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Feature Article, May 2006
Make Way For Elephant Pharmacy
New alternative pharmacy attracts repeat customers through service-oriented offering.
Susan H. Fishman
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Elephant Pharmacy has opened two locations, in Berkeley and San Rafael, California, and has two other stores planned this year.
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With the growing popularity of grocery stores like Whole Foods and The Fresh Market over the past several years, it was only a matter of time before a similar alternative concept in the drugstore arena made its way into the lives of health-conscious Americans. In November 2002, Elephant Pharmacy was created by Stuart Skorman “to meet the growing needs of educated baby boomers and other health-conscious people seeking a better shopping experience.” And thanks to the success of its original store in Berkeley, California, the company is beginning to expand, with two more locations in the Bay Area, and envisions a national rollout for the future.
An alternative to the traditional pharmacy, Elephant Pharmacy sells complementary and alternative health, beauty and lifestyle products from around the world, along with most of the items found at a typical drugstore. It is the only store in the country with a prescription pharmacy and a separate full-service herbal pharmacy with collaborative pharmacists and practitioners. And although there are other drug retailers, such as Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, out there offering some component of an alternative concept, no one is doing it like Elephant Pharmacy, says company CEO Kathi Lentzsch, who has more than 20 years of retail management experience with companies like Pottery Barn, Cost Plus/World Market and Pier 1.
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Elephant Pharmacy is to drugstores what Whole Foods is to grocery stores.
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“We are such a fresh, unique retail concept because our offering isn’t just about the product — it’s about information and education,” says Lentzsch. “We are providing a service that is so desperately needed because the health care in our country is not able to provide it anymore. Doctors don’t have the time to spend with patients because of the way insurance works, so patients are looking for a way to educate themselves, and that’s one of the main pieces that we offer.”
Elephant Pharmacy got a jump start from a group of investors and strategic partners in the natural food and natural products industries, as well as the pharmacy trade, including Anthony Harnett of Bread and Circus, Sandy Gooch of Mrs. Gooch’s and Roxanne Quimby of Burt’s Bees. Large corporations offering support include CVS Corporation and J.P. Morgan.
The drugstores feature a staff of well trained pharmacists, herbalists and aestheticians who offer free access to a full range of health and beauty information and advice. In addition, a rotating group of experts, from registered nurse practitioners to naturopathic doctors, offers free consultation times every day. The stores also offer health screenings and daily free classes taught by local practitioners. More than 3,000 book titles are featured with appropriate products and are available for reference in the “book room.” Additionally, a wealth of free product information and health tips created by Elephant Pharmacy’s editors is available throughout the store.
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Inside Elephant Pharmacy.
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Elephant Pharmacy’s target demographic is upper middle-class consumers in the baby boomer age, ranging between 41 to 59, although in the university town of Berkeley, the store draws a decent number of younger shoppers, too. The company likes to complement that with families that have moms in their 30s.
Lentzsch says the chain could very well spread across the country, but from an operating efficiency perspective, the expansion will remain on the West Coast initially.
“We’re looking to fill in the Bay area, and we’ll be looking for other locations in Southern California, Seattle and Portland initially.”
The most recent store opening was in San Rafael, California, in December 2005, and another will soon open in Los Altos, California. In addition, Elephant Pharmacy has signed for a location in Pasadena, California, opening later in 2006. The company is currently working on the store prototype, based on what it’s learned from the stores that have opened.
“We’re settling in this year to make sure we have it right,” says Lentzsch. “We decided to slow down our growth for this year so that we could build our infrastructure and understand what kind of staffing we needed now that we’re a multiple store chain. We were a one-store operation for 3 years, so to go from one store to three stores takes a different kind of management.”
The average Elephant Pharmacy store ranges from 10,000 to 14,000 square feet, although Lentzsch says the company is considering going to a smaller footprint for the more urban areas where it’s difficult to get larger spaces. For the Los Altos store, which was designed by Alameda, California-based MBH Architects, the goal was to design a place where customers can meander and have fun.
“We’re trying to build a totally different experience from the drugstore,” Lentzsch says. “We’ll learn a lot from it, and we may be right and we may be wrong. But we know that the customer spends 40 to 50 minutes on average in our store and likes to hang out there. So we’re trying to build an environment that makes it all that much more fun for them.”
So far, the Berkeley location has been very profitable and is far exceeding what a traditional drugstore would do as far as dollars per square foot, according to Lentzsch. The store does 1,200 to 1,500 transactions per day and attracts an affluent customer, perhaps because Elephant Pharmacy is “a high step between the grocery store and the traditional specialty store,” Lentzsch says.
“We drive a lot of traffic to our stores, and that’s driven by not only people who are coming to shop and buy, but people who are taking our classes and re-filling their prescriptions. So unlike a traditional specialty retailer, we have customers who are in our store monthly, weekly and, sometimes, every day. They have a reason to keep coming back.”
©2006 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.
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