By Stevi Costa
Sip & Ship is not your typical shipping center. Owners Diana and Steve Naramore are quite aware that their business, which combines a mail and dispatch center with a gift shop and coffee house, is not the norm.
The idea for the shop came from Diana Naramore’s time working at the Queen Anne Dispatch. She and her husband became close with the owners who suggested that the couple try to build a similar business entity on their own. The Queen Anne Dispatch incorporates mailing, gifts and fashion, due to the current owners’ former experience in the fashion industry. So when the Naramores set out to open their first multi-function business in Ballard in 2002, they decided to incorporate something necessary to the life of every Seattleite: coffee.
Sip & Ship offers Café Vita coffee drinks along with locally-sourced pastries and sells local artisan paper products alongside nationally recognized brands like Paperchase and Moleskine. In both sipping and shopping sectors, Diana Naramore said that community was a driving focus in her buying decisions.
“There are three considerations I make when I buy. The first is certainly local,” Naramore said, elaborating that her definition of local includes both things that are locally made and items purchased from a local representative who makes his or her living selling a product line such as the Botanica candles the store carries. Naramore’s other buying considerations include green business practices, preferring to stock products from paper companies that use recycled materials which reflects Sip & Ship’s own emphasis on going green. (Anyone can drop off unneeded boxes at the store and Sip & Ship will recycle them.) Finally, Naramore makes sure that the products she stocks are “cute,” like the featured cards from local artist Driscoll Designs and Ilee Papergoods.
“The perfect customer participates in all three elements: they ship, they shop, they sip,” Diana said. But Naramore understands that not everyone can participate in all three elements all the time. “There are key shoppers to each department that help us survive,” she said, noting that each facet of her business is seasonally driven, so when one sector of the store is down, the others remain buoyant. The model has been successful enough for the Naramores to open a second location in Greenwood in late 2008.
Shipping services, however, are the backbone of the business. Sip & Ship is an authorized shipping center for UPS, FedEx, USPS and Seko Worldwide Freight, so clients can drop-off prepaid packages with any of those carriers, as well as receive packages at the store rather than their home or business. (Sip & Ship will even notify you via phone, text or email when you have a package at the store.) According to Naramore, the advantage of shipping a parcel with Sip & Ship, rather than seeking out a carrier-specific site, is the ability to compare service rates so that customers can choose what’s best for them.
“A lot of times shipping can be very confusing,” Naramore said. “We like to take the confusion and ambiguity out of the shipping matrix.” Naramore and her employees begin by asking customers about their shipping needs regarding time sensitivity, fragility and necessity of package tracking. Customers are then presented with carrier options that suit those needs and then make their final selections based on price point.
On most services, Sip & Ship out-prices carrier-specific stores, except in the case of the United States Postal Service (which charges Sip & Ship a service fee that drives up the cost). From UPS and FedEx, Naramore receives a wholesale price for services and is provided with a suggested retail price to give to customers. Usually, Sip & Ship offers services below that suggested retail price.
Besides being a multi-faceted shipping-retail-coffeehouse, Sip & Ship is a community hub, thanks to Diana Naramore’s focus on inviting the community to her store and cross-promoting with other businesses. “We envision ourselves as a sort of concierge to the neighborhood,” she said, adding that the coffee shop loft space provides ample room for local business events. In the past, local business people have hosted seminars, writers have organized discussions about their work and doctors from nearby Swedish medical center have used the Sip & Ship for “Coffee Talks” where they answer general health questions from the local community, all of which have helped cement Sip & Ship as cornerstone of the Ballard business community.
Although Sip & Ship’s Greenwood location hasn’t been around quite as long, it has quickly become a community fixture by participating in local events like the Greenwood Art Walk and the Greenwood Car Show.
Sip & Ship Ballard is located at 1752 NW Market St. Sip & Ship Greenwood is located at 8560 Greenwood Ave. N. Visit www.sipandship.com for more information about either location.
