Southwest Florida specialty shops finding their niche

Before Marie Heiland opened her shop, she did not know olives need to be picked, crushed and pressed in a day's time. Or that vanilla ice cream drizzled with blood orange olive oil tastes like a Creamsicle.

But after four years of hard work and planning, the owner of the Naples Olive Oil Co. on Immokalee Road has found a niche.

"I do it right," Heiland said. "I have a legitimate, quality product. The average person thinks it's all the same."

Shops like Heiland's that sell one product or offer one service may be dwarfed by big box retailers and chain stores, but owners and operators of Southwest Florida's specialty stores have unparalleled expertise in their product and the opportunity to make their passions profitable.

Niche business owners provide customers with a limited selection but an expansive knowledge of what they're selling, said Sandra Kauanui, director at the Institute for Entrepreneurship at Florida Gulf Coast University.

"I think customer service has a lot to do with it," she said. "That is the difference between going there and going to a big business where you might have a lower cost but you don't have those kind of relationships. They know their business. They know their product."

Niche shops stay in business, Heiland said, because they excel in a small corner of the market and know who they're selling to.

"You can't be everything to everybody," she said. "Not every customer is my customer."

Other times, people turn to niche businesses because there's nowhere else to go for the product or service.

Jack Anderson, the self-described Clockmaster of Naples who sells and repairs antique clocks, says he does not know what will happen to his customers when he retires. There is virtually no competition.

"Of course that helps," he says.

It's the same way at Kurt Pascavis' Beef Jerky Outlet in North Naples, where receipts thank customers for their business. "We know you have a choice!" they say.

But that's not entirely true. The truth is, you can't shop at another Beef Jerky Outlet south of the Fort Myers location, which Pascavis also owns.

"When I came in, I bought the rights for Bonita, Golden Gate, Immokalee and Marco so nobody could take my idea," he said. He shudders at the thought of non-enthusiasts poaching his beef jerky brands and selling them at a superstore.

"They want to sell it at a gas station and not build all the beautiful stuff," he said, gesturing to the hardwood floors and plastic-lidded barrels. "That doesn't happen in our franchise."

Both Pascavis and Anderson shirk from traditional advertising. Pascavis pays a company $100 a month to display his ads behind clear plastic displays in bathrooms.

"It's at the zoo, it's at Tin City, it's at all the bars. It works," Pascavis said. "It's surreal."

Anderson, who repairs more clocks than he sells, is more of a word-of-mouth kind of guy. Steady business isn't unusual; in season, he sometimes has enough requests for a three-month queue, he said.

"I stay in business because of repairs. If you do a good job at a reasonable rate, they keep coming back," Anderson said.

Because finding customers interested in niche products or services can be a challenge, a business's location can be essential to its success. Before he settled on a Davis Boulevard property, Anderson said, he shopped around for a location with a good landlord, a big parking lot and a fair amount of drive-by traffic.

"I looked all over trying to get the right place," he said. "There's easy access here. If people are bringing clocks, they need room to park."


"The key was location," Vaske said. "It was very much a college crowd and a high school crowd."

The Dude closed about nine months after it opened because another tenant was willing to sign a long-term lease with the mall, Vaske said. But business was good, he said, and he remains passionate about the cereal business and The Dude's future.

"We were just starting to catch on," Vaske said. "If there was an opportunity to do it on campus, we have definitely talked about doing it again."

What make a niche business most successful is an owner passionate about what he or she does, Vaske said.

"When you're in business, you want to be around something that you love, and breakfast cereal is always something I loved," he said. "You've got to have a passion for it.

"If you just get into something because you think it's profitable, it's not the business for you."