Relishing the Best of the Midwest with Relish Kitchen Store
By Micah Cheek
When you think of foodie hubs, Wisconsin might not be the first place that comes to mind. But Relish Kitchen Store in Sheboygan is catering to the needs of a town that has is raising its culinary standard, fueled by the many resorts and kitchenware manufacturers in the area.
Jane Davis-Wood opened Relish in anticipation of a market. There hadn’t been a kitchenware store in Sheboygan for 15 years, and the city was beginning a renaissance. “Our economy is home to many corporate headquarters. So we have a wonderful audience. It’s a place where there’s a lot of job openings, so we’re building a lot of housing to bring young professionals into the area instead of driving from Milwaukee every day,” says Davis-Wood.
“I knew it was coming, I decided to be in place and wait for them. Now, the nearest kitchenware store to Relish is over 50 miles away. The cities to the west of us are discovering us, because it’s easier to drive to us than to the city of Milwaukee. That’s been a happy surprise. We are drawing from a large area,” she adds.
As the customer base of Relish grows and draws from a larger geographical area, Davis-Wood has her eye on expansion. “We are doubling our size this year, were expanding to have a full demo kitchen. We’re a little crowded in here right now,” she says. “The unit next to us became available, [and] we thought, Oh, this won’t happen again for a long time; we can push this up a few years.”
Along with more storage and display space, the full demonstration kitchen will fill even more needs. “Other kitchens do the fancier cooking; there are people who don’t want that. They want to learn how to make a stock, how to use a knife. They want to have a good time and a good meal and know how to make it when they get home. The expansion and remodeling will be significant, but Relish is just expanding with the city itself. It’s going to be first quarter before we get that place up and running; I’m not worried about construction at all, especially with the construction that’s going on around town,” says Davis-Wood.
Relish has to be at the top of its game for the cooks of Sheboygan. The city on the coast of Lake Michigan is now a resort town and corporate headquarters. “We’re a cookware city. Polarware was here, a number of other companies were here. People want to know about the metal; we need to be aware of that kind of thing,” says Davis-Wood. “We have huge resorts in town that can use all the chefs they can get…. These are mostly chef-owned restaurants in the area, plus a culinary school a few blocks away. We do a nice little knife business with the students. Every high school here has a culinary program.”
With this audience, Relish has put a focus on high-end cookware and bakeware. “Cookware is very important to our business. Everyone’s tired of having to buy cookware every five years instead of just once,” says Davis-Wood. “We’re one of the only retailers that can supply Vollrath… Their cookie sheets have been named by “America’s Test Kitchen” as the world’s best cookie sheets.” Customers in the area tend to be focused on the fundamentals, and are looking for high-quality products for everyday cooking. “We want to show people how to feed their families, [that] Ina Garten stuff. We want you to be able to go home and recreate this the very next day,” says Davis-Wood. “The spiralizers have been really popular. I’m probably one of the few people who has made sweet potato waffles with spiralized sweet potatoes — we like to encourage people to learn how to cook [like that].”
Davis-Wood opened Relish with her daughter after both had careers in corporate retail. Those experiences taught some valuable lessons on what — and what not — to do. “When I was in big box stores, I wanted to learn about inventory control. At one point I realized that you had to stand behind the cashiers. They have exactly 11 minutes to get people through,” says Davis-Wood. “It’s called throughput, how fast can you get them through. And if they were taking longer, they were either counseled up or counseled out. Now you’ve ended up with a couple generations of shoppers who have never had full service. They don’t know what that is.”
In creating Relish’s retail experience, Davis-Wood went in a different direction. “It’s all about the experience, We get such a good return on customers; it’s more of an experience. It’s the way retail used to be when I first started in the 70s. You’ve got an audience that’s never experienced it,” says Davis-Wood. “It’s a lot more fun to ask Jane how to use the knife than it is to ask Amazon.”
