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Small business Monday – spotlight on Frontera
Happy Fall, y’all! Feel that cool nip in the air? Nolan Graves, owner of Frontera, tells us where to get a fire pit (and where the Birmingham chiminea craze started a few years ago) in this week’s installment of Small Business Monday!
I’m Nolan Graves, owner of Frontera, which has been open for twenty years. Â I had been in the corporate world for years, working for Oscar Mayer and Coca Cola in Louisiana. Â When I moved back to Birmingham, I found it difficult to get a job in corporate, so a guy I’d been friends with since kindergarten and I drove a truck down to Mexico, filled it up (with pottery and metal work) and came back and sold products from my place in Vestavia.
Then I got the chance to move into this building. When we moved here (3022 3rd Avenue South), there was nothing.  Pepper Place was just getting started.  We started off with a retail space in the front and a curtain to separate the warehouse space in the back.
We ended up purchasing a 15,000 square foot building a mile from here. Â We did wholesaling, too. Â We’d fill a truck and drive up to Huntsville, stopping along the way to sell to garden shops. Â Â We went from nothing to doing million dollars a year in sales. Â Sloss owns our building now and plans to finish out the alley in back like a New Orleans scene.
It’s fire pit season! Â I didn’t sell any last year because of the drought and the burn ban. Â But we’re looking forward to selling a lot this year! Â We’ve got a 3/16″ steel, lifetime guarantee pit. Â (Like and share their fire pit post on Facebook for a chance to win one!)
Years ago, we went down to Mexico and found chimineas. Â Â My buddy, Frank and I had just brought in chimineas. Â Nobody had heard of the chiminea. Â Bob Farley did a story on us for the Post-Herald. Â He came in and took some pictures and talked to us and the story wound up being on page B-1 in the paper. Â The afternoon the article came out, it was like Walmart in here. Â We ordered a straight eighteen-wheeler full of chimineas and sold a hundred thousand dollars of chimineas in less than a month!
The biggest challenge for a small business owner is big box stores and Amazon. Â These will be the death knell of small businesses. Â People will even buy toilet paper online now instead of supporting the guy down the street. Â Whenever possible, I always try to support small businesses.
For more information –Â https://www.facebook.com/fronterabirmingham/
Check out this other recent small business post-https://bhamnow.com/index.php/2017/06/05/small-business-monday-spotlight-ghost-train-brewing-co/