Sprucing Up Our Doorstep

Paging through the glowing spread, “Snow Comes to Door County” in the December edition of Midwest Living, a common thread is found running through the 16 photographs accompanying the story.

The businesses highlighted in the images are not closed for the season, and they are not merely putting out open signs and posting hours. A photo of the White Gull Inn features a horse-drawn wagon picking up passengers in front of the classic restaurant’s facade draped in decorations. A street scene in Fish Creek highlights the turn-of-the-century storefronts of the Fish Creek Market and On Deck Sportswear, each framed in seasonal decorations. Glowing Christmas trees, red bows, and other nods to the holidays spruce up other shots.

All of the businesses featured prominently go out of their way each year to decorate for the season, and there’s a lesson in that.

Those businesses earned prominent, FREE advertising from an objective third party, for the individual business but also for the entire peninsula. For most of these establishments it’s not the first time.

The lesson? It doesn’t always take big dollars or slick marketing to get a business or destination noticed. Sometimes it takes a little bit of extra effort and time spent on the little things, like putting up holiday decorations, or hay bales and corn stalks in the fall, or planting blossoms in the spring. All things we are often too quick to skip nowadays.

Take Kohler, for example. A village with a name synonymous with better-left-un-articulated bodily functions has made itself a popular winter destination in large part due to its reputation for dousing the village in Christmas lights. With a population of just1,926 and nothing close to the number of stores, galleries and other attractions Door County offers, it gets by on a reputation for giving the extra effort to its visitors.

We take a weekend, give it a name and throw festival on the end, and we expect the hoards to come pounding on our doors. All too often, we skip the work it takes to make the event special and memorable for the visitor (and the local).

Those who’ve been around a while will remember 4th of July parades featuring a few actual floats, completed with painstaking hours of work (not just a car with a sign taped to the side), and entire villages adorned in patriotic colors.

Growing up in Egg Harbor, participation in the annual scarecrow contest for Pumpkin Patch weekend was so complete and creative that I hit my teens before realizing that not every town in the world held the same contest.

As a former business owner, I admit I was often guilty of not doing enough to participate, and I recognize it can be hard to take the time (and money) to get festive when you’re toiling day and night just to keep the lights on and the grill hot, let alone increase your profit margin. So what can we do to improve the buy-in without asking still more of our business owners? Here are a few relatively low-cost ideas that don’t put the entire burden on the business owner:

1) Each spring, enlist a willing local landscaper to tour each village, offering suggestions to business owners for easy ways to spruce up their doorstep. Send them out armed with a trailer full of plants, bushes, and flowers, so the business owner can buy right off the truck, saving time and dollars not spent on the wrong greenery. Not every business owner is a horticulturalist, so why not give them a hand, and send some money to our local landscapers and greenhouses? It might be a great way for a landscaper to drum up new business as well.

2) Along the same lines, each fall communities could fill up a wagon full of hay bales, pumpkins, and corn stalks from area markets or farmers in the fall and take it through town to sell to businesses off the trailer. Do it in mid-September, so villages are fully decked out come festival season.

3) And since I’ve gotten this far, I’ll rehash an idea I’ve voiced before – line our highways with cherry trees. In warmer climates (see Florida, Dauphin Island, Arizona, San Diego) the medians are filled with palm trees and desert flowers and plants. How about planting cherry trees in the middle of the four-lane through Sturgeon Bay and even further south? Continue it on up the peninsula, especially in front of some of the less than awe-inspiring architectural additions to the once-rural landscape. Imagine a Blossom Festival that welcomed visitors with miles of cherry blossoms, rather than concrete and bland, mind numbing, suburban-style infrastructure. If for some reason cherry trees are impractical, lets find another colorful symbol of the Door.

Will holiday decorations and landscaping solve all our business problems? No, of course not. But it won’t hurt, and the effort and time put into it is likely to come back to those who do it, and to the entire community. At some point, as we find the numbers aren’t where we’d like them, we have to quit pointing at marketing, the economy, or gas prices as the culprit, and begin considering whether we’re still putting out a good enough product.

It takes more than slapping a festival name on a weekend, more than simply putting out the open sign (though in the winter, a couple more would be a good start).

Ask yourself this – would Midwest Living have bothered to do an 8-page spread on Door County if every business was closed, the lights were off, and storefronts were dull and unadorned?

I don’t think so. And if it weren’t for those businesses who still open their doors and spruce up the windows when the profits are slim or non-existent, Door County would have lost a few hundred thousand dollars worth of free advertising this fall.