Food Truck 2.0: Boutiques on Wheels

NEW YORK (MainStreet) – Sitting at the wheel of a 27-foot former potato chip delivery truck, Joey Wolffer, a 29-year-old designer from New York, cringes every time she sees a pothole up ahead. And on the cobblestone streets of New York’s meatpacking district, that means pretty much every block.

“My second day of driving, I crashed,” remembers Wolffer of the week in June 2010 when she launched The Styleliner, a fashion accessory boutique housed entirely in a box truck. “Navigating the streets was very difficult, I was very nervous. But now I’m very confident.”

Still, every jolt gives Wolffer’s collection of jewelry, shoes and other accessories (sourced from small designers around the world) another chance to fall, get tangled and break. Running a small business is hard no matter what the concept is, but it takes a special person to put his or her full energy into literally driving a small business around town.

But a small class of entrepreneurs like Wolffer are doing just that – eschewing the traditional idea of bricks and mortar to brave the perils of potholes, crazy taxicabs and parallel parking gigantic trucks in an effort to bring their business to the consumer instead of the other way around.

Like Wolffer, some do it to build a successful business; others, like Kyle Durrie, do it more for artistic reasons. Durrie, 32, took a break from her print shop business in Portland, Ore., this summer to travel the country in the Type Truck, a converted 1982 Chevy van housing a mobile print shop with two printing presses that has gone coast to coast, through large cities and small towns alike.

“It was set up as an adventure, not a business venture,” says Durrie. “It was a way to get out and travel and have some compelling experiences and give other people those experiences, about making something with their hands.”

That said, she has been able to get by on a shoestring budget by selling the prints and posters she makes herself and by collecting donations from the many visitors who pass through whose fingers eagerly soak up the ink from her presses to make their own souvenir cards or posters, which Durrie does not charge for.

“People connect both with the aesthetics and the history of it, but also just to the experience of making something with their hands,” Durrie says. “I put out a donation jar, and some people are very generous. It tends to even out.”

But driving into a random town and pulling up on a random sidewalk is no guarantee of success for a small business entrepreneur. So while all of the mobile businesses that MainStreet spoke with spend some part of their time trying to convince strangers to step into their vans, none of them rely on that arrangement exclusively.