mybeardpapa.com

After our exhausting and dirty digging efforts, we find ourselves hanging out at the fountain. And what do we have here? Caruso is testing their water feature!

The fountain show was created by the same people who did the Bellagio and looks just as nice (except smaller). My bad picture taking skills don’t exactly show the fountain’s true colors, but it’s cool that you are so close to the water. They definitely still need to tweak the water cannons though, because I felt like I was front row at the Shamu show at Sea World.

Seeing the water show totally makes me want to go back to Vegas. Stud Train!!

We have finally broken ground and our first mission is to find our sewer! For some reason Caruso did not stub our sewer connection above ground, but they did promise to dig it out for us. We waited a couple days for their crew to come find our sewer, but of course it never happened. Our plumbers got so frustrated that they decided to just do it themselves. Of course, being super honorable guys, we decided to help out as well. Above is a picture of Daishin sticking his shovel into the hole. My hands have never been so blistery.

Here’s a picture of the Arcadia store’s grand opening day.  We worked our butts off to make our opening date (some things never change) and it was definitely worth the effort.  The three of us probably slept a total of eight hours in the three days before we opened.  I even dragged my girlfriend to Wal-mart at 1 AM the morning of our opening to get some temporary chairs for the party.  Thank you to everyone that came, because you definitely made our hard work pay off.

Speaking of hard work, we attended the city of Arcadia’s Breakfast of Champions on Friday and one of the speakers was the man himself, Rick Caruso.  He spoke about his ten points to success.  Among them was “zig when others zag”, “the power of self-entitlement, “know your audience”, “never sit back”, and “WORK LIKE HELL”.

Caruso went on to tell people that he definitely isn’t the smartest person in his Company, but is good at surrounding himself with smart and talented people.  He says the key to working hard is loving what you do, and he obviously loves what he does.

Overall, his speech was decent, but I expected a little more depth from the man that has transformed the Los Angeles retail scene.  Personally, besides “working like hell”, I think the second most important item from Caruso’s presentation is “the power of self-entitlement”.  Too many people have great ideas but either lose faith in their projects, start out strong but run out of steam, or do not have enough self confidence to make their dreams a reality.  You definitely have to believe in yourself if you are going to achieve great things.

We haven’t started construction yet due to permit issues.  The biggest permit issue?  A health department mandate that an employee accessible restroom must be within 200 feet of the kiosk.  The closest public restroom to our kiosk (and every other kiosk) is around 400 feet away, so the health department doesn’t like that too much.  Without the health department’s approval, the city plumbing department won’t issue us a permit, so we’re basically stuck.

Caruso said they’re going to handle it, but it hasn’t been handled yet and there’s only 21 days until we’re supposed to open.  Very scary.  This means when we actually do start construction, we’ll be constructing throughout the night to get this done.

Anyway, since we can’t really talk about our Beard Papa construction, I’m going to continue to post about the retail center.  What park would be complete without a children’s playground?  Certainly not a park inside of a retail center.  Take a look at the very standard playground set.  Frankly, we here at Beard Papa aren’t too awed by the setup.  It looks like a playground set that you can buy at Toys R Us (maybe not Walmart).  In Caruso’s defense, they’re still working on it, so maybe the whole playground set will be gilded in 23 karat gold like this guy.

We went to the job site again today to hopefully see at least one of six kiosks built. The above picture is what we saw, just walls of the structure. The bad part is that this kiosk isn’t even ours! Our Beard Papa kiosk location still looks like this. Anyway, all six kiosks are the same size, so at least our Isidor (our super great cabinet contractor) can measure the kiosk and start building those cabinets.

If you take a look beyond the kiosk, you can see the behemoth three story Barnes and Noble in the background. They’ve already started to merchandise all of their tens of thousands of books. It looks extremely tedious, but hey, at least they’re done constructing while we’re still looking at a pile of dirt.

The naked Americana man has arrived! This immense 23-carat gold leaf statue stands above the fountain at the heart of the project. Here is what the Americana is saying about the statue:

“An extraordinary sculpture, “The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves” recently took its place at the heart of the village. Standing more than 18 feet tall and weighing more than 2,500 pounds, the statue is a replica of one that was created in 1949 by visionary American sculptor Donald Harcourt De Lue for The Omaha Beach Memorial in France to commemorate D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. ”

While this is most likely 110% true, Rick Caruso has been known to create statues of his children at his retail centers. So with our uncanny deduction skills, we at mybeardpapa think that the developer himself posed for this sculpture!!

By the way, we’re trying to lobby for the statue to be holding up a cream puff. Wish us luck.

There are about 24 days left before the grand opening, and we haven’t started construction yet. The main reason, as you can see in the picture above, is that our kiosks have not been built yet! We were supposed to get 45 days to build our Beard Papa’s store, but obviously that isn’t happening.

Our main concern right now is making sure we’re open on May 2nd, but it’s getting a little scary. Looking at that pile of dirt makes me even more worried about hitting our date.

The problem with these kiosks is that Caruso is so particular about aesthetic design that he had these kiosks created in Germany. That’s nine time zones, 5798 miles, and infinitely more problems. Besides comparatively minor things such as the architectural plans being written in German and the lack of English speaking employees at the factory, the major concern was that mass of water called the Atlantic Ocean.

Yes, many ships traverse the Ocean every day with no problems, but we don’t get that kind of luxury. Since the kiosks were already behind schedule, Caruso decided to put our kiosk on a faster boat. Well this faster boat was so speedy that it broke down half way here and decided to take a vacation in the Bahamas! So our ‘fast’ boat is getting fixed in Bermuda while the ’slow’ boat safely chugged its way to Boston. There’s your irony lesson of the day.

The Americana at Brand is still scheduled for its May 2nd opening! The picture above is the pretty, pretty sign that sits atop the complex. For the latest lineup of stores (and a wonderful description of Beard Papa’s of course), check this link out.

We’re going into heavy construction soon and we’ll be blogging live from the construction site multiple times a day, so definitely stay tuned! We’ve already been through a lot of crazy times with mall management, tenant coordinators, contractors, ship malfunctions, etc, that we’ll discuss while we’re constructing.

Anyway, I like the sign.

Alright it’s about time to give this another go. After being dormant for almost a year, our return has been long overdue. I was inspired to write today by the efforts of one of one of our team members who transformed our cookie cutter myspace page into something definitely much more interesting… (myspace.com/arcadiabeardpapa)

Like all first time business owners, our initial year has been a learning experience just about every day. We’ve grown a lot as a team and I feel very lucky and thankful to say that our year has exceeded our expectations. Like the Lakers, we learned to work with one another and look at us now…

So as we approach our one year anniversary, it’s about time to replicate that magic. I am pleased to announce that we have secured a lease at Caruso Affiliated’s, Americana at Brand project in Glendale. Nicknamed the “Grove East,” this is the most anticipated retail project since Rick Caruso’s other retail monster, the Grove in LA. We are scheduled to open May 1! If you’ve been in Glendale recently it’s the construction taking place across from the Galleria.

For more info, check out their site: www.americanaatbrand.com

We’ll give updates as they come our way.

FYI -We’ll be submitting our architectural plans to the Health department this week so wish us luck!