Scotland by the Yard Closing

By John Lippman

Valley News Business Writer

Published: 06-01-2016 9:51 AM

Quechee— On a brae in the village of Quechee a flock of Jacob sheep have grazed and charmed passing motorists on Route 4 every summer for decades. With their four curling horns and shaggy black-and-white patch coats, the sheep could be at home on the Black Moors of Scotland.

This weekend the Jacobs arrived for their last season: Scotland by the Yard, the Gaelic apparel and gift store which hosts the sheep’s summer idyll, is winding down after 63 years in business as owner Don Ransom retires and he was unable to interest a buyer in the store and property.

“There were some people who expressed interest but when they heard it’s a seven-days-a-week business and there’s risk involved, they said, ‘no thank you,’” said Ransom, who had Scotland by the Yard on the market for three years in anticipation of his retirement as he approaches his 70th birthday.

“We were essentially selling a lifestyle,” Ransom said. He and his wife, retired Woodstock real estate agent Susan Inui, live in the yellow-painted house behind the shop and with a view of the surrounding Quechee hills. “It’s a beautiful spot. But if I don’t see cars in the lot, I’m always calling down to the store, ‘How’s it going?’”

Ransom and Inui will put the five-acre property back on the market later this summer, Ransom said, but Scotland by the Yard is now holding what it calls a “retirement sale” with the goal is to clear out as much of store’s merchandise as possible before closing its doors in August.

One can almost detect on this stretch of Route 4 the strains from lone bagpiper piping Auld Lang Syne as a mist settles over the Ottauquechee River flowing nearby.

Ransom has also given up his role in running the annual Scottish Fesitival on the Polo Grounds in Quechee, which he founded but later organized with the St. Andrews Society of Vermont. He launched the festival in 1973 as a way to promote the store, celebrate Scottish heritage and sell Scottish handcrafts, but Ransom’s retirement along with the society’s decision to withdraw as co-sponsor has led the August event that annually draws about 3,500 people to be taken over by Scottish Arts Inc., of Manchester, N.H., and renamed the Quechee Games.

Small-store retailing has always been a difficult business and no more so than in recent years as shoppers shift more of their purchasing online and consumer spending never returned to pre-recession levels. In the Upper Valley, at least half a dozen clothing and gift stores have closed over the past two years, from the West Lebanon commercial strip to upscale Hanover, with none of them replaced by new retailers and several of the storefronts still vacant.

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“It’s amazing those guys stayed in business as long as they did,” said Thom Milne, owner of Caledonia’s Best, a Randolph Center, Vt.-based online seller of Scottish imports and who has worked in marketing for more than 20 years. “Bricks-and-mortar stores are a thing of the past. The future is selling online.”

That may be true, but Ransom said the store, although it doesn’t do the business it once did, is still profitable and, although it adjusted to the changing market during its 63 years in business, the core remained the richly woven fabrics of soft Scottish and Irish sweaters, scarves and blankets cherished by customers.

For Ransom, his career in retailing — he prefers the word “merchant,” with its echo of a more genteel past — occurred by accident. After studying literature and philosophy at college in his native West Virginia — there’s still a tint of smoky Southern drawl in his accent — Ransom, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, worked for Vista and then as a drug counselor as part of his “alternative service” obligation.

An early, short-lived marriage to a woman from the Boston area brought him to New England and through friends he learned that a woman business owner in Quechee, Deborah Laughlin, was looking for someone to help with her Scottish import store’s attendance on the Scottish festivals circuit. The festivals were, and continue to be, a combination of Scottish heritage celebration with bagpipe music, sheepdog trials and games such as ladies’ rolling pin toss with merchants selling kilts and crafts.

Laughlin and her husband, Hugh Laughlin, had relocated their Scottish import store, then called the Celtic Shop, from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., to the center of Quechee village when the Quechee Lakes Landowners Association was trying to develop a retail hub near the bridge. The store had been founded by Deborah Laughlin’s mother, Lezlie Arthur, a woman who was as passionate about her Scotch heritage as she was about the old-world tweeds and tartan fabrics of Scotland, Ransom said.

Ransom joined the store in 1975, before it moved to its current site on Route 4 in 1978. Then in 1986, with a 100 percent financed $200,000 loan, he acquired the business, which he finally paid off four years ago. “I had no money,” he said of the time he took out the loan. “It was a mountain of debt.”

Although Ransom is only one-quarter Scottish — “but that gets you in the club” — he became a self-taught expert on Gaelic culture and traditions. The business required annual excursions to Scotland in search of mill town manufacturers with the 19th century machinery to produce the quality sweaters, blankets, hats, scarves, ties and jackets the store is known for carrying. He read the history of Scottish clans to know the difference between a Stewart, a MacDonald and a Robertson and the tartans that are associated with each.

“Importers of everything Scottish,” the roadside sign on Route 4 assured motorists.

The 1980s and Wall Street boom years were a good time for the business, Ransom said. “There was a giant peak in our economy and we were swamped with customers. I had to have six people on staff. People would stack stuff on the counter and say, ‘just ship it’” he recalls.

But by the 1990s many of the old Scottish woolen firms and clothes makers began to succumb to lower-priced — and lower quality — textile manufacturers from China, India and South America. The steady Scotland by the Yard customers who came to the shop looking for clothing to reflect their cultural heritage became less frequent, too, as their fashion choices switched to trendier styles.

“By the late ’90s I realized we had to refocus and reinvent ourselves as a Celtic shop and carry Irish goods, too. Ireland always had a tradition of creating quality textiles,” Ransom said.

Not all customers were happy by the shift. Ransom notes, slipping into a Scottish brogue, the time one Scotchman came into the shop, scowled at a table of piled with merchandise and picked up an Irish-made cap and loudly exclaimed, “Whotz dish Eye-reesh b!”

Ransom continued to diversify, also including English-made labels, so that about five years ago less than half the product inventory in the store was originating from Scotland and the majority of it now originating from Ireland, England and Wales.

The roadside sign was changed to say “Fine Celtic Imports” to reflect the shift.

Ransom calls the evolution from solely Scottish products to an inventory reflecting the broader Celtic culture “positive, shifting away from that nationalistic thing. … We’ve just relied upon a steady core of people who recognize quality and value.”

Of course, it’s still possible to purchase at Scotland by the Yard a man’s black formal argyle jacket ($395) and a black muskrat sporran with white tassels ($315) to go along with it.

Georgia Bean, of Lebanon, who worked as a full-time employee at Scotland by the Yard for 25 years and still helps out a couple of days a week, noticed too how both the store and customers have changed over more than two decades.

When Bean first began working at Scotland by the Yard, “we would go to work dressed up. People dressed up more, not like it is today. Back in the early days a lot of rich people stopped in, from Woodstock, and they would specifically be looking for beautiful cashmere sweaters and mohair jackets.”

Today, “it’s more tourists, T-shirts and souvenirs,” she said.

One of the things Bean said Scotland by the Yard has not sold, however, is the Scottish delicacy haggis, made from sheep’s heart, liver and lungs and traditionally wrapped in a sheep’s stomach that poet Robert Burns praised as the “great chieftain o’ the pudding-race.” Nor has store ever sold Scotch whisky, although Bean said tourists occasionally stop by to inquire if they do, “and we tell them go out the drive and turn left, there’s a liquor store in Woodstock.”

Ransom said that, for a brief while, he envisioned creating a retail Celtic store mini-empire around New England with stores in places like Portsmouth, N.H., and the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. To test the waters, in 1984 he opened a British import clothing store called Nickelby’s British Clothing in Shelburne, Vt., hoping to draw customers from “the college crowd in Burlington.”

“I quickly learned the hassles of a second business,” he said, and the store closed two years later.

And those dealt by Mother Nature. Scotland by the Yard was closed for several weeks in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011, as the damage caused by flooding from the Ottauquechee River made long stretches of Route 4 impassable. Just as Ransom had nearly finished paying off his original loan, he had to return to the bank and borrow $75,000 to meet expenses covered by lost revenue.

“I have about $10,000 remaining on that,” he said.

Ransom allows that, although Scotland by the Yard has a website where it is possible to purchase select clothing and jewelry, the new world of online retailing has never held much interest for him.

“The primary purpose of the website has been to get customers to visit the store,” Ransom said, which he acknowledges is a contrarian viewpoint in the age of click-and-shop. “I’m one of those people who is challenged by new technology.”

“I had a webmaster for a while and he would get all excited about the ‘analytics’ and point to one and say ‘look how many people are clicking here!’ I recognize the value of it, but you have to play the game and I refused to get personally involved with it,” he said.

Ransom said he and Inui, who joined Ransom in the business when the couple married eight years ago, are going to take time off and relax, perhaps by making several long-weekend trips around New England. Both are active in North Chapel, the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Woodstock. They plan eventually to move out from behind the store and into another home in Woodstock.

“The store has been a landmark on Route 4 because of the beautiful craftsmanship in the sources of the goods sold there,” Inui said.

“It was also because Don felt very strongly about the quality of the goods he wanted to sell and not making any attempt to be in competition with the things other retailers sell.

“The store had a really good run. … We certainly sought folks to step into our shoes. But it wasn’t meant to be. To all things there is a season,” she said, echoing the verse from Ecclesiastes.

John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.

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