Retail

On the day after Easter at Oregon Floral & Stained Glass, sun streams through the storefront window onto blue and green vases, gift items and remnants of Easter egg displays that by day's end will be replaced with Mother's Day collections. Full Story 

"Pee, poop, puke, and dog hair. That's what I should have named my shop," quips Julie Anderson. Add to that bites and expressed anal glands, and one gets a pretty good idea of a typical day at Rover Makeovers, a pet grooming shop on Main Street in Cambridge. "I don't know how you can do this job and not love dogs." Full Story 

It's hard to know what to make of the 2011 holiday retail season. Initial forecasts predicted mediocre sales increases in the 2% to 3% range, but long lines at midnight on Black Friday and strong, discount-fueled initial sales raised hopes that the economy had reached a higher plateau. Then early January brought more sobering news of a December stall, even with the news of 200,000 new jobs that month. The picture appears to be better locally, though still not precisely quantified as local shopping centers continue to gather information about their stores' performance. Full Story 

Frank Farwell founded WinterSilks, a Wisconsin-based online apparel retailer, and helped it become an Inc. 500 company. Now he’s written a book titled Chicken Lips, Wheeler-Dealer, and the Beady-Eyed MBA: An Entrepreneur's Wild Adventures on the New Silk Road. As the title suggests, the book has plenty of attitude, including the assertions that venture capital isn’t needed to seed small business growth and, more controversially, his panning of private-sector unions. Perhaps a combination of “tude” and unconventional wisdom is exactly what entrepreneurs need to navigate these economically troubled times, especially since Farwell is candid about his own mistakes and what he learned from them. Full Story