February 2012

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Wanderers in a gift shop don’t have to live near one or even have visited one to be able to connect with the lighthouse mystique. There is something about a lone lighthouse, like an island, that conjures up the isolation of the human condition. “Man as a lighthouse” may not have the same ring to it as Paul Simon’s “I am a rock, I am an island,” but to stand at the base of a hill, the top of which is crowned with a lone whitewashed cylindrical structure, stills the rustlings of the mind. “People still like to dream. You just have to have something people can take home,” affirmed Paula Houghton, owner of The Sea Gull Shop in New Harbor, Maine.

“We’re in Delaware,” said Derrick, “yet we sell a lot of California lighthouses. People don’t see what they want out there so they buy an Alcatraz lighthouse here.” Always popular, also, said Derrick, are palm trees, flamingoes, and hula dancers for the car, which are hard to find. Another item that’s been really hot at the Sea Shell Shop is flip flops.

The palm tree theme is used often to decorate a Florida room, which is a trend in the north. People go on tropical vacations, want to remember them, and not feel cold in the winter. For that reason, sales have been brisk, said Derrick, “because more of the nautical idea is catching on even up north.”

Rusty Boone, manager of Lighthouse Depot in Wells, Maine, was pleased that the store basically held its own this year. “We stayed about even though most people in Maine saw anywhere from a 15 percent to 20 percent drop in business. We felt like we were ahead of the game.” Boone enumerated several possibilities to explain the drop in business, everything from insufficient advertising by the State of Maine Tourist Association, to high gas prices. The bulk of Lighthouse Depot’s customers come from the northeast by car and Boone finds, “it’s a more cautious public. We in southern Maine are doing quite well as opposed to northern Maine with1.3 million visitors less at Acadian National Park this year.”

Tourists visit Lighthouse Depot, said Boone, as much to be entertained by a store that has 10,000 lighthouse nautical items as to shop. Lighthouses are the primary inventory item, and the fiber optic lighthouses are a particularly strong category. Also selling well are pirate figurine characters from Encore, lawn lights from Twin Oaks and any functional items that justify spending money.

To hold their attention once potential consumers are in the store, Punchard tries to make displays very interesting and eyecatching. Whatever materials she uses have to go with the feel of the items. If doing something with glass, she won’t mix it with other materials; the maple syrup will be included with other autumnal items. She might mix lighthouses in with shorebirds in the cupboard and have a primitive wood look to the whole arrangement.

The front door of The Sea Gull Shop in New Harbor, Maine faces the famous Pemaquid Point Lighthouse. For the 30 years Paula Houghton has been opening the door, grandmothers have been picking up T-shirts and sweatshirts with the name of the area or the state for grandchildren and tourists of all ages will always go with the lighthouse themed mug or T-shirts, with figurines, glass floats, rocks for the kids and anything with the rusty old look. The big trend though is for useful items like nautical can openers and mermaid bottle openers. as well as mermaid Tshirts and dolls. Practical food items such as jams, jellies and maple syrup move well, but Houghton believes that people still like to dream so the pirate theme holds its popularity with do rags, mugs and bags of coins selling consistently. She conjectured, “the actual pirate that roamed the coast on both sides of the Caribbean is becoming a popular folk lore figure similar to the cowboy and will carry on.” Along that line, she sold four 3 feet tall birdbath soap holders for $125 each. She noted that the Native American theme is not as popular as it used to be but that new age numerology and horoscope books are popular, along with those by nautical and Maine authors.

People weren’t just buying postcards this year, said Houghton. She sold as many paintings as ever by Maine artists. Nonetheless, sales for the year were down, the worst in 10 years. She attributed the downturn to weather conditions, prevalent feelings with the war in Iraq, families not as optimistic as in the past, with oil prices and the big split in the classes, between those doing extraordinarily well and those that can’t pay gas bills this winter. Even salesmen were not selling as well. They noticed that the closer they were to route one and major highways the better sales were, and the further down the peninsula, the worse they were.

At a tourist destination on the coast, visitors automatically buy nautical gifts, said Chris Wedel, manager Of the Tides Wharf Gift Shop on Highway 1 in Bodega Bay, Calif. Wedel sells tons of shells, high end souvenir clothing by Gear for Sports and Camp David, toys, name drop items such as magnets, mugs, shot glasses, Christmas ornaments, wine countryrelated accessories and lighthouse items, even though there is no lighthouse in Bodega Bay. Memorabilia reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds, which was filmed there is big, as are local artists greeting cards and artwork, jewelry, and kitchen items.

Although nautical still sells, it isn’t what it used to be. Jim Coombs owner of Cape Annie’s Lighthouse in Sandwich, Mass., reported that companies manufacturing replicas of actual lighthouses, Harbour Lights, Spoontiques, Lefton, Scaasis, have been down 75 percent in sales in the last three years. He said, “The gift industry as a whole is down severely around the country. What is hurting this type of industry is ever since 9-11, people aren’t traveling as much, and therefore not buying the replicas of the lighthouses they would see in their travels.” But more than that, Coombs sees a “Wal-Mart world” emerging and people are going for the cheap junky imitations instead of buying nice gifts because they assume the average person thinks the person they are buying the gift for won’t know the difference. There are currently seven Christmas Tree Stores in the Cape that are considered discount stores.

“Nautical jewelry is probably what keeps a lot of shops in business,” said Coombs. “If we had stayed as the lighthouse theme we probably would be going out of business.” Coombs and his wife will make custom products in the next year, more lighthouse photography and wood crafts which are needed if selling to people that don’t want to buy from the Christmas Tree Shop. Of their jewelry designs, bracelets are the top sellers, earrings are next, and necklaces, a distant third.

Most mentioned nautical gift merchants are staying above water during the changing economic tide by maintaining the same tactics that have kept them securely in business thus far.

Lighthouse Depot is a revamped store and barn originally built in the 1600s. Displays are customized to harmonize with Colonial Americana. Manager Boone estimated, “Since we are a destination, sometimes we have a couple hundred people in the store at a time so we gear it a lot for self service.” To increase sales, Boone watches price points closely and tries to give customers much more value for their money.

Houghton extends The Sea Gull Shop displays into the adjoining restaurant of the same name, where she hangs paintings, prints and enlarged photos of the area taken by local artists. Houghton likes old fashioned displays, no plastics, but using boxes, barrels, materials from the area such as rope, netting, lobster traps, wooden crates, branches, feathers and rocks, essentially the same displays she’s used again and again for 30 years. Houghton tried the modern method of one product on one display but it doesn’t work for her. She incorporates the lone product into her other themed displays.

Houghton noted that to keep customers interested, she moves items around. She wants to make the shopping experience pleasant for people and maintain good visibility of products. Houghton remarked that advertising is not a solution because tourists are not likely to pick up a newspaper. But she said, “An area being written up in a magazine read by travelers might increase exposure but won’t make a difference in the profit margin, which is just going to go the way of the economy.”

The custom built wooden displays at the Sea Shell Shop are tiered so merchandise, such as nautical boats that are big sellers, shows up well. Derrick claimed that every time he arranges something at eye level it sells better, that display change is a continuous process, that anything sells, depending on how it is displayed.

Coombs has always produced a written Cape Annie’s Lighthouse newsletter but is now switching over to an e-mail newsletter. He said next year he and his wife will design more nautical jewelry and other custom-made products, more lighthouse photography and wood crafts. He said “people that don’t want to buy from the Christmas Tree Shop want items made in this country and by local crafters. We can’t do enough business to survive on it, but have to feature them more. We can’t have a typical gift shop of just souvenirs because most of them are made overseas and people would just as soon go to the discount stores for those.”

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