Vancouver resident turns a backyard hobby into a business
Scott Lukens, founder of Backyard Bird Shop, a supply store for birding enthusiasts with locations in Vancouver and the Portland area, makes a living from a lifetime obsession with feathered creatures.
"We wanted to design our stores to be an escape from the outside world, with lots of birder supplies and expertise for those wanting it," Lukens said.
According to Lukens, birdseed is the store's best selling item, even though it only takes up about 10 percent of the stores interior. The rest of the space is filled with feeders, baths and other birding products.
Gross sales are about $6 million a year, according to Lukens, half of which comes from sale of birdseed. "Birders are very passionate people with specific needs," he said, noting that before his store opened, there were few places catering to the birding market in the Vancouver-Portland metro area.
Ever since he was a boy growing up in Atlanta, birding has been a passion for Lukens. "When I was a child up until now, I spent all my time watching birds," Lukens said.
Lukens says there are more than 8,000 species of birds across the world, with the goal of most birders involving seeing and indentifying as many species as possible.
His passion for birding eventually included his wife, Molly Evans, with whom he relocated to Vancouver in the late 1980s. Lukens worked for Union Carbide's human resource department in Washougal, while Evans had a position in marketing with Hewlett Packard.
"When we had our first daughter, Molly took a year off," Lukens said. "Changing diapers looked like so much fun I decided to take a year off when she went back to work."
During the year he spent raising his daughter, Lukens says he began to roll around the idea of opening his own store to meet the needs of birders in Portland and Southwest Washington.
Evans was supportive of this idea, and Lukens sunk his $37,000 of savings into their flagship store in Lake Oswego in 1991.
"My wife said as long as I wasn't scared of her becoming the bread-winner, to go for it," Lukens said. "Without her support there is no way I could have succeeded."
According to Lukens, the first three years were tough. However, he continued to open new stores and by 1994, Lukens said he began to make a profit.
That was also the year Backyard Bird Shop opened its first Vancouver location. Since then the company has grown by leaps and bounds, with Backyard Bird Shop now employing 40 people – 15 working in Vancouver. In addition to stores on S.E. 164th Avenue and N.E. Parkway Drive, Vancouver is also home to the business' shipping facility.
And according to Lukens, profits have only increased since the downturn thanks to the "stay-cation" phenomenon.
Despite all this, Lukens takes a conservative view on future growth, preferring to stay within the confines of the Vancouver-Portland market.
"Plenty of people have asked us when we are opening new stores in Seattle or elsewhere," Lukens said. "But to stay successful you have to stay local."
