Dairy chronical 9 March 2011

I have been talking to numerous people who have done retailing of kids wear or designing women wear but none of them believe in setting shops but would work on exhibition model. Finance is not constraint nor the reputation in local market. People with whom I have talked have all been doing this for past at least 5-10 years. Their reasoning on why not to set up shop is that they believe that when you do exhibitions and if you have good eye for what the target audience of exhibition is(target is generally an apartment complex some posh some not) than the sales are higher and returns much more positive rather than opening shop. Opening shop has advantages of long term commitment, branding but also operational challenges of managing them.
People are more keen on taking up bigger apartment to live in and then using one of those rooms for setting shop and then obviously the local market is apartment complex where you live. The bigger complex more the number of customers. One of my friends wants to use my 4 bhk in springfields for that purpose. She does retailing of kids wear. Most people say that profit margin is around 40% on clothes section. Pretty good.
On topic of setting up franchise it seems franchise ask for 70% profit sharing which is very high and will take at least 3 years of breakeven time with all risks taken by me for all capital investment. So, franchise is big no from every one I discussed about.
All people I asked for linkedin invites accepted my invite. Now the question is how to take it forward. Should I validate the franchise option with them about profit sharing or not. I am going to validate it to figure out data points for my own.
On investment capabilities I did sanity check in the area where I wanted to do something like this – it is fairly within my budget. Only challenge is time investment from my side. I really think it will be very stiff ask to manage work, set up shop and bring up kids. I am pursuing it like novel whose end I don’t know.