---
type: Article
title: "Do You Own What You're Building?"
description: "Storms make trees take deeper roots. A 2008–9 lesson from my own store: when neighbors closed, the answer wasn't fighting harder. It was building together."
resource: https://amyfaychandler.com/do-you-own-what-youre-building/
tags: [do-you-own-what-youre-building]
---

[Weekly Retail Tidbits](https://amyfaychandler.com/category/friday-retail-tidbits/) | [Know Who You Are](https://amyfaychandler.com/category/friday-retail-tidbits/know-who-you-are/)

# Do You Own What You’re Building? — Weekly Retail Tidbits #246

	By[AmyFay Chandler](https://wordpress-1600709-6279960.cloudwaysapps.com)
						April 24, 2026July 31, 2026

Originally published as Tidbit #246.

“Storms make trees take deeper roots.”

— Dolly Parton

Do you own what you’re building?

2008–9 was a hard time. My retail business was inside a group of shops called Southern Market, and I watched many of my neighbors close their doors. It scared me. What had felt like serious competition shifted overnight. We needed one another to survive.

So I changed my attitude. I wanted other merchants to have sales as much as I wanted to have them. The business on top of which all our businesses were built — Southern Market itself — had to have enough of us succeed in order to stay open.

That experience shapes a lot of how I think. I know it’s hard to have neighbors who compete. The worst experience I had was with a new SM merchant. She bought into one of my biggest lines (I had about $40K invested at the time) and she started stocking the same things. Merchandised a few feet away, she outpriced me by one penny on everything.

Working shoulder-to-shoulder with other merchants taught me a lot about focus, attitude, and what I could actually control.

Recently The Painted Tree (TPT), a similar concept to Southern Market, announced it was closing all of its 60+ locations nationwide and filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Vendors got the email on a Tuesday and had ten days to clear out their booths. Some vendors had merchandise in multiple stores across the country. How do you even begin to pull all of that back in ten days? Some couldn’t even get inside — landlords locked the doors. Others walked in to find merchandise had been stolen. Vendors are losing April sales, prepaid rent, and deposits. My heart goes out to every one of them.

Businesses built on the backs of other businesses are inherently risky.

Some retailers grow on social media platforms. But if your business is built on top of a platform, you don’t own your audience. Social media can shift in a split second — and has.

The online equivalent of TPT for manufacturers? Platforms like Faire. On platforms like that, manufacturers are the product, not the partner. Same goes for Amazon.

So what can you do? Understanding is the first hurdle.

Own your website. A heads up — if you’re built on Shopify, leaving isn’t simple. When I transferred mine off, it took 60 days to get the domain released. Your URLs, backlinks, and search rankings are tied to Shopify’s structure, so leaving is a much bigger project than you’d expect. A better approach: build on WordPress on your own domain, then link out to your Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace storefront from there. Plenty of hosting companies can help.

Own an email list — and use it. Social media should be secondary. Never primary.

Work with your reps. I know the monetary perks of big online wholesale platforms pull hard. But there’s a reason those platforms don’t share full information between manufacturer and retailer — the platform wants to be the owner, and the structure is built to keep it that way.

Reps are true partners. Bridge builders. Reps share information in both directions because we are genuine extensions of two businesses.

Yes, working with humans can be harder than jumping online at midnight to place an order. Your customers feel the same way about Amazon.

Is the effort worth it? That’s rhetorical — but sit with it. It comes down to how you identify. And identity has the strongest pull of all.

Thanks for reading. It isn’t always easy to write each week, but it is a privilege. Our Tango team appreciates you. I appreciate you.

xoxo,
♥AmyFay

## Tech Tip — The Quiet Shift in Google AI Mode

Google shifted something in AI Mode last Thursday — a small technical change with a bigger implication for how shoppers find your store.

When a shopper uses Google’s AI Mode (the conversational search that’s replacing the list of blue links) and clicks on your store, your website no longer takes over the screen. It opens in a panel next to the AI. The AI is still right there. The shopper can flip back and compare you against three other stores in seconds.

In the old world, a click was a commitment — you had their attention from the first gla