Fleet Feet Sports franchise opens location in Clay

CLAY — The local franchise of Fleet Feet Sports on Nov. 1 opened a second store located at 4136 Route 31 in Clay in the Market Fair North Plaza, across from the Great Northern Mall.

Franchise co-owners Edward and Ellen Griffin opened the 5,000-square-foot store, citing business growth in the past three years at the store’s location in DeWitt.

The local Fleet Feet Sports franchise, founded and opened in May 2000, focuses on the fitting of running, walking, and cross-training shoes as well as accessories and apparel for the active lifestyle.

The expanded 10,000-square-foot DeWitt location, which opened in June 2010, operates at 5800 Bridge St. The firm had earlier operated in a 3,000-square-foot location at 3453 Erie Boulevard East in DeWitt.

“We grew 62 percent in 30 months at [the current] Bridge Street [location],” says Edward (Ed) Griffin.

Many of those customers are from the Liverpool, Clay, Baldwinsville, and Cicero areas, says Elizabeth (Liz) Knickerbocker, local marketing manager for Fleet Feet Sports.

“We know that there’s already a good customer base here [in Clay] and a growing customer base is possible,” she says.

In analyzing the DeWitt store’s customer data using ZIP codes, Ed Griffin found that 20 percent of its business was coming from the Baldwinsville, Clay, and Cicero areas.

So, making it easier to generate revenue from those customers became a priority, but their travel time, in Fleet Feet’s view, has become an issue.

A decade ago, Knickerbocker says, customers from the northwest area of Onondaga County didn’t have a lot of traffic to contend with to reach Interstate 481.

But now, with the State Route 31 corridor much more developed, traffic is heavier resulting in a trip to the DeWitt store that “can almost take a half-hour,” according to the marketing manager.

“So, we heard a lot of ‘Well, I don’t want to come across town to get to [your store],” she adds.

Plus, Fleet Feet also sees customers from the Central Square, Oswego, and Watertown areas, and the Clay location will provide them a shorter drive, Knickerbocker says.

In addition to increased sales, the Fleet Feet Sports training programs have also grown, with programs training more than 1,000 participants each year. Fleet Feet Sports has added winter training programs, citing “high demand,” the company said. 

Finding, securing the new space

The company started researching the possibility of a new store in Clay in the summer of 2012 and checked with the stores that are already operating in the area, says Ed Griffin.

Fleet Feet worked with CBD Companies of Syracuse to locate the space for its new store.

Negotiations for the space began toward the end of last year, he adds. Griffin then secured the space in July, he says.

Fleet Feet Sports is leasing its space from M & J Wilkow, Ltd., a Chicago–based real-estate firm that owns the Market Fair North Plaza, says Knickerbocker.

A location of Dallas, Texas–based Tuesday Morning previously occupied the space in which Fleet Feet is now operating.

On its website, Tuesday Morning describes itself as an “upscale deep discount off-price retailer specializing in domestic and international, designer and name-brand closeout merchandise.”

Knickerbocker declined to disclose how much it cost Fleet Feet Sports to open the Clay location, but she indicated the local franchise financed the new store using its own assets.

Boulder, Colo.–based 3 Dots Design handled the design of the new space, she adds.

CBD Construction served as the contractor on the project. It also built the franchise’s current DeWitt location, says James Wade, assistant project manager with CBD Construction.

Subcontractors for the work at the Clay store included Steven Segal of Down to Earth Electronics, LLC of DeWitt, which handled the electrical work; Dannan Plumbing, LLC of Onondaga; Jett Painting, Inc. of Phoenix, which handled the painting work; and The Effect Group, Inc. of Syracuse was responsible for the flooring work at the store.

Efforts to prepare the space for the Nov. 1 opening continued in the final days of October.

“I think that we really want to make sure that customers know that both locations have the same materials, the same quality staff,” Knickerbocker says.

The Clay location will house the local franchise’s training department, and its purchasing department will work at the DeWitt location, she adds.

The store’s products will arrive at the DeWitt store before shipment to the Clay store, if necessary.

The local franchise of Fleet Feet Sports employs 40 people, including a mix of full- and part-time employees. The company has plans to hire 10 additional workers to service both locations, Knickerbocker says.

About 98 percent of Fleet Feet’s customers are consumers, but the store also provides shoes and uniforms for track-and-field teams at Le Moyne College, Colgate University, the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome (SUNYIT), and several area high schools. 

Besides merchandise, Fleet Feet Sports can also analyze a customer’s gait (a manner of walking or moving on foot), while the person runs or walks on an indoor track.

All Fleet Feet employees are trained on basic biomechanics and use a barefoot-analysis system of the foot in motion to understand a customer’s foot function.

The iPad gait analysis and the barefoot analysis systems allow for “more accuracy” when fitting customers for sneakers, Fleet Feet said.

Fleet Feet, Inc. is a national 89-store chain that Sally Edwards and Elizabeth Jansen opened in Sacramento, Calif. in 1976. The company is now headquartered in Carrboro, N.C., according to the website of Entrepreneur magazine.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com