Fair Folks and a Goat: The New Frontier of Retail

How one store learned to sell design and found a community to boot

Walking into the spacious and brightly lit shop floor of Fair Folks and a Goat, one’s mind boggles at how to define it. Described as an “all-in-one space,” it is a design store, a café, a community, and simply a place to hang out, making it part of a new brand of retailers that have taken on all these functions.

Fair Folks and a Goat is also the most recent iteration of several businesses that have attempted to combine design and retail in unconventional spaces. Founded by Anthony and Aurora Lazzei, the couple had run a tea salon in the Upper East Side and a bed and breakfast in New Orleans, before coming back to New York.

In both ventures, anything considered part of the décor, from the art to the bed covers, was up for sale. It was as if shoppers were inside a catalogue, experiencing these design objects as they were intended to be used, and not as stale goods stocked on a crowded shelf.

But Anthony said that after realizing that their older clientele did not share their same passion for design, they closed the tea salon. “Selling eight hundred dollar chairs or thousand dollar paintings to older customers didn’t do anything for us,” said Anthony. And for reasons he did not want disclosed, he had to close the guesthouse.

While operating in New Orleans, however, they came up with an interesting idea — they began to offer a coffee membership. Renovating the bed and breakfast into a gallery and cafe, Anthony said the enthusiastic response to this new initiative was promising enough that they felt their vision of retail merited another effort.

In 2013, the couple opened their newest version of Fair Folks and a Goat in Greenwich Village, an affluent neighborhood in New York. The store offered a $25 monthly membership plan for unlimited coffee and sold a collection of apparel, sunglasses and design goods geared towards a younger crowd, all curated by Aurora, a former buyer for the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Store.

The cheap coffee brought in thousands of customers who would dive in and out for their caffeine fix multiple times in a day, encouraging them to use the store as a “living room outside of their apartment,” said Ryan Hill, who works at Fair Folks and a Goat.

Annabella Sugrue, a political science student at NYU, said the subscriptions were a “super good deal,” and that she had already referred many of her friends. At one point, she had trekked to Fair Folks and a Goat so often that she had spent only thirty cents for each cup of coffee.

The continuous foot traffic also ensured that they would end up poring over the wares of Fair Folks and a Goat on a daily basis. But this put pressure on the store to keep things interesting for its patrons walking in and out every day. Unlike most retailers, which might change their offerings two to three times a season, they would change their merchandise 70 to 90 times in the same period, said Anthony.

Like his employees, he repeated the same hope that the store would become a “home away from home,” providing a sense of community to its members. Many of the baristas manning the coffee station know their patrons well, often spending more of their time talking to their patrons instead of looking over the register. In fact, Fair Folks and a Goat only chooses to employ frequent customers, in other words, those who embrace their vision of retail, much like how bookstores eventually employ their keen devotees.

Anthony links the success of Fair Folks and a Goat to these same patrons. For him, they assumed two purposes. One, they were a constant source of information of how their customers responded to the goods sold and the space itself. Two, keeping a log of its burgeoning number of subscribers allowed Anthony to forecast future cash flows, allowing him to go to his investors and creditors and show the business was making progress. It also issued an additional dividend in that he could buy his coffee beans in bulk, permitting him to make a small profit on the inexpensive coffee memberships.

Likening the store to an insurance company, Anthony, a former financier, said though business was slow in the beginning, once the number of members reached a critical mass, he found the incoming revenue predictable and stable. It was as if they had broken through a wall, he said. This same core of subscribers would serve as an umbrella against rainy days.

But their current success looked unlikely given the initial resistance to their ideas.

Since the opening of the first Fair Folks and a Goat, Anthony noticed people found it difficult to understand their idea of retail, in which community and creativity were bywords and not buzzwords to be appropriated by smart marketers. Though, coffee shops can be found all across retail now, in bookshops and even churches, this “all-in-one space” felt groundbreaking at the time of their store’s launch.

But he found that younger customers like Annabella quickly understood and took their vision of retail for granted, saying they “just got it.” Looking for the right market and paying attention to their customers was all it took for Fair Folks and a Goat to prosper. For now, it seems the once faltering store has finally found its footing.