Co-spacing is sharing space with one or many businesses to reduce overhead and draw from a variety of demographics for your brand.

Individuals or businesses share a large space, without doors or walls, share the costs of parking, utilities, insurance, rent, meeting offices, bathrooms and kitchens. The rates are based on the area you rent in relation to the size and rent of the entire venue.

Venue Ideas

Antique co-ops have been around for decades in huge spaces where individuals rent out display cabinets, kiosks, or full-sized retail areas to sell a wide variety of everything from silver tea tongs to vinyl records. The usual thread is antiques, or at least, older objects, from household items, music, furniture, or toys. Co-ops can have 20 to 200 vendors in a space owned by one person or company.

This is an ideal situation if you have tea collectibles to sell or you want to offer new items for tea service, however, antique co-ops do not include food and beverage vendors because of health permits and regulations.

If serving tea is your goal, consider a venue with a culinary/beverage only venue in which customers can visit a wine bar or an oyster bar; bring the kids for pizza or burgers; shop for culinary tools and equipment; buy tabletop items from dinnerware to placemats for themselves or for gifts. Administrators try to avoid overlaps, so there is only one Chinese restaurant, one pizza shop, plus single examples of other ethnic cuisine or a salad bar, and ice cream or dessert booths. Culinary themed craft and art booths, a produce market, butcher, or fishmonger, cheesemonger are all possible vendors.

Most importantly, it could have YOUR tea shop where you could either sell bulk teas or have tastings only or provide full-service tea menus plus offer your teas and accessories from teapots to cozies, gift baskets, and everything else you would stock at a mortar-and-brick store.

Your umbrella organization becomes a destination center with communal dining areas to cross market beverages, foods, crafts sold there. This type of venue is perfect for an ambitious developer eager to transform an abandoned warehouse, train station, or strip mall that can be opened up to allow customers to stroll through the entire culinary-themed venue.

Need an easier solution?

You can cut costs while benefitting from the cross-marketing effort of selling teas and tea related products along with someone else’s merchandise that is complementary.

Sharing your existing shop with others or sharing space in someone’s existing store can be a win-win. Some possibilities are: fine stationery and paper craft shops; jewelry shops, especially those specializing in antique or period pieces; knitting or needlework shops; bookshops that specialize in cozy mysteries, romance novels, and/or British classics, or if you don’t sell food, a bakery shop is perfect.

Cross-Promote with Events. Open your classes and product demonstrations to all vendors and their customers. Host a trunk show of particular artists or designers, on a day you're usually closed, with a portion of sales given to a local charity. Give each visitor a flyer citing your regular hours and a one-time discount for returning.

Cross-market your advertising to promote events, new products, or expanded hours.

Cross-market products by placing some of yours on the shelves of the other vendors and their products on your shelves. Vendors can use a special category in their POS equipment when customers want to buy from several vendors, or simply call you over to make the sale using a handy tablet or phone POS tool.

Promote. Promote. Promote. Use both individual and group efforts for social marketing, advertising, flyers, in-store banners or signs. Link every social network tool with one that is dedicated to the store so that every effort to promote one vendor promotes the others.

Play by the rules.

- Talk to both your accountant and your attorney about responsibilities for both you and your fellow tenants.

- Involve your insurance agents to determine how to bill your co-spacers.

- Contact your landlord (if you don’t own the property) about whether this requires an addendum to your lease agreement, and

- Check local governments regarding permits for more than one vendor to occupy one space.

Before you sign.

If you are the landlord or hold the lease, you can definitely make the rules but landlord or renter, know what is expected of you. Some questions to ask are:

-Is there flexibility of days and hours of operation?

Is there room for receiving and unpacking?

-For shipping and handling for online or phone sales?

- Are there bath and kitchen accommodations, as needed, for all?

- Should each vendor handle only their own sales or can this be a cooperative experience?

- Can your POS equipment handle multiple accounts and separate sales taxes, gross sales, etc.?

- What other concerns do your CPA, landlord or lawyer require?

The trend of co-spacing is hot! Many landlords want tenants to remain versus a continual turnover, so the future looks good for co-spacing as a way to keep shopkeepers in business and landlord properties rented.

Too much to handle?

Go simple. Ask your local baker if they would display your teas along with some tent cards or flyers about your shop. Suggest they sell your teas and you sell their breads or cupcakes. You can do this as a limited promotional activity or make the arrangement standard.

Selling your teas wholesale may be a loss leader, yet a huge marketing push to get the bakery’s customers to visit your store where you can show off your complete inventory, offer tastings, and give special discounts as a thank you.

As always, any time you do something new or different, post it on your social media including your web site, in window displays and at the POS counter. Every item of promotion SELLS.