Feb. 22, 1999

"Gay Cybercommerce"

By Steve Friess

Audy Morgan's business was tanking. Too big a store, an unimpressive location, a clientele that "had no idea what to make of us and went into shock." So the 34-year-old entrepreneur did the predictable: He packed up his gay-pride merchandising shop and moved.

His destination, though, wasn't so conventional. Morgan and lover Terry Williams reopened Alternatives Pride Emporium in a place where he didn't need a front door chime at all. Where location is just as important, but easy to enhance. Where the clientele can take all day and all night deciding what to make of the place.

In September 1997, Morgan abandoned a "real" Las Vegas storefront and instead hung out a light-blue, pink triangle-decked awning in cyberspace. Profits tripled almost instantly, and his overhead -- once as high as 20 percent of his gross -- fell to just 1 percent.

"The only thing I pay, really, is the $19.95 cost of having a domain name," boasts Morgan, who says the site has received 207,000 hits. "We did have a printed catalog we put out in late 1997, but we didn't have a good response to that. It was expensive, and it just became obsolete right away 
because new items came out."

Online commerce is nothing new, of course. But what is intriguing is that many entrepreneurs are finding it easier and more lucrative to sell and advertise gay-specific products, says Vanna Pecoraro. Owner of a gay-wedding wares site called Family Celebrations, Pecoraro and her lover "never even considered" opening a "real" store for their business. The two ex-cops 
from San Dimas, Calif., started the business with a catalog in 1997 but only saw business soar last fall when it went digital. In a "lean" month, Lee says, she receives between 25 and 50 orders a week via the site. The past holiday season was a bonanza.

"Opening a ‘real' store really cuts back on the geographical impact on the community," says Lee, 30. Noting orders have poured in from Asia and Europe as well as the American Bible Belt, Lee goes on, "There are many places in the United States alone where people don't feel safe going into a wedding store and saying they want Joe and Jim on their glasses."

And it's not just gay stuff that sells well online, but professional services, too. Rainbow Realty Corp. owner-broker Adam Thompson doesn't even have a Web site yet, but the mere mention of his firm on the site of the Chicago-area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce has led to $30,000 in commissions since August. That's $4 million in real estate sales, Thompson quickly points out. For the relative pennies he spends belonging to the chamber and others like it, he's getting a far better return on his investment than the three-line ads he spent $1,000 per year for in classified section of The Advocate.

"You can't pick up a phonebook and look for gay and lesbian Realtors, but you can do that through a search engine." gushes Thompson, who foresees a day when advertising in print media will be outmoded.

As easy as it may sound, there are some tricks to the electronic trade. Location, as in any business, is key. But in cyberspace, it is where your name appears that constitutes location, so Thompson is making sure his $750-per-hour Web page designer imbeds the site with sure certain buzzwords -- "gay," "lesbian," "Chicago," etc. -- that will bring his firm to the attention of folks searching for other concerns.

And Morgan, recognizing early that this Alternatives Pride Emporium had to be more than just another store in the strip mall, concocted "pride awards" to give to other sites. Now his "pride" badges adorn thousands of honored gay-related Web pages, amounting to free billboards with hot links. 

Other challenges abound, proving that just being online isn't alchemy. Tracy LaGondino and Nancy Roberts of Honolulu own Bay Sport Blue Quality Activewear, a site that pushes workout clothing embroidered with pride symbols and slogans. LaGondino, 25, says she gets 100 hits a day and a reach far beyond her remote Hawaiian locale, but she doesn't advertise around the Net 
and hasn't enjoyed the successes of Morgan or Lee.

To change that, she plans two significant changes in coming months. First, she'll rechristen the Bay Sport Blue product line -- "which is a little obscure" -- as Define Normal, which "explains a little bit more the company and our feelings, what we represent. It's more catchy."

The second improvement may do more good: She'll take credit cards on her site. Up until now, shoppers have had to print out the order form and mail her a check, thus eliminating the impulse shopping so lucrative to other online businesses. "It takes a lot of initiative to actually make out an order with me," LaGondino admits. "I should have better luck with credit cards."

Perhaps, but Lee notes that to her surprise, about 80 percent of her online customers prefer to call on the phone to charge their orders rather than feed their credit card numbers to the Web form. "People are still growing more comfortable with that, no matter that we tell them it's a secure connection," Lee says. "They're still wanting that personal touch, wanting to talk to us. Customers in less gay-friendly places view this as an outlet."

But if the Internet puts gays and lesbians at ease online, the anonymity of the medium also makes it easier for anti-gay zealots to deliver their barbs. Hate mail so disturbed and startled Ginny Patton of St. Paul, Minn., that she shut down the website that advertised her gay-friendly law firm.

"I had no idea, living in such a liberal city, that there was so much anger out there toward queers," says Patton, 33, whose page was hacked twice and vandalized with anti-gay and misogynist slurs before she killed it in November. "The amount of referrals we were getting -- maybe a couple a week, which does mean some real money -- wasn't worth the nasty e-mails some of those nutcases sent us. I mean, they were calling us freaks?"

Still, Patton's experience may be the exception as other online gay operators don't report the same intensity of negativity. Instead, they report a myriad of benefits ranging from the facts that an online store minimizes the potential for shoplifting or that new products can be introduced instantaneously.

"We're at the future," Morgan crows. "I expect my Internet sales are going to be 1,000 times what they are now in five years. I expect to become a millionaire by the Internet."

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