It looks like they had a Dallas store for a bit, too. (^_^)
A bit more on the other original owner, Hiep "Hip" Huynh, courtesy of a 1994 UH newspaper article.
UH business students bet it all on Japanimation store
by Naryth Phadungchai
Contributing Writer
Many of us would like to have our own businesses, but for many reasons, we do not act on our desires. For two senior UH business students, making an idea come true is nothing new, but nonetheless challenging.
Hiep "Hip" Huynh and Jean-Binh Valente, both 23, own and operate a retail store, Planet Anime, in Rice Village, selling Japanese animation and related merchandise. They both agreed that it took real-world experience and determination, not textbook knowledge, to make their most recent venture a success.
"It was his (Valente's) idea, and I agreed to it," Huynh said. "He's bounced a lot of ideas around, but I never liked those ideas."
After a trip to California during last year's Spring Break, where both men saw a booming animation business, Valente came up with the idea of starting a similar business in Houston. Before their store opened five months ago, a handful of other places in the city sold a limited selection of animation from Japan, and none of them had the soundtrack CDs, model kits, posters or Japanese-style comic books called mangas.
Themselves fans of the medium, Huynh and Valente decided to put their enthusiasm for the hobby and for business to good use. "Jean's been tossing back and forth ideas of doing something on his own," Huynh said. "He couldn't handle that nine-to-five job, and he always wanted to be an entrepreneur." Huynh is the same way.
Each have experience when it comes to starting up and running a business. Both Huynh and Valente have been friends for the past 12 years, during which each owned a comic-book stand and operated a video-game distributorship, putting video game machines in convenience stores. They used the money earned from their previous businesses and a loan from Huynh's parents to set up their latest enterprise.
Despite their eagerness to make their business work, at first, neither Huynh's nor Valente's family shared the same feeling. "At the beginning, they weren't real supportive," Valente said of his family.
"Everybody had doubts because it's an unexplored business," he added.
He said his parents were concerned that the store would fail and that he and his partner would lose their money. "They said we shouldn't have done it," he added.
Despite Huynh's parents' doubts about the success of the business, they loaned him the money anyway.
The store, located on Times Boulevard, now seeing a steady stream of customers, is expanding its inventory and branching into mail order. "They (his parents) are OK with it now," Huynh said.
A major reason for their success, Valente said, is a crucial decision they made shortly after they opened the store.
"When we were first starting out, we went to other people (distributing for their merchandise)," he said.
"We wanted to do everything safely. We didn't want to take any risk." Valente said that not taking risk meant going through a distribution channel – in particular, dealing with distributors in the United States – to get the goods from Japan.
That experience proved difficult, but in the end helpful. "They didn't treat us fairly," he said. For example, Valente said in order for him to get the goods he wanted, he had to buy merchandise he didn't want.
Moreover, domestic distributors overcharged the store for those items, so he and Huynh decided to bypass the normal pecking order and deal directly with the distributors in Japan.
"Going to Japan was a big risk," Valente said. He admits that he didn't have any idea how the Japanese conducted business, hence his apprehension dealing with a different business culture.
He has since made two productive trips to Japan. In addition to not having to bother with U.S. distributors, the store is now one of the players in the importing of animation-related merchandise from Japan.
To make their business work, Huynh and Valente put in about 50 hours a week at the store, with Valente's younger brother helping out at times. The effort they put in means they are able to take only one class this semester. Huynh is studying marketing while Valente is studying management.
Though their college work is going slow, that seems to be fine with the two entrepreneurs. When it comes to running a single, small store, "it (school) didn't help me any," Valente said. "What I learned from opening up my businesses, from my past failures and successes," he said, helped him the most.
Such experiences include stocking up on merchandise that didn't sell. When it comes to that kind of gambling, Huynh said, it's best to listen to one's business sense, not what happens to be the trend at the moment.
Both Huynh and Valente plan to further expand their business by next year. When that happens, Huynh says, what they learned in class will become useful.
(
http://archive.thedailycougar.com/vol60/94-11-02.html)
I surveyed the room and its contents. The rack of VHS rental tapes was very impressive to behold. The largest I ever saw. The line of 12 Animeigo Urusei Yatsura TV volumes particularly caught my eye. "Geez, it would take a considerable amount of time to cop-I mean watch. WATCH! all those!" I thought to myself.
