Photography by Vandana Apte
It isn’t that The Old Country Store in Moultonborough, NH, has been around almost since the dawn of American independence. What’s amazing about this gift shop is that it has consistently been a profi table operation. Find out how.
Eric J. Wallace
in May. Prior to its current incarnation, the Old Country Store served a number of local functions ranging from stagecoach stop, Masonic lodge, town hall, library, and post offi ce. Due to its location along the intersection of major east/west Highway 25 and north/south running Route 109, the store was, from the very beginning, an important center of commerce. “Even in the early stage coach days the building served as a hub for supplies and rations and trading,” Holden says. “The place always had a double function. Even when it was a lodge, or a post offi ce, it remained something of a general store, a place where people could come and get the things they needed to live.” In fact the earliest “sales” were made in 1781, which would make the shop 232 years old! Fast forward to 2013, where big-box stores abound
and Moultonborough’s miles of prime lakefront property draw weekenders and tourists alike. The Old Country Store has reinvented its marketing focusing on the building’s rich, Americana-infused history. From the exterior’s old-fashioned hand-painted wooden signs, rustic yellow siding and shutters, the life-sized, antique, cigar store chieftain greeting you at the door, one gets an acute sense of entering a time warp. Inside, there is the big iron woodstove, rows of old-timey candy, brass cash registers, and exposed wooden rafters hanging with baskets, glass lanterns, and toys. Scarred plank wood fl ooring, aged barrels and checkerboards complete the look. “We keep all the computers—anything digital—out of sight,” says Holden.
Longevity outlook “The key to our longevity and success has been our ability to understand it’s not about trying to compete with the chain stores, or anyone else. It’s about being unique. It’s about carrying products your customers can’t get anywhere else,” Holden says. One of the store’s biggest sellers is locally harvested
maple syrup. Working with a neighbor—a cultivator with three to four thousand taps on his property—Holden insists
on personally tasting each forty-gallon batch of syrup. If the batch doesn’t live up to his own standards, he won’t sell it. Another huge seller is cheese. Having learned the art of cheese-making from the New England “old-timers,”
GiftShopMag.com Fall 2013 n GIFT SHOP 29
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