2014, 2016-2017
Best Place to Buy a Gift
FEATURED STORY FROM THE BEST OF BG 2019 ISSUE
For Keeps:
The owner of For Keeps, Amy Craft Ahrens, wanted a place located downtown where people could find things they could not find in big corporate stores. And with For Keeps, she has that place. For Keeps is a store with a homey feel and relaxing ambiance, with gifts varying from socks with silly sayings to fancy furniture.
Another aspect that makes this gift shop unique is, according to its website, they will order anything they do not have if a customer is in search for it. Bowling Green State University junior, Heather Dawson, said, “It’s a different store than the rest in Bowling Green because of all the different things you can buy there and usually they aren’t found in any other stores.”
The boutique began when Ahrens was working in gift retail in Chicago and her father, successful downtown businessman Floyd Craft, told her he wanted to expand his hardware store into a building he just bought next door to it. When he described what it looked like to her, she said it sounded more like a gift store than a hardware.
Since he did not know anything about gift stores and Ahrens did, she decided to take over. They opened the store about nine months later in 1997. “We just had our 18th Christmas, which is just crazy to me,” she said.
Over those 18 years, For Keeps has built a large and loyal clientele, with the majority of customers being female. “Women are the ones that kind of hold the purse strings in the family for the most part. They’re the ones doing the everyday purchasing a lot of the time,” she explained. However, there are men that will stop by For Keeps to get something for themselves or other women. “We have a couple of guys that are big Yankee Candle fans,” Ahrens said.
Since For Keeps is primarily a gift store, customer traffic is heavily affected by the calendar and time of year, which is different from the other family businesses.
“Our other businesses in the family, the Ben Franklin store and the Ace Hardware store, don’t have anywhere near the fluctuations in business that the gift business does,” Ahrens said.
Their fourth quarter is about 40 percent of their year, as October, November and December are when they have most of their traffic. The Black Swamp Arts Festival also brings a lot of people into town and is their second busiest weekend in the year. Christmas, however, is definitely their busiest.
“We start purchasing for Christmas about two weeks after Christmas,” she laughed, “So, we do a lot of our holiday purchasing in January already.” Those items start to come in May, she said. They price, package, organize and store it. Then they start putting it out for display in the store in September.
Even though they gear their purchasing for the big Christmas season, they still have traffic when people have birthdays, graduations, weddings and other events. Because of these other events and holidays, Mother’s Day, Easter and St. Patrick’s Day, For Keeps does not have a problem keeping the business flow during the spring and summer.
To keep people coming into the store during that period, they utilize promotions, including email marketing, Facebook specials and Christmas catalogs with special offers in them. One struggle that Ahrens explained was not having an online shopping presence.
“It’s probably the single biggest thing that I struggle with. We’re going to have to have an online shopping presence at some point, but we haven’t found out how to make it work,” she said. Because they are in and out of products quickly due to ordering small quantities, an online presence is not a good fit.
On the brighter side, they do not have to worry about competition. Ahrens works together with other similar businesses to make sure they are carrying different things so that they are not competing with each other. “The more Bowling Green has to offer, the more people are going to come shop downtown. So, it’s good for us to have other stores that my customer likes,” she said.