Christine Whelan FEO, December 8th, 2022, VOL. 4 ISSUE 8
Christian Kentie, the Frugal Dutchman of Ridgeway was chosen in October by eBay Canada to win the Micro-Multinational Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2022.
“The recognition comes from outstanding work in selling and shipping internationally. I’ve been a seller on eBay for six years,” Christian began to explain.
“A few weeks ago, eBay Canada featured us as their premier local comic shop.” Christian was flattered, honoured, and grateful, but a little surprised. He laughed, “We’re not even considered a comic book store.”
The Frugal Dutchman is a collectibles, comics, and games store in downtown Ridgeway. Kenties’ story is a positive one, one of rising up from the pandemic in ways the entire collectibles retail industry could not have predicted.
Don’t judge a business by its storefront.
“70% of what we sell online on eBay goes out of the country.”
Kentie broke the business down. “We run a 50/50 business – 50% of our business is with our storefront in Ridgeway and the other 50% happens online. So, 70% of that 50% of our online business goes out of the country.”
He explained that seasonally, they are busier in the storefront in the summer and make their money in the winter online.
“I used to be a web designer and I’ve worked in software programming. That’s what I did before I had the store.” Computers, and therefore the online business, come more naturally to him.
The Story Behind the Name
I’ve been curious about the name of the store, The Frugal Dutchman, since Christian opened the doors to the building that once was, many years ago, Beeshy’s China Shop in downtown Ridgeway. And so I inquired.
“The name came from my mom.” He explained, at the time of making the store was about to become reality, he had gathered a list of potential names but none of them were catchy. “Creatively, there was no spark,” as he put it.
So, he turned to his family and close friends, asking for their input. “And the next day, my mom sent me her idea. She said it half as a joke. ‘Why don’t you call it the Frugal Dutchman?'” Christian laughed, “And that was a better idea than any other ones thought up.”
His mom’s suggestion was not random. “My family is from the Netherlands. My grandparents came over in the 50s. Dutch culture was a big part of my upbringing and a big part of who I am. I found out recently that, although she made it out as a joke, she was serious about wanting the name.”
Christian’s Journey
When asked what brought Christian to this passion for collectibles, he shared his journey. “My parents work in the ministry. My dad’s a pastor. with an organization called Urban Promise in Toronto. They work with inner-city kids. But, as a side business, he has always, since eBay started in 1995, sold stamps and postcards online. So, I grew up around it.”
About 15 years ago, Christian and Kristen began selling items at a flea market in Barrie, invited by his father-in-law. They found it quite lucrative.
The couple started to make changes toward the current direction six years ago. “We had gotten to a point where we were doing regular, weekend shows. We had to pack everything up, set it up, sell it, then pack it all up again and bring it home. So, we needed a place to store everything.”
They found storage units to be expensive and when his father-in-law came across a small, local storefront, cheaper than storage, they took it.
“We decided to set it up and if we have a show to go to, we’d just pack it up and go. We’d work the store only on weekends. This was still something I was doing in my spare time. I was still doing web design.”
Opening the Store
“Three weeks after we opened the store, I got laid off.”
So, he sat down with Kristen and, “We had a fairly serious conversation. We had just moved from Fort Erie to Ridgeway. She had just started a job a few weeks before that.
“The question was, what do I do now?”
After brainstorming and going through all their options, Christian said to his wife, “Here’s a thought. Employment Insurance will give me eight months. So, that gives me eight months to focus full-time on getting the store to work. If it doesn’t work after that, then we can have this conversation again.
“That was almost seven years ago now.”
The Unexpected Effects of the Pandemic
“We are not recession-proof,” Kentie stated. “We are actually the opposite. Nothing in our store is considered necessary. And when you’ve got to cut corners, collectibles are what you cut corners on.”
“But nobody could have accounted for this.”
The business owner explained, “But COVID actually had an unexpected, opposite effect for us, in the collectibles industry. Whereas, a lot of industries struggled, and so many businesses shut down, especially small businesses that had to scramble to somehow get their business online, we kind of had a head start.
“I own the shop with my brother, Gordon Kentie, and my father-in-law, Chris Riegle. I’m the Managing Owner and so I own the principal amount of the business. Every year in January, we sit down and ask, what’s our vision for this year? What are we going to do differently to move forward? That year, in January 2020, we had decided that we needed to focus on our online sales.”
And they got their business online just three months before the first lockdown.
“When March hit, we sat down again and asked ourselves, what do we need to do to survive? We went into survival mode because, as I said earlier, nothing we sell is necessary. How do we toe the line and break even for the next, who knows how long?”
They learned to run on bare bones. He called it the resilience of the human spirit.
And then the unexpected happened. “The collectibles industry saw something that nobody accounted for. Where everyone else was struggling, collectibles actually took off.”
Christian explained, “We had lockdowns happening, which meant people couldn’t travel. And that made a huge difference because people in general will save all year long for their vacations.
“On top of that,” he continued, “Many people had transferred to working at home and weren’t spending money travelling to and from work. So, there was this money not being spent.”
Finally, “Home offices were created everywhere, in most homes. And I don’t know about you, but in my office, that’s where I keep all my cool stuff.”
We talked about how the price of lumber has gone up partially due to the rise in demand as people were doing repairs and renovations in their homes and properties while stuck at home.
“Construction and collectibles are two industries that thrive through lockdowns. Collectible shops everywhere, if they were doing any type of online sales, did really well.
“None of us could have seen this coming ahead of time.”
Game Room
When the store space became open next door to The Frugal Dutchman, a decision was made to take it on.
“We’ve had ideas we’ve wanted to do with the space because we are not just a collectibles store but a games store. One of the normal things for a games store is to have a space for people to come and play.”
“So, we’ve expanded into the store next door and turned it into a game room. It’s a board game lounge with a Craft soda shop. We’re working with a small, locally-owned company out of Windsor called Soda Pop Bros.”
Community Service Hours for Students
Christian talked about the opportunity he offers to high school students who are looking for community service hours. Even though it’s a retail environment, he likes to take the experience further. He teaches aspects of business and focuses on transferable life skills that the students can take with them for the rest of their lives.
An Iconic Tradition At Christmas
“We’ve got the Roll Your Discount promotion going on again this December. It’s an iconic sale promotion for a game store. Dice are something we deal with all the time. When the customers come up to the register to pay for their purchases, we give them two 20-sided dice to roll. Their discount on their sales is whatever they roll. They can roll up to 40% off their sale.
“We came up with this promotion a few years ago and we’ve done it every year. People ask about it now.”
The Building
The building has been around, going back as far as the 1800’s when it was called ‘Canada’s Most Famous Village Shop’. It was when it was later called Beeshy’s, a store filled with English China, that Christian remembers. He says there’s a little extra for him that he has opened a business and survived a pandemic in the building he, reminiscing of years ago, was not even allowed to enter, being a little boy and Beeshy’s being a china shop.
To find out more about The Frugal Dutchman, you can check out his website frugaldutchman.com, you can contact Christian directly by emailing him at info@frugaldutchman.com or visit the store at 304 Ridge Road N. in downtown Ridgeway.
