How to Make a Business Out of Pop Culture

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- The Little Lebowski is only 400 square feet. But in this tiny Greenwich Village establishment is packed enough merchandise based on 1998's The Big Lebowski to become an international hot spot.

The store's owners, Roy Preston and Nicholas Dollak, make sure customers feel like they are in the movie. The store's dressing room also serves as a mock bowling alley, with rigged paper pins that flatten or pop up as the door opens and closes. Visitors can have their picture taken with their face in a cutout of the character Jesus Quintana (more characters coming soon) amid Lebowski T-shirts, DVDs, figurines and other trinkets.

New York's The Little Lebowski abides by catering to fans of a 13-year-old movie. Like the hero of The Big Lebowski", its owners stumbled into success.

It makes for a unique business model.

Preston concedes that they didn't set out to open a shop based on the movie. It was only after several failed concepts in the same storefront that the partners stumbled on something golden.

Preston and his partner originally opened the store in November 2007 as a children's bookstore.

"A month after we opened, the U.S. economy collapsed and on top of that, we're in Greenwich Village and right down the block from Washington Square Park, which closed for construction. That cut off all the foot traffic," Preston says on a now busy Friday afternoon.

The result was not good. Abandoning the children's bookstore idea, the partners moved on to a souvenir shop, then to comic books -- moving further and further astray from their original idea and deeper into a financial hole.

"We were so broke we couldn't afford to order comic books," Preston says.

"Whatever money we had got eaten up by just trying to stay in business," he says. "We had to borrow from this place and that place to pay the rent. There was no business during that period. We ended up exhausting all our finances in our first two years. We almost went broke."

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