Jennifer Yates: Generalist Movement Catalyst
A Geographer's Tale: the Intersection of Art, Science and Retail
Where do art, geography, indie retail, and pattern recognition all intersect?
On the desk of the one and only Jennifer Yates.
Geography is more than classroom maps
Let’s back up for a moment and talk geography.
My knowledge of the field ends with map flip charts from primary school.
As Jennifer describes it, the study of geography is all about spatial thinking and being able to visualize objects, relationships, and their relative space.
According to an actual geographer, you see it in your mind. It is innate. Geographers are born, not made.
To gauge your own spatial awareness - take a look at the reasoning test below.
Can you solve it?
Jennifer took a test like this back in grade school and scored off the charts. She was intrinsically able to envision how the 2D objects would appear in 3D.
A budding geographer was found.
(Note: The answer is D)
Geography in practice: 24-hour marketplaces
As she dove into the study beyond the classroom maps, she realized that geography is about seeing patterns across space and layering them to identify the connections and insights.
What that means in practice….
While working on her master’s degree, Jennifer drove past a newly-open-overnight grocery store and asked herself: “I wonder why this store switched to the 24-hour model?”
Which, of course, led to more questions, like:
What did customers look like during the day and at night?
Where were they coming from?
Did the area where customers come from expand and contract between day and night?
To satisfy this curiosity, Jennifer made the study of 24-hour businesses the focus of her master’s thesis.
She interviewed customers 24 hours a day. For days.
She asked where they came from, where they were going, and how much they spent. She peeked in their shopping carts to understand what they were buying.
She saw patterns that could only be identified by layering data and maps.
For example:
At night, shoppers came from farther away.
24-hour establishments tended to cluster together, creating ‘night marketplaces’.
And time of day plus distance affected receipt total (people driving across town in the middle of the night spent more!).
So, this is what a geographer does outside of the classroom. You can catch Jennifer’s take on the project here.
Noticing patterns in Independent Retail
Fast forward a few years. Jennifer is done with school and has some experience under her belt building statistical models that help retailers choose their next perfect location.
Living in Michigan in the budding days of the internet (yes, we’re talking late 1990’s), Jennifer became enamored with artisans across the country.
Pockets of makers were starting to form in areas like Austin and Washington. Mostly they would sell their wares on independent sites, but some were starting to band together in small marketplaces like buyolimpia.com.
This was even before the early days of Etsy, and as a trend, handmade goods were still largely ‘underground’.
One of her favorite pieces was this beauty from Rebecca Pearcy, a pioneer coming out of the Olympia area. Jennifer LOVED this hat, and also wished she could have touched it and tried it on before placing her order.
As she wore her beloved hat around town, she began to notice a new set of patterns:
Artisans were popping up across the country making really interesting products
People were interested in unique/handmade/DIY-type goods
Like her, they wanted to be able to touch and feel the items before purchasing
She couldn’t get the idea out of her head.
There was so clearly a need for a brick-and-mortar retail shop that offered a highly curated set of beautiful handmade goods from gifts to clothing and accessories.
Thus, Henrietta Fahrenheit was born.
Creating a community beyond the store
She didn’t stop there.
The store wasn’t just about the goods but instead was a hub to bring together all kinds of art. From local artists displaying their photography, paintings, or prints in the space to live concerts facilitated by moving all the furniture (including the dressing rooms) out of the way - Henrietta Fahrenheit was a place for people who valued art and creativity.
The store bloomed into a community.
Vendors, customers, and artists converged. The ethos of the store spoke to people across demographics - there was no one type of customer. The common thread among patrons was the ability to identify creativity and the desire to express themselves in a creative way.
This mindset was captured in a bumper sticker that read: “I GET IT”.
People who were part of the community and understood that it was about something bigger proudly displayed their affiliation.
The story of Henrietta Fahrenheit captured attention across the country. Artists traveled from every corner: Seattle, to Boston, and Austin to Chicago to see if their wares could be part of the movement.
Customers drove in from all over. Visitors from Portland, Jacksonville, San Francisco, and Toronto made it a point to stop by. Bands touring Michigan would drop in.
They were even recognized as Michigan’s best new business in 2003.
Did Henrietta Fahrenheit miss a crucial pattern?
Unfortunately, all was not well behind the scenes. Two years in, Jennifer was struggling to make the financials of a brick-and-mortar retail business go around.
She was plagued by the worry that she had ignored a critical pattern from her days predicting successful retail locations.
That is - the location must be convenient to customers.
She opened the store in Ypsilanti because she lived there and wanted to invest in the revitalization of the downtown.
But, the location was not a centrally convenient shopping destination.
To test the theory that location was causing the issue, she moved the entire store to downtown Ann Arbor, a more shopper-friendly and walkable location 7 miles away.
It turned out location wasn’t the problem. The higher sales and higher rent perfectly offset each other. Unfortunately.
After 3 years in business, she chalked it up to a concept that was ahead of its time, or in the wrong place, or both, and closed the doors with a deep appreciation for the experience and a love for the community she had built along the way.
[She subsequently brought all the goodness of artistic community building into her next project with a few of Henrietta Fahrenheit’s vendors - the Shadow Art Fair!]
Reflecting on this experience, Jennifer offers this advice to other Generalists:
“Even if you do ‘fail’ - failure isn’t total. Some parts of an effort are successful and other parts are less so. There is a gift in everything – look for the gift even when things don’t go well, you can use it as a springboard to the next thing. “
Meet Jennifer Yates
Geographer | Builder | Connector
She grew up on a rice farm, studied and taught geography, worked as a radio station DJ, taught herself how to play bass guitar, did voiceover work, built statistical models, opened a retail store, spoke at conferences, and co-founded an art fair. To say she’s a Generalist who has ‘tried a few things’ is a dramatic understatement.
In every endeavor, Jennifer is imaginative, perceptive and, to borrow a phrase, rebelliously kind.
Today, Jennifer runs Roux, a consultancy in which she puts to use her skill at seeing patterns across space and understanding the relationships between patterns. A geographer at heart, she can’t help but bring this mindset to any problem in business operations from process design to change management to project management.
Her sweet spot is understanding a vision (at the 30,000-foot altitude) and connecting it to execution (in the trenches). She occupies the ambiguous space between the two, where there is often a disconnect, and knows how to get things done.
If you need someone who can re-energize your business with fluid structure, team relief, and day-to-day ease - head on over to Roux and say hello.
Join us in Breaking the Mold: Generalists Who Thrive in a Specialist's World as we explore real-life examples of generalists connecting dots, innovating, and solving problems.