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BLUE TULIP MAKES SPECIAL EVENTS ITS SPECIALTY

By Molly Knight

As her son Dylan’s first birthday approached last November, Robyn Morano pondered the occasion and decided she would spare no expense. “Your baby only turns 1 once,” said Morano. “I wanted his party to be as nice as I could possibly afford it to be.”

Luckily, Morano knew where to go to get started. As director of marketing for Suburban Square, in Ardmore, Pa., she had watched many a suburban mom rush into Blue Tulip, a stationery and gift shop that opened at the open-air shopping center last May, and emerge with a stuffed shopping bag and a satisfied face. “Blue Tulip is one of the hottest retail concepts in the Northeast right now,” said Morano.

Before Morano met with Blue Tulip employees, she was overwhelmed by it all. “Kids’ parties these days have the matching favors and banners and plates and cakes,” said Morano. “It’s easy to get intimidated in situations like these, but the staff really walked me through it and made it a pleasurable experience.”

The first thing she needed to choose was a theme, so Blue Tulip employees asked her what Dylan’s nursery looked like. “Dylan’s room has a vintage rock ’n’ roll look,” said Morano. “So they took the pattern design and ended up putting a custom guitar on the front of the invitation that matched his nursery. I was worried I would have to take out a mortgage on my house to get them made, but I was pleasantly surprised by how reasonably priced they were.”

The party was almost as big a hit as the invitations, which ran about $3 a pop. “Everyone kept coming up to me and asking, ‘Where did you get these?’ said Morano. “It was worth every penny.”

The stationery-and-gifts industry, taken as a whole, makes lots and lots of pennies — about $7.5 billion annually, sources estimate. Hallmark Cards alone generated some $4.2 billion dollars in revenue through its 43,000 stores in 2005 (the latest figures available at press time).

Blue Tulip founder Joseph H. Ellis, who had been heading the retail research group at Goldman Sachs, thought he could do well in this lucrative market. Ellis launched the Princeton, N.J.-based specialty paper retailer in 2001. “He had watched the retail industry for many years,” said Todd Shugarman, Blue Tulip’s vice president of development. “When he retired, he wanted to do something in an open niche and market. There are really very few retailers in the occasion business.”

Blue Tulip takes a holistic approach to celebrating events, rather than focusing on one thing, Shugarman says. “Weddings, birthdays, bat mitzvahs, you name it,” he said. “Our emphasis is on fine paper invitations for every occasion.” And if you don’t find what you’re looking for in the store, an on-site graphic designer is available to help create custom invitations at no additional charge.

Currently, Blue Tulip operates 17 units in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. It opened eight of those last year and plans to open eight more this year. “Right now we’re in the Northeast, but once we get more comfortable, we’ll be ready to expand across the country,” said Shugarman. “You can’t just go to say, Arizona, and open a lone store; you need to be able to open a three-to-five-store cluster for support. Soon we’ll be able to do that.” Next year Blue Tulip will expand to Florida.

The company looks for locations in suburban lifestyle centers that cater to families, Shugarman says. “We want to be in specialty centers that are grocery-store-anchored,” he said. “We’ll also go into lifestyle centers in suburban downtowns.”

The company is not relying only on greeting cards for income, however. Its stores also sell bath and body products, gourmet food, toys and women’s jewelry and accessories. Pink grapefruit body lotion goes for $18. Sour cream coffeecake mix sells for $15.95. A brown-and-aqua argyle woman’s watch retails for $79.

The ideal size for the stores is about 5,000 square feet, says Shugarman. “We have a lot of different departments within our stores, so we need to be able to give space to differentiate between our jewelry department and our paper department, for instance, so people can find things.”

Blue Tulip’s competitors are mom-and-pop stationery stores and larger retailers like Williams-Sonoma and Target. “I guess Papyrus would be the one national, mall-based store that everyone knows about,” said Shugarman. “Still, we feel we offer a broader range of products.”

The company’s targeting of New England towns met with opposition in one location, but the retailer later came to be welcome. Longtime Wilton, Conn., resident Sheri Richards remembers the hoopla surrounding the Blue Tulip store that opened in the Wilton Campus Shops in September 2005. “There was definitely some resistance,” said Richards. “We had a stationery store called Boyd’s that had been here for 50 or 60 years just go out of business, so it was sad to see a bigger guy come in that might knock out another mom-and-pop shop. There was a big article on the front page of The Wilton Bulletin about it.”

Richards says the store has been able to win over many residents in the last year and a half, however. “I saw a lot of people in there before Valentine’s Day because they had a workshop for kids where you could pay $5 and your kid got to sit and make a really nice Valentine and leave with a gift bag,” said Richards. “It seemed like a big hit.”