🔒Keeping it local: Small Central Mass. retailers are using community connections, product knowhow, and modern tech to claim their share of the holiday shopping rush

In a day and age where an entire holiday season’s worth of gifts can be purchased from Amazon or other big retailers in less than an hour from the comfort of one’s smartphone, local shopowners have to go above and beyond to woo customers into their stores.

With the nearing of Small Business Saturday, an unofficial holiday slated for the last Saturday in November and created in 2010 to offer a counterpart to the more corporate-focused days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Central Massachusetts’ small retailers are finding ways to encourage customers to do their holiday shopping locally.

While Central Massachusetts was once the home of multiple organized shop local movements, those efforts have since dried up. But despite the lack of an organized movement, small retailers from Worcester to Fitchburg are still urging customers to forego relying on massive corporations to conduct all their holiday shopping.

They may lack the capital and market control of some of their big-box and online competitors, but local retailers are using their community connections, first-hand experience with their products, and the help of modern technology to make their presence known.

Local First movements

In 2007, realizing the days where they could rely on a steady supply of foot traffic and window shoppers were gone, local retailers banded together to form Worcester Local First, an initiative to encourage local buying, which grew to 200+ businesses. Their efforts spawned a similar effort in northern Worcester County in 2008, dubbed Fitchburg Local First.

Sustaining the movement proved more difficult than starting it. Kristen Sciascia, the owner of Worcester-based C.C. Lowell Art Supply Co. and a one-time chair of Worcester Local First, said balancing running the businesses and the organization became too much of a challenge for organizers.

The dissolution of Local First organizations doesn’t mean there’s zero voices urging shoppers to think local; the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce has a Gift Local Gift Card, which is available for purchase for use at a number of area businesses.

Amazon’s impact

Still, the ever-growing influence of massive e-commerce platforms is tough to ignore.

In the years since the region’s shop local movements have fallen by the wayside, Amazon’s presence has only grown. The firm brought in $10.6 billion in profits during the last three months of 2023, in a record-breaking holiday shopping season for the company, according to a February article from the Associated Press.

Amazon has taken additional steps to ensure it's in prime position to profit from this year’s holiday shopping season in Central Massachusetts; a new warehouse and distribution center at the former site of the Greendale Mall in Worcester opened in October, joining sites in Charlton and Westborough as other Amazon facilities opened in the region since 2023.

Amazon’s rapid expansion has had a significant impact on small retailers, according to a 2022 joint study from the American Booksellers Association and Civic Economics, a Chicago-based economic analysis firm.

The study argued the company was responsible for ongoing displacement of retail activity from traditional centralized spaces to outlying industrial parks — creating a crisis for municipalities — and found Amazon displaced 136,000 shops occupying 1.1 billion square feet of traditional commercial space with its 2021 retail sales.

Product knowledge and education

While it’s fair for local businesses to fear e-commerce giants like Amazon, C.C. Lowell has good reason to believe it has staying power: The company has been operating in Worcester for 172 years, claiming to be the oldest art supply store in the nation.

Employee knowledge of the products is a major reason for its longevity, said Sciascia.

“Everyone that works here uses the product, understands the product, and probably 80% of the customers really do need an education on something, how to use a certain paint, what brushes to use, what can make them the most successful with what they're doing,” she said.

Artists are only as good as their tools, and C.C. Lowell’s customers appreciate the ability to get up close and personal with the brushes, pencils, and other artistic items, said Sciascia.

“It's more about the experience,” she said. “They do tend to come into it so they can feel and touch, but we also have some products people have never used before.”

The store creates its own unique holiday products by assembling kits where customers can purchase a number of related items at a discount.

Growing a concrete base

Like C.C. Lowell, fellow Worcester retailer Green Zone Grow Shops uses product know-how and in-store classes to draw in customers.

Once working in the dental space, Green Zone Owner Joesph Casey took over the shop five years ago after seeing it listed for sale on Craigslist by previous ownership.

"It's a mom-and-pop store, just myself, my wife, and one [additional] employee,” Casey said.

While Green Zone mostly focuses on customers who are growing cannabis at home, a practice that has been fully legal in Massachusetts since 2016, its products have wider gardening uses. Combined with their abilities to provide information on specific issues a grower might be having, Casey said the store’s price-match guarantees for products found on Amazon or other big e-commerce platforms is helpful in fighting back against larger retailers.

“Our prices are as low as the internet, and then you're going to get the expertise,” he said. “That personal touch means you’re going to have a successful harvest.”

About a half-mile north of Green Zone sits Concrete Collection, a vintage and secondhand clothing store based in @ the common, previously known as the Midtown Mall. Shop co-Owner William Daughtry isn’t concerned by shoppers rushing to big retailers for Black Friday sales, as he’s worked hard to establish a customer base for the store through grassroot efforts.

Daughtry is preparing for the holiday rush by handing out 5,000 flyers to college students, hoping they appreciate the unique offerings he sells.

“I have a nice little community here that supports this, so I'm going to focus my efforts on that, instead of being so mainstream driven,” he said. “I'd rather have something that's old and has history and nostalgia to it, so I can wear it and say I'm so happy no one in a 36-mile radius can get this. That's such an independent way of being fashionable.”

The former Midtown Mall’s attempt to once again become an attraction for foot traffic and window shoppers is still a work in progress, but Daughtry is doing what he can to unite business owners in the building to help everyone grow, offering discounts for customers who show receipts to neighboring businesses like Odd by Worcester Brewing and Woo Juice.

“If you come on Small Business Saturday, here in this building, you can do a little bounce-around effort,” he said.

Collecting customers

Gallery at 759 Main is a Fitchburg-based memorabilia shop started in 2022 by Rob Babineau, a lifelong Fitchburg resident and now-retired physician, and fellow business partner Roy Crawford.

The store features hundreds of items, offering everything from signed jerseys, to Seinfeld-related memorabilia, to a rare Tampa Bay Buccaneers helmet signed by both Tom Brady and Donald Trump. The store features political-related memorabilia from both parties, valuing commerce over politics.

After a stint in Princeton failed to draw traffic, the store moved to downtown Fitchburg in 2023, trying to contribute to local revitalization efforts seeking to bring more life back to the city center and foregoing a location in an area with more high-earners.

“A lot of people who come in say ‘Wow,’” said John Sepulvada, an associate who helps with IT work at the store and is a friend of Babineau and Crawford, said. “You really have to take your time and walk around to see everything we have."

The gallery relies on relationships with nearby businesses to grow its reputation, allowing Game On, a local indoor sports center, to decorate its bar’s walls with memorabilia from the store, providing the venue with free decorations and the shop with another location to show off its collection.

One might not expect a business started by two people of retirement age to be up-to-date on the latest technology, but that’s where Sepulvada lends a hand, leading efforts to categorize the shop’s impressive collection on its website. This helps the shop compete with eBay and bigger collectable companies.

Sepulvada keeps a close eye on social media for trends. For example, he creates posts or flash sales about an item they have that’s related to a celebrity who is in the news or an athlete who just had an attention-grabbing performance.

“We're finding through some of our analytics that some of our more popular pieces are [related to] Taylor Swift,” Sepulvada said. “So we're going to do an ad that's targeted toward mothers of Taylor Swift fans.”

If a particular item a customer is looking for isn’t in stock, Babineau can use his extensive network in the memorabilia space to try to track it down, said Sepulvada, who’s hopeful all these efforts will lead to a big holiday rush after last year’s season was bogged down by the move from Princeton.

“We're hoping this year is much better,” he said.