Today we’d like to introduce you to John Foto.
John, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We started as a Salvage Company buying and selling distressed merchandise that originated from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This pursuit of distressed merchandise lead us to forming a relationship with one of the biggest department store chains in the country in which we began buying truckloads of their surplus and salvage merchandise. Much of this merchandise did not lend itself to wholesaling to other retailers so we began doing parking lot sales at our warehouse. These parking lot sales were extremely successful, so in 1999 when a building across the street from our warehouse went up for sale we bought the building and opened our first retail location in South Gate. Since 1999 we have grown to 4 retail locations with 80,000 square feet of retail space and 140 employees.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We felt it important to distinguish ourselves from the many dollar stores in our area by offering name brand merchandise at deep discounts. Because of our early success it became more and more difficult to keep our shelves stocked with name brand merchandise so we met this challenge by slowly establishing relationships with other Club and Department stores. We soon became a major player in Southern California’s reverse logistics industry. The pendulum then shifted in the other direction and we had too much merchandise for one store causing us to begin the search for other store locations.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Santa Fe Seconds story. Tell us more about the business.
Santa Fe Seconds is a deep discount variety retail store. We carry a wide variety of name brand goods displayed in clean, organized, well-lit and well merchandised stores. Much of our merchandise we sell come to us from contracted programs we have with major retailers. The other portion of the merchandise we sell comes from closeout buys from the many manufacturers, wholesalers and jobbers located in the Southern California area. Between these two areas of merchandise acquisition our stores are always stocked with an interesting variety of merchandise at unbeatable prices.
We are most proud that we have built our business purely by word of mouth, we have never advertised. We have a following of loyal customers that seem to like our deals.
What makes us unique is the large variety of name brand goods at unbeatable prices.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Since first opening in 1999, the expansion of such stores as WalMart, Costco and Target has made for more opportunities for us to buy much of the reverse logistics goods that is available as a result of this expansion.
Contact Info:
- Address: 8730 Santa Fe Ave., South Gate, CA 90280
8615 Long Beach Blvd., South Gate, CA 90280
645 N. Avalon Blvd., Wilmington, CA 90744
896 E. Holt Ave., Pomona, CA 91767 - Website: www.santafeseconds.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/santafesecondssantafeoutlets/
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