We Talk to The Bulk House’s Co-owner Joe Harvey About the Impending Closure of Their Physical Store

Katie Coy, Managing Editor | Aug 30, 2022 11:30 am | Add a comment | 257 reads

For avid readers of the Beijinger or those who follow zero waste store The Bulk House, you may be experiencing a feeling of deja vu reading this headline. Alas, The Bulk House is being forced to close their physical store yet again.

The announcement was made via their official WeChat account on Aug 23 with the tagline “Hi, bye, see you online.” So, zero waste crusaders can breathe a slight sigh of relief as it is only the physical store that is closing, with all their products still being available on their online stores.

In the WeChat announcement the disappointment and frustration at the forced closure by owners Carrie Yu and Joe Harvey is palpable, as the closure of their brick and mortar Beilouguxiang location will be, after all, the third time they’ve had to close.

As any small business owner in Beijing will tell you, especially those operating in the hutongs, keeping your doors open in the capital can be challenging to say the least. With over two years of Covid closures piled on top of already complicated and forever changing regulations, the struggle is real. We reached out to The Bulk House to find out more about why they’re having to close and what they have planned for the future.

Firstly, so sad to hear that you’re having to shut your physical store, can you tell us a bit more about why you’re having to close?
In the words of Jake Bugg "nothing shocks me anymore". There has been no reason given for why we can no longer rent the store, I guess "some men just want to watch the world burn", as Alfred Pennyworth said in The Dark Knight. It seems I will be answering these questions using other people's quotes.

Our landlord's contribution to society seems to be to not give a crap about small business owners. Some people are weird.

And this is the third store you’ve had to close, can you tell us a bit more about those other stores and what happened?
That's right, the Beiluo store is (soon to be was) our third store.

Our first store was in Maizidian, a tiny little place in the 258 building. A fire in the south of Beijing (Daxing) resulted in a sweeping fire safety regulation for Beijing, so many buildings had to get renovated. We had ten days to pack up and get out. There were probably 50 small stores in our building that all had to move out. We couldn't wait (or moreso didn't want to wait) until the building reopened a couple of months later so we went on the hunt for a new location.

Five days later... we had a new store on Gulou Dong Dajie (second store). That store lasted a year. We had a couple of scares during the "great brickening" and due to uncertainty, we decided not to renew the contract.

However, the Gulou Dong Dajie store really helped to put THE BULK HOUSE on the map. Loads of media (including yourselves) came to the store to interview us and shoot videos and a few went viral. Some noteworthy ones were Pandaily's video that got over a million views and then later Yitiao (一条) did a video and that went to over 30 million views pretty quickly. Over the past couple of years it has continued to attract eyes and last time we looked it was on around 95 million views, so it could now be at a 100 million views. As we all know, we are in the age of social media dominance, so without eyeballs on content then people won't know about you, so we are very appreciative of all media channels that have stopped by the store to share about our zero waste company.

And so third time lucky we opened the Beiluo store in September 2020.

The physical store is set to officially close on Sep 17, are you planning any special events or promotions to run before closing?
Yep, Saturday, Sep 17 = closing day. There's a promotion running from now until we close.

For all our self-operated brands (THE BULK HOUSE and Lagom Planet) there is a discount ranging from 17-20 percent off (depending on how much you spend). All other brands are 10 percent off in store. Online shoppers can enjoy a 10 percent discount as well. Full details of this is on our WeChat account. There might be additional discounts over the next couple of weeks, we'll see how we get on.

There is a better deal in our store as we have quite a bit of stock and as we've had less than 30 days to get our act together we need to push more customers to come to the store and help us reduce the burden of packing all of that away and moving it to our warehouse.

We’ll probably be have a leaving soirée in the final week, keep an eye on our WeChat Account for an announcement about that. ID: TheBulkHouse_China

Looking forward what do you have planned next for The Bulk House? Do you think you’d ever consider opening another physical location in the future?
Our next plan is to just focus online. We have three online stores: Taobao, Weidian and the WeChat Mini Program. We'll continue to increase our product range and continue to make our little company run more smoothly. We have customers in all provinces of China now, so that's great and perhaps we'll branch out to other Asian countries in the next year or so, but we'll take it slow and keep things at a jogging pace instead of sprinting and potentially causing unnecessary stress.

We've learnt a lot since January 2018 (which was when we opened our first store and when both Carrie and I went full-time with THE BULK HOUSE) and the biggest lesson we have learnt is to focus on what you already know in your head that you want to do. It is terrifyingly easy to act like the dog in Aesop's fable, dropping what you already have to get a bit more of something you don't necessarily need. You can apply this lesson often and life will better. It's a lesson linked to minimalism, which is a practice we preach.

Lastly, is there anything you’d like to say to our readers directly?
Dear readers of the Beijinger chronicles,

Thanks for reading these four questions and answers today.

I guess all I should say is (as a duty), adopt a little bit of zero waste into your lives. The world is getting well hot for a myriad of reasons and just some of those reasons are due to us using way more than we need, not recycling and using materials that are not too good for the planet.

If you are thinking about the planet once a week and doing something positive about it, keep it up. If you aren't, considering starting one positive action this month and once you've got that down, add another one next month.

Pick something that will help you first and as a bonus will also help the planet. That could be changing what you are putting on your skin (opt for more natural ingredients). You might want to save some money, if so, switch to making coffee each day instead of getting it delivered from Costsbucks or Notinluck Coffee.

Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle and Rot (in that order)

Last piece of unsolicited advice (a rule I agree with from Kevin Kelly) "If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar."

Cheers!
Init.

Joe