Kitchen A La Mode: Small Store With Huge Personality

By Greg Gonzales

There’s a store in South Orange where customers who see boxes stacked on the brick sidewalk outside take that as their cue to rush to the counter inside. Nestled snugly between two restaurants in downtown South Orange, New Jersey, Kitchen A La Mode’s owner, Ben Salmon, has figured out how to make his store into a fantasy land for shoppers who need a totally unique gift or home cooks who want tools and décor they can’t find anywhere else.

The store is located just four doors down from one of the busiest train stations in New Jersey, along a line that runs right to Manhattan’s Penn Station in a 30-minute ride that brings 4,000 commuters a day from the heart of New York City to Kitchen A La Mode’s doorstep and display window. Salmon has made that window more than just a display; it’s part of his sales floor. “I’m still toying around with this idea of an interactive window, so I actually have a table in it you can shop from,” he said. “People kind of like this idea of being able to shop in the window, so right now, while I try to make it pleasing from the outside, it’s also interactive from the inside.”

In addition to product-oriented displays, he’s also tried pop-up shops. “We had someone come in who does mini herb and succulent gardens; she set up all her stuff in the window, and it was this kind of live shopping window, which was new for us. It got a lot of interest,” he said. He also breaks out the sharpening machine to do live sharpening events, right there in the window, and people line up with battered knives in hand before opening just to see him do it, and Salmon added that it’s a great way to remind customers that they can come in to get a knife sharpened anytime.

Once they’re lured inside, customers find a 1,000 square-foot shop with the good-better-best inventory one might expect in a much larger space. “I’ve always called the store a Manhattan-style boutique with a village-neighborly charm,” Salmon said. “It has a European feel to it, very narrow and long with a second-floor loft. We pack a lot of punch; we probably have the inventory of a 2,500 square-foot store in 1,000 square feet. We have very, very high ceilings, which kind of makes the whole space feel very open, and our product pretty much goes up to the ceiling. You have to be very meticulous as a merchandiser and a curator in that situation; I have a kind of architectural style of merchandising to keep it neat and organized because it could very easily turn into a junk shop, but it’s not; it just looks like we have a lot of great stuff.”

“I’m big into consumer psychology, and I don’t want people to feel like they can’t touch something,” he continued. “If something is too sweet in a story, if a story is kind of complex and it looks just the way it would in their kitchen, people might not want to mess up the display. I merchandise in a way that encourages people to touch the product, to interact with the product, I want them to touch it and feel like they can look at the price.”

The first third of the store changes frequently, along with the window; it’s more gift-centric and focused on new product as it comes in. “All the new product, I introduce in the front of the store, and as new product comes in, slightly older products move to another category somewhere else in the store,” Salmon said. “So what I focus on is more of the impulse, gifty purchases up front, and then people are going to come up and ask for a baking sheet or a can opener, and that stuff is further back in the store, so they go past the giftier, interesting stuff before they get to the essentials.”

Local items aren’t Salmon’s biggest sellers, but he’s still always searching for them, because they help him compete with online giants. “In many ways, I’m working with folks who are just starting with wholesale business,” said Salmon. One of those people is Lisa Lofdahl, of LL Metal Works, whose knives are all made from scratch, one of a kind, never working off molds. Beloved Bath, a bath products maker owned by two women whose young-adult sons are on the autism spectrum, uses its proceeds to fund job training for young adults with autism. “We don’t have what everyone else has, so people really do like to come in to see what’s new and different,” Salmon said. “And our local artisans give me an opportunity to consistently rotate through that.”

He also sources products from around the world: a South Orange local hooked him up with an artisan maker in a small town in Venezuela who makes hammocks and placemats, along with wood products like spoons, bowls, pestles and mortars and bowls, all of which he displayed in his window earlier this year.

For Kitchen A La Mode, gifts are really the lifeblood of the operation, which is part of what kept the store alive since its beginning ― two months before the 2008 financial crisis. “I’m moving further and deeper into the gift category. People are always willing to spend money on others, and my problem with my essentials is that when you sell high-quality, high-value product, people only need to buy it once,” Salmon said.

“In order to keep things going, I’m amping up my gifts ― I’ll always have my essentials, but what I’ve always found when I go online, whether it’s Amazon or etsy or whatever, if you know what you’re looking for, you can be pretty successful and get what you want. And in fact, that’s where I’m always going to lose to Amazon, is that people know that they want a 12-inch All-Clad skillet. Why do they need me? They don’t. They know exactly what they want, they go online, they type it into Amazon and have it delivered the next day. So I’ve acknowledged that I’ve kind of lost that business, so the business I haven’t lost is the people who don’t know what they want.”

“If you don’t know what you want, it can be extremely difficult to find the right thing online, whereas if you come into our store, you have help, and you can just wander around and look,” he added. “You can see something new; you never even thought to give your friend a Moscow mule mug and a cocktail shaker, but you see it and it’s perfect, and you never would have discovered that online. For inspiration and education, brick and mortar will always be relevant. Also, one-of-a-kind product, the local stuff I’m the exclusive retailer for, things that are made in smaller batches that couldn’t sell on Amazon or in chain stores where each individual product varies as you get it, those kinds of things are going to do better in physical retail. That’s where we have to mark our territory.”