Retail Romeo and Juliet can help prevent family feuds

One Valentine's Day, Thor Bjork gave his wife, Michelle, a plastic plant that became a family joke. Another year it was a "Beavis and Butt-Head" video, which she actually liked, but don't tell anybody. And then there was the winter safety kit he bought for her car.

He finally nailed it with a bouquet of flowers -- except that he inadvertently left the price tag attached.

"They all were sweet and well-intentioned," Michelle Bjork said. "But a 'Beavis and Butt-Head' DVD on Valentine's Day? Weird!"

Nonetheless, those uninspired gifts ended up inspiring her to start an unusual business that generated upwards of $250,000 in sales in 2007, its second full year of operation.

Welcome to Shakespeare Enterprises, doing business as the Romeo and Juliet retail shop and websites, which offer imaginative, prewrapped gifts that help clueless men (Romeos) to shop for their wives or lady friends and women (Juliets) to find presents for their men.

There is not a "Beavis and Butt-Head" video to be found anywhere on the company's websites -- www.Romeoshops.com and www.Julietshops.com -- or at the Romeo and Juliet shop that opened early last year on the Nicollet Mall.

But there are, for example, football and basketball video games for the man in your life and, for the ladies, maybe a hand-blown perfume bottle imported from Florence, Italy.

Bjork started the business in September 2005, after she left a full-time job to care for her baby daughter.

"I was home so we wouldn't have to put her in day care," said Bjork, who began with just a single website, the Romeoshops site for male shoppers. But by the end of the 2005 Christmas season, "we were so busy I had to put her in day care anyway."

A year after the start-up, a friend of the Bjorks, Mark Fawcett, signed on as a business partner after proposing a similar website for the Juliets of the marketplace.

It was an ideal partnership: Fawcett, a veteran Twin Cities TV and video producer, not only selects gifts for the men, but he's the computer geek who manages the websites. Bjork, 31, shops for the ladies' gifts and runs the shop they opened in February 2007 in 1,600 square feet of space in Gaviidae Common.

The business has blossomed: In 2006, Shakespeare Enterprises grossed $100,000, primarily from the Romeoshops website. In 2007, the he-and-she websites generated just $104,000 of sales, but the retail shop added another $150,000.

Bjork and Fawcett scour every resource -- magazines, newscasts, websites -- looking for gifts "you don't find every day," as Bjork put it.

For the ladies, for example, there's French milled soap, a bracelet made out of vintage typewriter keys and -- for the guy who really wants to play on the Romeo image -- a rare audio collection of poetry read by the authors themselves.

On the less expensive, under-$25 side, you can get key chains with space for kiddy pictures, aromatic soy candles or a box of chocolate turtles made in Minneapolis.

And then there's a wide array of jewelry, ranging from a bracelet for $25, a necklace for $50 and -- if you're a guy who's really in trouble -- a designer necklace and earring set for $580.

On the guy side of the aisle, you might settle on a poker set with a built-in cigar humidor, a Swiss Army knife containing a USB flash memory drive or -- my favorite -- a chess set made of characters from "The Simpsons." For those with a more festive taste, there's also leather-wrapped ice buckets and martini shakers.

Growth has come primarily via word of mouth, helped in large measure by favorable publicity, including exposure on "Good Morning, America" and in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, as well as on local television and in Twin Cities newspapers.

And some inventive customer-service strategies keep the buyers coming back: With a data base of about 4,000 customers, the company operates both an online and telephone service to remind folks of important gift-giving dates and periodically alert clients about upcoming sales.

Sometimes the service commitment takes a radical turn, such as the Christmas Eve when Bjork drove out to Deephaven to deliver a gift that otherwise would have arrived too late.

Such service has attracted a blizzard of e-mailed testimonials, including this heartfelt offering from a gent whose gift was delivered on time despite his woefully late order: "Thanks for saving my butt."

Dick Youngblood • 612-673-4439 • yblood@startribune.com