November’s A chat with Ashton Harrison, founder, president/CEO, Shades of Light

CS: How many retail stores do you currently have?
AH: We have a retail store and an outlet store. We’re planning to open one in Virginia Beach, probably between now and January. And there are a few others we’re working on. We’re hoping to open one every six months.

CS: All local? How far will you expand?
AH: We don’t know yet. We’ve been doing some studies, because our retail stores draws such a large range from such a large geographical area. So we’re studying our catalog buyers and our retail buyers and then grouping them by phone area codes. And then we’re also talking to our customers. Because they’ll tell us. They’ll say “There’s nothing like you in Virginia Beach. There’s nothing like you in Charlottesville. Please come to our town.” They’ve been telling us that for years. So we have this list of cities, which we’re then cross-referencing with our own statistics to see which ones we should go to first.