Success in adaptation

Twenty-six years ago, Trent Walsh opened BaT Comics & Games on Broadway in downtown Chico. He’s moved the store a few times—some of his landlords weren’t the greatest, he says—but for the past 11 years, he’s occupied a spot about a block away from that first storefront. He couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

“When we first started, we had to decide what kind of business we wanted to be,” he said of himself and former business partner Benny Louie. “We wanted to be geared toward the college crowd—so that meant being downtown, and not, say, in the mall.”

That was 1994. Since then, the internet certainly “has taken a toll” on the industry—“Amazon is fairly terrible,” Walsh said. “Most of my down [times] are attributed to that.”

But it’s not all been bad. For instance, there are a plethora of blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to comic books and games that never would have existed without the internet. They spur random bursts of product popularity. Something he’s been carrying for years might suddenly become a hot commodity because a celebrity hypes it online, or a popular blogger turns people onto it.

Walsh has seen trends come and go, most noticeably in the realms of board games and comics. The former have evolved past the “I’m beating you or you’re beating me” style to more involving team efforts in accomplishing goals, he says. And while comics and graphic novels still make up the majority of his business, Walsh says they’ve gone from constituting about 60 percent to 65 percent of sales to 40 percent to 45 percent.

“Literacy is much lower than it used to be,” he said. People would rather come in and buy T-shirts with comic book characters on them than the comic books themselves—because they’re just not that into reading, he says.

“One of the things we do—and we do well—is we have a huge variety of stuff,” Walsh said, adding that he carries 30 distinct product lines in the store. “We try to have enough variety so if comics aren’t that popular for a while we hopefully have enough other stuff to make up for it. If you want to survive long-term, you have to be able to adapt to trends.”

That adaptation applies to Walsh, too. When he first started, he was the demographic he hoped to reach. Now he finds he relies on his employees’ opinions on what’s cool. “I’m terrible at choosing ‘cute’ things,” he said as an example, pointing to a large plush unicorn he was preparing to put in the window display. “People wouldn’t necessarily think of us as selling plush toys—but we sell a ton of them. We’ve got to do whatever we can to get people in.”