Clothier Says He’s Victim Of Core’s Decline

Traders & Trappers is pulling up stakes in downtown Spokane and portaging to Portland.

Owner Vic Quarve (Kwar-vee) says he picked Portland because that’s where most of the Spokane store’s customers are. It didn’t start out that way.

But virtually everywhere downtown, says the proprietor of what he defines as a “traditional outdoors clothing” store, pedestrian traffic has tumbled in the past year or two.

And foot traffic past his front door at N214 Howard has “plunged” since Brooks Clothiers closed up shop last spring half a block down the street at Main and Howard.

“An awful lot of the customers we used to end up with would come by and go to Brooks first,” says Quarve, “then they’d in come here and buy something.”

What was the vital link between stores - one selling outdoors wear, the other suits?

“I’ve never been able to figure it out,” says Quarve. “But, anyway, since Brooks went out of business, we’ve pretty much lost the spillover we used to get from them.

“These days, there’s no local traffic to speak of past my front door.

“Almost the only drop-ins are visitors, people staying in downtown hotels who are out for a walk. They see the quality of merchandise in the window, and come in.

“Like today, for instance,” said Quarve, when I stopped by his shop early Wednesday afternoon, “so far today I’ve sold two hats. Just two hats. Both to people from out of town. One to a guy from Portland.

“I make more sales to people from Portland than to people in Spokane. So I’m going to Portland.”

Makes sense to me.

Quarve, who has spent most of his work life in merchandising, and wife Gretchen opened the store going on five years ago.

They specialize in outdoors clothing and accessories for people who live and work outdoors, as opposed to outdoors playclothes.

In Traders and Trappers, you see a lot of all-wool outerwear and underwear, as opposed to nylon or cotton blends. It’s a place where you can buy everything from those thick, fuzzy, all-wool old-time union suits that you sometimes see in designer Westerns, to a dogsled, or a larch canoe paddle solid enough to club a bear.

The above-mentioned hats, by the way, are not cheap. These are some great looking haberdashery.

Everything in Traders and Trappers is special. Top flight. Pricey.

“It’s a snap to sell quality merchandise,” says Quarve, coming from a background as buyer for the beloved bygone old Crescent Store in Spokane. “There’s no trick to selling if you’ve got the right stuff. You show it to people. And they buy it.”

He came to Spokane in 1973, and worked for the Crescent half a dozen years before the prestigious pioneer store, an Inland Northwest shopping and cultural institution for 99 years, folded its tent. Quarve sold real estate for a while next. Then opened the store.

The initial couple years on North Howard between the Taco Time and Brooks were prosperous, Quarve says, but a pattern of slow decline began to show up in sales figures.

“Last year I lost $10,000,” he said. “This year I’m trying not to lose $20,000.

“That may be all right for some of these bigger establishments that are better captialized,” says the niche retailer, “but I don’t have the depth. “I stand and watch, and I see fewer and fewer people on the street and I think, I can’t tread water much longer.”

But Quarve says he doesn’t want to alarm other merchants unduly.

He hopes downtown will be turned around by the strong initiatives that are now being undertaken. He is heartened by the proposed $80-million redevelopment of River Park Square and the special taxing district being established to manage downtown like a shopping center.

But he can’t wait for the turnaround. And he’s not sure it will actually be coming. It may be past the time that downtown can be saved from a drubbing.

So, after nearly a quarter of a century here, Vic and Gretchen Quarve, who operate exactly the type of retail establishment best suited to downtown Spokane, are moving on.

“I hope to God you can whip this,” he said.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review