We Opened The Glamping Store

Not having land under contract has freed up some time for us. And during that time, Mike decided to address a problem we identified after getting into the glamping industry... if you go out to try and find glamping-specific items, there really isn’t a dedicated retailer. Yes, there are manufacturers and distributors selling individual items. And larger retailers such as Amazon have some glamping items, but they are buried in the rest of the items they sell. So we set out to bring everything deemed “glamping” together in one place, The Glamping Store.

Another driving force behind opening The Glamping Store (TGS) was Mike's experience building out our merchandise store for Mitten Getaways. We always like to get a souvenir on our vacations, so we knew we wanted to sell some merchandise from our resort. We also saw selling merchandise as a part of our pre-marketing efforts, getting some people to don our logo on their shirts, coffee mugs, etc. Once we discovered we could sell this custom merchandise via a print-on-demand service, without any risk or inventory costs, we were all-in on hosting an online store for Mitten Getaways.

However, when it came to creating a store for everything "glamping", we realized our resort's online store would have a relatively limited customer base. Our customers would mainly be people who would want to help us out, at least until they stayed at our resort and wanted our merchandise as a memento of their stay. We wanted to offer something to glampers and glamping resort operators everywhere. Thus we created TGS. At a high level, TGS has two categories of products for sale; products we have designed ourselves and products sold by third parties, most of which we have personally used, or at least endorse based on other customer reviews. Related, we reformatted the Mitten Getaways gift card to also be applicable at TGS, and we created a rewards program where our customers can earn points and exchange them for, well, rewards. We also reworked our user account a bit to work for all three businesses so guests and customers can track their orders, reservations, subscriptions, etc. In addition to ready-made products for purchase, TGS also offers customized items. Since our products are focused on the broad category of glamping, we thought that there may be businesses within the glamping industry that want their business name or logo added to one of our products to either sell or wear themselves. We also thought that the customization may be desired by a group of glampers like a family or corporate group that wanted to personalize one of our products. So for a very small fee, we’ll customize any one of our existing products and make it available for the customer to purchase. All they have to do is provide what they want added and approve a proof. TGS also has a product blog to highlight and review some of the items we sell, and we’re working on building out glamping product inventory, subscriptions, and glamping courses.