THIS IS AN ARCHIVE POST FROM 2015
Finally, finally! After a month and a half of delays, the first Virivee shop in Budapest, Hungary opened on Monday.
Opening a physical shop is a pretty big milestone for a small independent fashion business, and for me, this is a particularly exciting moment. Virivee is a handmade tights brand and until now most people have discovered my tights online. Having a real place where people can see, touch and try my designs feels like a completely new chapter.
Originally, I wanted the shop to open at the beginning of December, but the Christmas rush simply didn’t leave enough time. Then in January we ran into a little problem with Elmű, the electricity company, and somehow February just disappeared.
By the middle of January, we were constantly “two weeks away” from opening. In February, I kept saying, “We’re opening next week.” Then, during the last two weeks, it became “We only need a few more days.”
And now it is finally open.
Designing the shop
I think the shop turned out really well. The style is very close to me, which is probably not surprising. There wasn’t really a finished concept from the beginning. I mostly designed the space as I went along, following whatever ideas suddenly popped into my head.
Most people seem to like the result, which is particularly good news considering how little of it was actually planned in advance.
The most eye-catching part is definitely the huge drawing covering one of the walls. It took me about two and a half days to complete, and I designed and drew it directly onto the wall myself.
I first made a rough sketch in my notebook, but once I started drawing on the actual wall, I changed quite a lot of it. There are also parts that I simply invented while I was standing there with the pen in my hand.
So, yes, the final design is basically the result of a very large wall and a very long drawing session.
The wall seems to be a hit so far. Both women and men like it, which honestly surprised me a little. I didn’t expect the men to be quite so enthusiastic about it.
Opening a shop is never just opening a shop
The whole adventure of opening a shop isn’t completely new to me. A few years ago, we opened the Choco Cafe in Vác, Hungary, a chocolate café that was a considerably larger hospitality business.
That project had a much bigger budget than this one. Interestingly, I wouldn’t say it took more time. We built the whole thing from scratch in about three months, even though the café was in a historic protected building.
It’s a good example of how much the time needed to open a business can depend on money. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for just how many tiny things you suddenly need when you get to the final stage of opening a shop.
You think you have bought everything necessary. Then you realize you need a calculator. A stapler. Shopping bags. Another stamp. Cleaning products. And about a million other tiny things. And when you have already reached the point where you are absolutely convinced that everything has been bought, all these little things can still easily add another €100–130 to the bill.
Of course, that is nothing compared with the overall cost of opening a shop, especially when the space also needs to be renovated. But after weeks and weeks of buying things, I was getting slightly tired of discovering yet another item that apparently cannot be left off the shopping list.
At one point I started to feel that our tiny shop was going to contain more things than an average stationery store.
The cash register
The most painful item on the list was definitely the cash register.
A few years ago, we bought the last one we used for around €175, and the company actually had two of them. They were lovely little machines. But that was before online cash registers became mandatory.
So you can imagine my reaction when I found out that the absolute cheapest model currently available, including installation, costs around €350, while being considerably less capable than our old machines.
Well, never mind. That is done too.
I now officially have an online cash register.