Serving Soldiers With the Wherewithal for a Meal

By Lorrie Baumann

With their backgrounds in the U.S. Army, Oliver and Kathryn West continue to serve by making The Pot Rack in Leavenworth, Kansas, a resource for young soldiers and their families who are making homes away from home during training assignments that typically last for up to a year. “We start with the customer aged 30 to 32 or so, and they go on up to retirement age and beyond. A large percentage of them are associated with the military. At that age, they’re here for a year for an upper-level schooling class,” says Kathryn. “It’s kind of a fun year for them because they get to get out without a whole lot of obligations because they’re only here for nine months. They’ve been married for a while, so they’re upgrading the things they got married with. We have the opportunity to showcase some nice quality products for them.”

The couple opened The Pot Rack in 2008 and packed their 1,100 square feet with pots, pans, bakeware, gadgets, coffee and tea. “We sell a lot of coffee and have since the day we opened,” Kathryn says. “There’s another shop in town that sells coffee but doesn’t have the same variety. We sample coffee every day. Our customers know that if they’re downtown, even if they don’t want anything from The Pot Rack, but they want a cup of coffee, they come in…. We also sample tea every day as well, so there’s always something on for everybody.”

“We have 28 different coffees to appeal to a wide range of tastes,” adds Oliver. “We’re close to a military base that rotates its main population every year. We get people from all over the place coming in all the time. They bring their tastes with them, and we try to accommodate them.”
While gadgets are the category that reaps the highest sales for The Pot Rack, the pantry of specialty food products comes in second place. In addition to the coffee and tea, sold mostly as tea bags, although loose tea is also in stock, The Pot Rack offers sauces, pickles, pasta sauces, candy, soups and spices. “We do a lot of soups, soup mixes. The best brand we carry is Frontier. For people who are concerned about sodium, they can use their own stock,” Kathryn said. Spices come from Teeny Tiny Spice Company and Urban Accents.

The couple have been married for 29 years, and both started their careers in the U.S. Army, Kathryn as a quartermaster officer, and Oliver in tank battalions. Both military brats, they both attended Leavenworth High School before they went off to college, Kathryn to Kansas State and Oliver to Oklahoma State University. Both were commissioned into the Army, but they only met while they were both assigned to Fort Hood, which was Oliver’s last duty station before he retired from the service. Kathryn separated from the military around the time that Oliver retired and in civilian life, became a business manager for a corporation that moved her to Kansas City, then to Atlanta and then to Leavenworth. Oliver followed along, pursuing his own second career as an accountant for 25 years until the two of them decided that Kathryn needed to change course again. “She took about a year off and thought about what she wanted to do and decided that a store was it. So we dove in,” Oliver said.

“We said one day that we were going to work together again and going to open a kitchen store. We didn’t have any retail experience when we opened the doors. We thought we could figure it out,” Kathryn added. The Wests credit GC Buying Group members and staff for helping them learn the business.

“We opened September 20 of 2008, and it was, like, the week after Lehman Brothers collapsed,” Kathryn said. “I looked at Ollie and said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ And Ollie said, ‘Well, we have all this stuff. Let’s try and sell it.’”

The Pot Rack is located in a historic building in downtown Leavenworth, a community of around 35,000 people in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Leavenworth is Kansas’ oldest city, and it’s the location of several prisons as well as Fort Leavenworth, the home of the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies, the Center for Army Leadership, the Combat Studies Institute, the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, the Center for Army Lessons Learned and the Mission Command Center of Excellence. The town is big enough to support specialty shopping and benefits from a community that supports independent local businesses, Kathryn said: “People do leave town to buy certain items, but the downtown is a center for gifts and specialty. There are about 25 quality specialty stores plus many nice independent restaurants.”

Those restaurants both encourage the community’s interest in food and food preparation and bring downtown traffic to The Pot Rack’s front door. “The restaurants draw people in, not only at lunch, but for meetings and dinner,” Oliver said. “People will come by on their way to dinner…. If we get them downtown to eat, they’ll shop too. And vice versa.”

The Pot Rack encourages that association between the kitchen store and local food culture by keeping menus from local restaurants in the store to share with tourists who ask for a referral and by collaborating with the Leavenworth Farmers Market, which operates across the street from the store on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings from May to October. The Pot Rack helps promote the farmers market by offering its literature in the store, talking to customers about the market, and decorating the store with fresh flowers purchased at the market. “We shop there, and we talk to our customers about what looks good over there that day,” Oliver said.

“Everybody wants to know when the first tomatoes are in,” Kathryn added. In return, if one of the market vendors gets a question from a customer who loves the look of the eggplant but doesn’t know what to with an eggplant, the customer is often referred to The Pot Rack for an answer. “Someone at the farmers market will tell them to ‘Go over to The Pot Rack, and they’ll say, ‘Get you one of these,’ and you’ll be all set,’” Kathryn said. “And that’s what happens.”

“Our two main employees, Becky Kellogg and Tania-Liisa Smith, are accomplished cooks,” added Oliver, “One is a fabulous baker. They can tell people how to do anything – they’ve done it. They get a lot of people coming in and asking for advice.”

This summer, The Pot Rack itself is hoping to add another 2,500 square feet on two lots adjacent to the existing building. “We’ll be keeping the store open during construction,” Kathryn said. Her plan for the new space is to spread out the inventory so things are easier to find and to expand the textiles line, add to the assortment of bridal gifts and perhaps add a few tabletop items to complement the bridal registry, which is a store service that’s meaningful to the community. “We personalize the process for them. We put up a display with their name and a picture of the couple… a little display of things that the couple has asked for,” she said. “I think when you’re in a small town, it’s very important to do that.”