All in the family: Habitat team looks to new faces, new services, new clients.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg

Despite the adage against combining business and family, the mother-daughter management team at Habitat Housewares in Anchorage seems to have achieved a comfortable berth in the culinary-specialties niche. Mother Lori Atrops and daughter Stacie Wilson bought the gourmet kitchen store a few years back from its original owner and feel they've rightly steered operations at Habitat into the 21st century.

The bustling 8,000-square-foot store, a mainstay for decades at the University Center Mall at 36th Avenue and Old Seward Highway (www.habitathousewares.com), aims to be the comprehensive local center for all things culinary.

After a general computer-systems upgrade, they are confident that they're offering the benefits of a bridal-and-gift registry and general merchandising online without compromising operating efficiency. And for the modern bride in Alaska, the online element of a registry service is invaluable, Habitat managers believe. Previously, there were 10 full-time and 11 part-time employees, now there are eight full-timers and six who work part-time. New online accounts are inching along at 1 percent of total sales; managers anticipated growth in this sector would be gradual.

In 2006, they reported, except in December, the mall store approached or exceeded the monthly sales volume of two stores back in 2003, before Habitat closed its downtown location.

'RETAIL NEOPHYTES'

While Wilson had small-business experience, she confesses that "both of us were retail neophytes." In a field where quality and brand matter, there was a lot to learn fast, Atrops recalls. Wilson compares their early days to "drinking water through a firehose."

With a bachelor's degree in marketing, Wilson was in her 30s and had been involved in a handful of business ventures with her husband, Jeff, including a manufacturers' rep firm, commercial cabinetry and a construction-plans center. With the youngest of their two daughters starting kindergarten, she wanted the flexibility of having an operating partner, and she didn't have to look far to find one. Her mother, a registered nurse who'd moved on get a master's degree in English and teach at the university level, was ready for a change.

After 13 years of coaching university students in classroom and resource center settings, Atrops was finding it difficult to navigate from adjunct to permanent status and make what she felt she was worth. She was earning less back then, she reflects, than what some of her sales...