What the heck do we do?

It's been a dream for both of us to start a business, and we stress-

tested (kinda a term from yesterday eh?) our ideas over the years

to make sure we're not throwing our money away... but man now

that we've decided to go forward, there's so much to do!

My wife's asleep on our couch looking at website designers. We

had an eye for a website designed in Hong Kong that had the

functionalities we wanted for our storefront, but it's so far out of

our budget we'll have to get something simpler to begin. Hope we

can find one soon...

Oh yeah, I never talked about what our store really does...

the concept's pretty simple: we divide our store into many mini-

stores - most of them are 1'x1'x1' cubes - and we allow anyone

who have stuff to sell rent them and put their goods in. Basically,

that's about it!

So why are we doing this? Retail space is quite expensive, so

for many enterpreneurs it's almost impossible to get their products

into their own store if they don't have some serious loonies to

start one.

Yeah I know you can sell it online, but how are you going to get

noticed among a gazillion competitors all over the

world? Even if you have an awesome product, it'd cost you a

fortune to buy google / yahoo / bing ads just to bring traffic in...

and eBay? Oh man that cost even more... you get poor just to

attract eyeballs (another term from yester-year which means

less than nothing)...

Craigslist and Kijiji are good options, but your post only stays

on the front page for maybe 5 minutes... and then it disappears

into oblivion... and drifts away...

So that brings us back to square one: how do you draw people's

attention to your awesome product? This is how we can help.

G.E.M. is a store dedicated to

enterpreneurs of all kinds - small

businesses, students, moms,

anyone who has a great idea - to have

a low-cost store front in one of the

busiest mall in Markham.

Since the store's cost is divided amongst

the many mini-tenants, each cube can be rented at a very low, very

affordable month rate. Now anyone can afford a store without huge

upfront cost...

It's getting really late, I have to catch some Zzzz to go to work

in the morning... hope to see you again soon!