The St. Louis Development Corporation board voted Thursday morning to reauthorize funding for four grant programs designed to attract, retain and enhance retail businesses to St. Louis’ downtown.
The Downtown Retail Incentive Program launched last year as a collaboration between SLDC and Greater St. Louis Inc. The reauthorization makes $400,000 available for four different grant types, with SLDC putting up $100,000 and GSL kicking in $300,000.
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Grants cover up to 25 percent of improvements for a retail tenant, up to $50,000; up to $15,000 for build-out and startup costs for a short-term pop-up storefront; up to $5,000 to help build a sidewalk cafe or sidewalk retail space; and rent backstops for businesses that have fallen behind on similar expenses.
SLDC’s vice president of strategic partnerships and initiatives Stephen Davis expects considerable interest for the second year of the program. Last year’s, which invested $303,300 into 11 downtown businesses, was oversubscribed.
“The demand certainly exceeded the resources we had, and I think that’s why it’s so important that we make another round available,” he says.
SLDC interim president and CEO Otis Williams threw his “wholehearted support” behind the program, saying it’s similar to one the agency had in 2004, which “really led to the filling out of first-floor businesses on Washington at that time.” The program, he says, is “definitely a good one.”
One person it has helped is Ashley Morgan, the founder and CEO of Whip It Goods Skincare. A $15,000 pop-up grant allowed her to open a storefront at 1304 Washington Avenue last September.
“I wanted to have a storefront where I could workshop, actually connect, and engage with people,” Morgan says. “But with the overhead cost of having a retail storefront, I never thought it would be possible, at least definitely not within the first five years of me being in business.”
She launched her plant-based skincare product business in 2022 as an e-commerce storefront, but always had the goal of establishing a brick-and-mortar space. Morgan’s products are new to many of her customers, and having a retail store makes it much easier to engage with them, she says.
“They have lots of questions, they want to know that it works. They want to know what the ingredients are and what they’re for,” Morgan says. “Doing that one-on-one in a setting that I can connect with the community was really important to me.”
She says the grant funding covered the first six months of operating costs and has helped her business quadruple revenue. She’s now supporting the costs of her storefront on her own.
The physical location also allows her to build an experience for her customers like a workshop to make a custom body butter, she says.
“That’s my most popular class,” Morgan says. “They can come up with their own fragrance, their own signature product. No one else is doing that in the city, so it gives people something new to do.”
The retail space also helps her cut through the noise in a crowded skincare market, Morgan says.
“They’re just coming in to have a fun experience, but they end up leaving introduced to me, the product, to my brand,” Morgan says. “I didn’t think this would be my pathway to scale, and it has become [the way] for my business to grow and give me a competitive advantage in a market that is highly saturated.”
Other businesses have found similar footholds to success through the pop-up grant, including Buddy’s Wine Bar and The Passport Cocktail Bar & Bottle Shop.
“It definitely helped us out,” says Corey James. The owner and operator of Bella’s Frozen Yogurt took a chance on a second business in the same block and opened Buddy’s Wine Bar and Bistro at 1001 Washington last October.
James says the pop-up grant really came in handy this past January when damaged windows from a smash-and-grab took them out of operation for about three weeks.
“That was a big, major hit,” he says. “It probably could have crippled us if it wasn’t for the additional funding.”
The pop-up grant funding has since been used up, but James says Buddy’s is going strong, even expanding its schedule to six days a week. And in two weeks, the bistro will add lunch hours.
“That’s what I love about stories like this,” he says. “You hear about [how] they got money and this and that, and six months later, are they even still there? We are still here. We’re still rocking.”
SLDC’s Davis says this is the spirit of the pop-up grant: “Maybe a business isn’t quite ready to commit to a long-term lease, but having these funds to basically test their business in the location, they might find out it’s very much viable for them and then they’re able to stay long term.”
Davis says SLDC still needs to work out the timing for when they’ll open grant applications for this year, but he expects they’ll launch in early June and remain open through September.
Funding is on a first-come, first-served basis, and Davis says there is no specific allocation for each of the programs. Of the four grant programs, Davis expects the most applications for retail pop-ups and funding for improvements to tenants’ spaces.
