Ep13: Why Game Store Location Matters with Meeples Games

Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Laura and Garrett from Meeples Games in Seattle, Washington. This episode discusses setting expectations for the start of a local game store, factors to consider when choosing a location and lessons learned running the store and cafe for the last 11 years.

Auto Generated Transcript:

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild, and today I'm with Garrett and Laura, the owners of Meeples Games in Seattle, Washington. Tell us about the origins of the store.

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

We opened in May of 2017. No, sorry. May 17th of 2014. So we've been just over 11 years. We've been in this location the whole time, and we're doing great.

SPEAKER_01: 0:28

Can you tell us about the mix of your store's as well as the cafe?

SPEAKER_00: 0:32

I like to call us a comprehensive game store in that we have a little bit of everything. We have board games and card games and puzzles and stuffies and incidental toys and things. We have magic and Pokemon. We have...

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

Wargaming stuff, right? Yep. So miniatures, we have RPGs, we have a used game section. Like you mentioned, we have a cafe, so you can spend the whole afternoon here. What made you decide to

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

start a store? And then I just decided I didn't want to do that anymore. I wanted to have a game store. And I wanted to build the store that I wanted to go to because a lot of stores were dark or they were condescending or they didn't have anything to eat or it wasn't light enough for me to see the cards. I just incorporated all those things into this space And it took about two years from the time I decided I wanted to do it to actually opening. And why this location? We wanted to be in West Seattle. I did scope out other neighborhoods and possible areas to open. I didn't want to directly compete with any other stores. So I lived in Lake City and I didn't want to compete with Gary's, which was our game store. And then right after we So we could have been up there, but we wanted to be in West Seattle. We looked around a lot. There was a lot of construction happening. They tore down a bunch of old buildings. So a lot of retail space was lost at the time that we were looking. And when we found this space, even though it's upstairs, even though it's off the beaten path a little bit, the light is amazing and the ceilings are high and the space fit for what we needed it to be. And so we picked it. And

SPEAKER_01: 3:04

we wanted West Seattle because it's very residential. There's a lot of families, lots of kids here. But not only that, I mean, that's not unique to many parts of Seattle, but it's very isolated. A lot of people in West Seattle don't really leave West Seattle, so we kind of have them captive here. What were your initial expectations for the store right when you opened?

SPEAKER_00: 3:27

I expected it to be... really awful for the first year or so. I mean, that's when you're figuring out what people want and catering to who your customers really are. Like you go into it, we had defined who we thought our customers were. We have personas and all the thing for all the customers, but the reality is different than that. Actually, it's not too different than what we thought. We still have the same three core

SPEAKER_01: 4:00

personas are right what they want is not what we guessed right or like in different proportions to what we guessed

SPEAKER_00: 4:06

We had defined our customers as the serious hobby gamer. Those are the Magic players, the Pokemon players, the Warhammer players, those people who that's their hobby. The board game players a little bit, and then families, kids and parents, groups of kids, and then casual gamers who are groups of friends who come as an activity instead of going to a bar or Something

SPEAKER_01: 4:37

like that. Couples who are looking for something to do at home. Right. You know, things like that. What did you do to initially build your store community?

SPEAKER_00: 4:45

I did a lot of stuff around. I joined the Chamber of Commerce right away. I got involved in as much community stuff as I could. We had a lot of social media. We were using Twitter at the time. It was called Twitter then. We still call it Twitter. because I'm old. Facebook, we did a little thing where I had a little stuffed Wil Wheaton who was up there on the shelf and we took him around West Seattle and took pictures of him everywhere. We did an international tabletop day event at the bathhouse on Alki because we were not open yet and we had so many people. We advertised that everywhere and we had probably three or four hundred people over the course of five or six hours at the bathhouse on tabletop day. We

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

had a big open, the bathhouse is a rentable, like open community space. And we just had it open. We were doing game demos. We had a bunch of people that we had signed up to volunteer and help us out. A lot of our friends. So you can come in and learn like 10 different games and get a flyer. Oh,

SPEAKER_00: 5:56

we gave

SPEAKER_01: 5:57

away so much cool stuff. I think, and when we opened, I remember a lot of people were like, oh, we saw you at the bathhouse. In fact, the other day, a gentleman came in and he was like, I was one of your volunteers at the bathhouse and it was cool. Looking back at the beginning of the business, what has worked well or maybe not worked well and had to change over time?

SPEAKER_00: 6:15

The game library, the way we do the game library was the way we did it at the very beginning and we continue to do it this way and I think that was a big win for us and I will die on that hill and that is the game library is behind the counter. So when people want to borrow a game, they have to come and talk to us and that game does a few different things. Number one, we get to have an interaction with a human being and, you know, make them feel great and welcomed and heard. And secondly, we get to pair them with a game that fits. It fits their group. You know, if it's a parents and two kids and there's a seven-year-old and a 10-year-old, we offer them Forbidden Island, a cooperative game where a 11-year-old doesn't get upset because the 7-year-old got help. Everybody's on the same team.

SPEAKER_01: 7:13

Left to their own devices in that situation, the 7-year-old's going to see the Marvel Crisis Protocol and be like, I want to play that. And then it's going to be a nightmare scenario for the family as they wade through a 40-page rulebook.

SPEAKER_00: 7:26

We have to pair people with a game that's appropriate for what they want, what their skill level is. We ask a series of questions and that makes them happy. We want to delight our our customers. We want them to have a great time and come back. We want to get to know them. And we want them to buy that game and take it home. That's the ultimate goal. Buy that game and take it home, please.

SPEAKER_01: 7:48

What did your digital presence look like when you first opened?

SPEAKER_00: 7:51

We had a website quite a long time before we opened. I was using it, the blog portion of that, to just well now I have purchased all the kitchen equipment and this is what I got and today I went to the Chamber of Commerce meeting and met all these people and oh construction's starting and you know just trying to get people to be interested in what was happening and when we were going to open so I did we did a lot of that when we first opened we did have an online store but what I found is that nobody ever bought anything from our online store because we can't compete on price why would you buy it from me when you can buy it from Amazon for 20% less or more. So we kind of dropped that. But then when the pandemic happened, everything changed immediately. And so we spun up an online store really quickly. Or

SPEAKER_01: 8:51

curbside pickup. Curbside pickup. For a while there, we couldn't have anybody in the store. We set that up and it was really successful. It was like we were able to run a lot of business through there for the, I can't remember how many months we weren't allowed to have people in. But it was good. That was a big pivot for us. And we still have it open now. It does limited numbers, but we get a non-zero amount of people using it to check stock, which is valuable for them. And occasionally we sell something. How has the in-store experience changed since you opened?

SPEAKER_00: 9:22

I think that it is subtly changed in a lot of ways. The percentage of different categories that we have is different. We have leaned in quite a bit to the tactical miniatures and modeling supplies.

SPEAKER_01: 9:39

And the TCGs from when we started, right? I think when we started, I think your vision was a lot more like game store, board game store,

SPEAKER_00: 9:48

cafe. I did not want to be a magic store. I did not want to have the bros playing Yu-Gi-Oh. I did not. I didn't want that.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

But it was short-sighted. I think what we've realized is that a lot of those negative personas that were sort of that she had like sort of ingrained her mind came from other game stores that weren't our store and like we have a hand in sculpting the community you know and i think we've sort of done that and i think we have a very non-toxic community across like all of our games that we run and i think that that is something i'm super proud um but but not to get uh too far afield here but the so the tcgs was a big change we really have gone come a long way that's like you a third of our business now is TCGs of all types. And I don't think that was where we expected to be when we set off on the journey. I think something similar is true of, especially more recently, what you were saying about tactical miniatures and wargaming. That has also sort of exploded in the last, like, what, three years, two years?

SPEAKER_00: 10:55

So that percentage of what we carry and how we present it has changed a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 11:02

How has your marketing strategies changed over time?

SPEAKER_00: 11:04

Because we're in a and this is true for every game store, right? I am not advertising to all of Seattle. That, I mean, sometimes I do because you kind of can't avoid it, but I'm not going to get somebody who goes to, you know, Mock's Boarding House in Bellevue or Ballard to come here, except unless they want to play one of our games and come play Warhammer or something like that. So the challenge is finding advertising and marketing opportunities that are very neighborhood specific. So we do a lot of things like we sponsor, we put ads in the playbook or the playbills for the theater, the little Arts West, our little neighborhood play kind of thing. We do things with the high school on their sports calendars. We put an ad in the yearbook, that kind of stuff. Although nobody ever looks at those. I just do it to give them money. But we have started, we have a commercial, a professionally done commercial that runs at the movie theater, our neighborhood movie theater, the Admiral up the street, Go Admiral. And it runs before every single movie. We're West Seattle famous.

SPEAKER_01: 12:18

For this kind of location, I guess it's good to be neighborhood famous.

SPEAKER_00: 12:21

It is. It is. And that's kind of our thing. We're very friendly and family friendly and everybody is welcome. And that's on purpose because like I said, every, you know, not every, many of the game stores that I had gone to, trying to buy a game or, you know, get something to eat and play. They're a little condescending. And I didn't like that. I wanted it to be family friendly. I wanted to go with, be able to go with my kid and be comfortable. And again, the lighting, that's important to me. I need to be able to see my cards. And so we're very neighborhood and family friendly. While we still support the serious hobby gamers and the Warhammer people and the Magic players. It's

SPEAKER_01: 13:16

not mutually exclusive. Right. We can do both. Tell us about the cafe. What was the inspiration for the food and drink options?

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

Our menu has changed quite a bit since we started. Menus change. We evolve into what people want.

SPEAKER_01: 13:33

Our equipment has changed as well.

SPEAKER_00: 13:35

It's changed. Our original vision was food that you could eat that wasn't messy while you're playing your game. You know, a little something for everyone. I definitely wanted to have beer because, you know, I want to have beer while I'm playing my game. I wanted, you know, we have to have coffee. This is Seattle. We have to have a selection of beverages for non-alcoholic beverages. So we had those. But we had things like plates to share, you know, veggies and hummus and we had nachos and Tex-Mex for a while. But now we have burgers and sandwiches and salads and the hot pretzel has been here the entire time.

SPEAKER_01: 14:21

The hot pretzel is to the test of time? The hot pretzel and beer cheese. How did you decide how much space to dedicate to the cafe versus the store versus the playing space?

SPEAKER_00: 14:31

I worked with an architect at the beginning. So we had this space. Actually, they gave us a kind of a rough layout before I signed a lease because that was part of the decision process is, are we going to be able to do what we need to do in this space? So the layout is kind of dictated by the size of the space and where things already were because we built this kitchen. It didn't exist before. This

SPEAKER_01: 14:59

was a gym.

SPEAKER_00: 14:59

It was a gym. Yeah. And that was, I don't remember what was there. Oh, it was just open there. So We didn't move the bathrooms. Those are where they were. But everything else we built. A little change of the layout. If I could do it again, we'd learn some things and I might make it a little different. But having the separate cafe space and our tournament space in the other side over there, we call it the Thunderdome. And that's where we run, you know, magic tournaments and Warhammer Night and things like that. Pokemon. Those all happen over there. And then our retail space. space in the front, the division of the product that's over here and the product that's over there has changed quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

Definitely. I think the separation of the cafe and the seating in the cafe versus the event seating is pretty critical because it allows you to do something like Friday Night Magic or running an RCQ on the weekend and not have it take over your entire store, right? Like we still have the cafe. We can still pair somebody up with a game from the library and sit them down and we can sell that game and we can do both things. Is it chaotic? Totally. You know, that's how it is when you've got a hundred people in the store. But being able to do both and not sacrifice one for the other, I think, I mean, makes a big difference. The store is very bright, as you mentioned. It's how you wanted it. Is this the same atmosphere you had when you first started or has it changed over time?

SPEAKER_00: 16:29

It has changed over time because how could it not? But, but We still have what I was basically going for at the beginning. I wanted it to be warm and inviting and cozy a little bit, you know, not garish colors, not, you know, neon green and bright orange. Those are, it's warmer. We have a lot of wood. The choice of this, we had these built, of course, this color, it all kind of goes together with the original vision.

SPEAKER_01: 17:04

Yeah. I would say that over the 11 years, I mean, like, like she said, it's basically the same, right? Like all of our core principles are the same, except with the, we originally had a bunch of, um, cool, like old mismatched, like kitchen tables that were a various size dining room table. They were big and long and they were honestly really great. Uh, but they, they were starting to fall apart and we had to replace them. So now we have the uniform tables and these are great too, because we can rearrange them and we can mix and match them to the various tabletop size that's like maybe the biggest thing that's changed like vibe wise but the thing that I wanted to say is that I don't know if you set out for it to be this way but the thing that I've noticed that's the biggest change from then to now is that it feels so much more homey in here now because we've collected 11 years worth of things we've decided to keep right knickknacks that now live on the shelf or a poster from the pre-release from seven years ago that was too cool to get rid of, right? All that stuff makes it feel lived in. All that stuff makes it unique. The store's about 3,500 square feet. Do you think this is still the right size? Or if you were starting over, would you look for something different? We could definitely use more space. More seating space, more shelving space, just more space, bigger. And our store's big. I don't think it's small, really, by any means. What numbers or metrics are you looking at to know if

SPEAKER_00: 18:55

the business is healthy or not? Spend more money. just in general. And over the 10, 11 years that we've been open out in the game community, I know a lot of game store owners around the country. I'm in some groups of people who are very successful, and I feel very lucky to be connected with them. And there was this butts in seats concept when we first opened that was all about organized play. Butts in seats, butts in seats, and snacks and drinks. But we have this cafe model, which is slightly different. Actually, it's very different. But then here in the middle of that five or 10 years, halfway through, they were like, no, it's not butts in seats. That's not what is driving our business. But we found that for us, it kind of is. And so we've kind of reverted to, we do want to run more events. We do want people to come and play here because those people become our customers and their lifetime value is higher. I

SPEAKER_01: 20:10

think part of that is that the people who are participating in events are people who have sort of made it their hobby, right? So they're sort of invested already. We can get them to invest because we made it awesome, or if we can provide an appealing space for somebody who's already decided to invest, I mean, that's potentially a valuable customer. What has been the biggest surprise in running this business for the last 11 years?

SPEAKER_00: 20:36

So it's not really, I There are two answers to the question. The first one is not really about the business so much as it is about our aura of the business. And that is that we, again, it's been 11 years and we had a lot of kids come. We have a lot of kids come here and we go out and do things at school. So we have a lot of kids. And now we have four people who work for us who were coming here when they were kids. And it's like we have, we're just so ingrained in the community here that they grew up playing their games here and coming with their families and playing magic and playing Pokemon. And, you know, now they're playing Warhammer and they work for us. And I just am so proud of that and that they liked it so much that, you know, they want to work here. And that they've, we have some who have been here, we have staff who've been here for six, seven, eight years. Long time. And that I think reflects well on us as well because we are excellent employers.

SPEAKER_01: 21:46

I think the surprise from the business standpoint is what's happened with Pokemon and collectibles over the last like two years has been really interesting to watch. Can't imagine it being completely sustainable. And now that behavior has totally moved to magic as well. Like we're seeing collector booster displays just bought out immediately. There's a store in Seattle that pre-sold their Spider-Man collectibles at$850 and sold them out. I'm not going to name names, but that's an insane price point to sell or buy something at, in my opinion. I think that's insane. The magic's insane right now. The scarcity is really kind of a problem. They've pumped the brakes on production, which I think in some ways is good. But we've got an issue now. And I'm curious to see what happens with that. Because I think it's going to have, depending on where we go from here, where magic goes from here, where Pokemon goes from here, that could really affect... our business in the next like you know two or three years like if the bottom falls out on pokemon and the the people just move on that's going to have an impact on game stores across the country same thing with magic um and you can say it's magic it's been around for forever that could never happen but yeah

SPEAKER_00: 23:03

the availability of product is either having a positive impact or a negative impact um i think it's having a negative impact for us well

SPEAKER_01: 23:13

in the short in the Short term, it's positive, right? I mean, anytime you sell all of something that you get in, that's positive, right? That's never bad. I would wonder if the negative becomes when you consistently don't have product on your shelves and the mom and kid come in to pick up their Pokemon packs and they fail six times in a row. At a certain point, the kid is going to move on from Pokemon and find a new thing. And if that happens en masse, you're going to end up with a generation of kids that don't have nostalgia for the product. And that is what keeps the ball rolling on Pokemon for 30 years, you know? So we'll see what happens.

SPEAKER_00: 23:54

One of the things we do to kind of mitigate that is we, because of the scarcity of the Pokemon product, we get as much as we can possibly get, but it's immediately gone. So if I had booster displays of packs, they would be immediately gone. So we hold stuff back to sell to children because they're children and it's a game for children. It's also a collectible, you know, that's huge, but it's a game for kids. And we have been running Pokemon here the entire time, Pokemon training camp. We have a bajillion kids. You won't talk about chaos. Come on a Sunday, it's chaos. But we have packs for them still. We hide them away so that we have product for those kids.

SPEAKER_01: 24:42

There's actually like a neighborhood labor drought on chores going on the last two years because the lack of Pokemon packs is really causing the kids doing chores market to drive to a halt. What advice would you have for someone looking to start their own gaming business now based on your experience?

SPEAKER_00: 25:01

I would change how the cafe works a little bit. Our menu is pretty like restaurant and less cafe and I would probably move more into the cafe part and less less restaurant part because it's very labor intensive. The majority of our labor goes to the cafe, but the majority of our revenue comes from the store. And there's this symbiotic relationship between the two. If we didn't have the cafe, we wouldn't have as much business in the store. And that's part of the business model. But the way that I want everybody to be able to eat and get fair pay, being able to afford that here in Seattle has been a challenge because that game costs the same in Kentucky as it does here in Seattle.

SPEAKER_01: 25:55

But the cost

SPEAKER_00: 25:57

of living is twice as high and the wages are twice as high. And, you know, again, that's good. I want people to eat, but we have to be able to pay the rent as well. So the onus is on us to sell way more to be able like our revenue has to go up and up and up and up and up. Which it does. Our revenue is really increasing, you know, double digits year over year consistently. But then the wages do

SPEAKER_01: 26:25

the same thing. and do just as well. I hate to say that, but I think it's true. We have to work a lot harder because of where we are. Being on the second floor, like you said, we're kind of tucked away. We're a hidden gem, if you will, right? But being on the ground floor of a place where a lot of people are going to walk past, I mean, that's what you want, you know? We don't get a lot of walk-by business. We are a destination. People come to us for stuff, and we're a very successful destination. But it would be awesome to just let's go in there.

SPEAKER_00: 27:19

Yeah, we don't have that walk by. So we have to work really hard to get people to

SPEAKER_01: 27:25

come here. Laura, Garrett, thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

SPEAKER_00: 27:28

Thank you for having us. It's been great.