Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Craft Ahrens.
Hi Amy, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up in retail. It’s in my blood. My parents opened a Ben Franklin store (an old school “Five and Dime”) in the heart of BG back in 1976, and I began working in the shop at the age of 9. My sisters and I helped to paint and prep and set up the Ben Franklin store, and once we were open, we all worked there. I continued working at Ben Franklin through high school and then while studying at BGSU.
I didn’t expect to continue working in retail, but after college, I ended up working for a gift retailer in Chicago. I spent a little over 5 years managing a shop called “Natural Wonders” in a mall in the suburbs of Chicago. By this time, my parents had opened a hardware store in BG along with the Ben Franklin store. I was getting a bit disillusioned with corporate retail. In late 1996, my father told me he’d bought the building in between the Ben Franklin and the hardware store. He was describing it to me as a beautiful old building with original tin ceilings and a balcony around 2 sides, and then he said he was going to put more hardware in it. I told him that it sounded like it would make an amazing gift store. He immediately said that he knew nothing about gifts and that if we were to make it into a gift store, I would need to come home to run it. I was ready to leave Chicago, and in early 1997, I returned to Bowling Green and started work on For Keeps. On July 30, 1997, we opened our doors.
For Keeps has evolved a lot over the years. We started out as gifts and collectibles but transitioned to more gifts and home decor over the first 10 years we were open. We’ve tried to listen to what our customers are telling us they want us to sell so we keep changing. When the recession hit in 2009, we started carrying more jewelry and fashion lines, eventually even adding clothing and other accessories. Purse lines have always been good for us, and we’ve expanded the number of lines we carry over the years; it seemed that even when times were a bit tough, our customers would still like to treat themselves to a new pair of earrings or a new purse and we were happy to have something to offer them. I remember thinking that if we could survive the recession, we could survive anything. And then COVID hit.
In the first few days after the shutdown, I was a bit paralyzed. My biggest worry was being able to continue paying my staff. After a few days, I decided to go into the shop, get on Facebook, and see what kind of business I could drum up. Mostly, I was just hoping to be able to make enough to keep paying my staff…and it worked! We did business via Facebook, email, phone calls, and eventually via our website. We were able to finally add a shopable website which helped us a lot in the early months of the pandemic. We also started offering Mystery Boxes for our customers. They would give us a little info about the person they were shopping for, and we then chose items we thought they’d like, wrapped each item individually, and shipped them all over the country! It was so much fun making Mystery Boxes and we still offer that service today. We are very lucky that our community values small local businesses, and they were super supportive throughout the pandemic and beyond. The pandemic forced us to make a lot of changes really quickly. That’s one of the great things about small businesses; we can adjust and change in ways that are harder for a big corporate store.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We have had a few challenges. The collapse of the collectible market in the early 2000s showed us that we really needed to carry a broader selection of items. Then the recession in 2009 was a very tough period as well. It just got worse and worse for nearly 5 years. We’d just fully rebounded from the recession when the City of Bowling Green planned major construction projects in our downtown for both 2018 and 2019. We saw a pretty steep decline in traffic during that 2-year period and I was really looking forward to 2020 and even told my staff that 2020 was going to be so much better…and then COVID.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about For Keeps?
What our customers tell us nearly every day is that they can count on us to have just what they need and also to have items they have never seen anywhere else. Just today I had a customer looking for a gift for an 11-year-old and a 21-year-old and after walking the shop with her and showing her lots of great gift ideas we hit on just the right items. As we headed to the counter, she said, “I love you and this store”. We hear these kind of comments every day. We have a wide array of items to choose from, and we try to hit every price point, too. We want everyone to find something at For Keeps. We work hard at the market with sales reps and searching online to find products that people will love. We enjoy working one on one with our customers to help them choose a gift…not everyone comes in knowing what they are looking for, and we’re happy to help with suggestions and ideas until we hit on the right thing. We still offer free gift wrapping, and our customers love that they can come here last minute, find the right gift, and walk out with a beautifully wrapped present. And they usually find something for themselves, too. Our customers tell us time and again that they hope we never leave downtown BG and we’re so thankful for their support.
It’s important to us at For Keeps to contribute to our local community, too. We donate to many, many local organizations, from scout groups and school events to BGSU programs and local fundraisers. We support all the events that happen in our downtown, and I have personally been involved with the Black Swamp Arts Festival for 25 years, helping to make it happen in downtown BG every September. I serve on our local downtown organization and work with other business owners to promote our downtown. We are so lucky to have a vibrant downtown, but it takes a lot of work and requires everyone pitching in to help.
I like to say that while we are small, we are mighty! We may only have 5-7 employees at any given time, but we are all a family. We work really well together, and we’ve been lucky to continue overall 26 years to find people that feel the same way about treating not just the customers but also their coworkers, like family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.forkeepsgifts.com/
- Instagram: instagram.com/forkeepsgifts/
- Facebook: facebook.com/forkeepsgifts/
