River Cities Business Journal: Business Profile

Kingman Daily Miner

KINGMAN - You'd need a map to cover all the places Lee Dittmann has traveled in his life.

Fortunately, you wouldn't have to look very far to find one - Dittmann is the proprietor of Mindbird Maps & Books, a new local store that, while small, is well-stocked with a wide variety of maps, globes, books and related accessories.

Tucked away at 601 Hall St., Suite C, Mindbird's primary focus is on maps.

A lifelong map enthusiast, Dittmann has stocked the store with nearly every kind of functional map available: three dozen varieties of world map projections, two dozen varieties of U.S. maps, topographic maps of each individual state, and even charts of the heavens, the solar system and the moon.

And those are just the wall maps - Dittmann also stocks folding road maps and atlases of every state in the union and most major U.S. cities, as well as travel maps of countries all over the world, from Europe to Africa to Asia - he even has one of Antarctica.

“Generally I try to carry the best map of a particular area,” Dittmann said. “Largest scale, so it has more detail on it.”

A self-described naturalist - he doesn't own a car and spent four months bicycling across the country in 1983 - Dittmann has eyes for Arizona as well.

He carries more than 370 different topographical quadrangle maps of northern Arizona, compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Any place that has wild areas nearby is of interest to me, which is just about anywhere in northern Arizona,” he said.

Dittmann also stocks maps of most national parks, and even carries three-dimensional raised relief maps of Arizona and surrounding states, allowing a person to trace the mountains, valleys and plains by hand.

His bestselling map book for the past five years has been a one of river rafting routes throughout the Grand Canyon.

While Dittmann places less emphasis on the 3,000 or so new and used books he carries, his stock is no less tied to his interests - before striking out on his own, he worked in bookstores for years.

And while Dittmann does carry the odd bestseller here and there, much of his stock covers the smattering of topics that fascinate him.

His specialty is nature and science, particularly botany, though Dittmann also carries books on Eastern philosophy, U.S. history and astrophysics as well as contemporary fiction.

“There are a lot of books here people aren't going to find anywhere else in town,” Dittmann said.

He also stocks hand lenses and compasses for reading maps, as well as waterproof notebooks and pens, which sell better than you might expect.

“These can account for 10 percent of my sales,” Dittmann said.

Nearly everything in the store is sold at a discount, save the USGS quadrangle maps, though Dittmann noted most places that sell those maps do so at an inflated price.

“Most of the new items are discounted,” he said. “For me to compete online, you almost have to do that.”

And competing online is essential for Dittmann - in the nine years he's run Mindbird in one incarnation or another, he has been unable to ignore the increasing trend of online versus walk-in sales.

The sad truth, he acknowledges, is that few Arizonans have need of a road map of Saskatchewan.

Dittmann operated the first version of Mindbird out of a basement in Flagstaff beginning in 1999.

By the time he vacated the building in 2006, his online sales had outpaced his local business, even with Flagstaff's network of local referrals.

Dittmann's next stop was Cottonwood, where the gulf between his local and online business grew even greater.

“I did less walk-in traffic there than I did in Flagstaff in my basement,” Dittmann said. “By the time I finished in Cottonwood, maybe 95 percent of my business was online.”

Selling maps online isn't easy - Dittman said he's worked between 60 and 80 hours a week for the past nine years - but it does have its advantages over other products.

Large commercial web sites like amazon.com tend to overlook maps as a moveable commodity, and so they charge full price while Dittmann discounts.

Product description is another area where Dittmann has outdone his larger commercial competitors.

“I write out full descriptions for each map I carry,” Dittmann said. “I have more detailed descriptions for most maps than almost any other map dealer online.”

Perusing Dittmann's web site, www.mindbird.com, a prospective buyer can read a comprehensive description of each map's size and scale as well as whether or not it shows roads, borders, shaded relief for mountains, time zones or any other supplemental information.

“If someone reads my description, they pretty much know what they're getting,” Dittmann said.

Now that he's relocated to Kingman, Dittmann is hoping to reach out to the local business community.

He's already begun work on an online directory for local businesses, kingman-in-arizona.com, where he posts photographs and descriptions of various businesses around town, arranged in alphabetical and categorical listings.

“It's not just for businesses,” Dittmann said. “If someone wants to put their church or organization on there, they can do it for free. I don't have any banner ads, no flashing ads or anything like that.”

Dittmann hopes the directory will help redirect customers to local businesses, including his own.

After all, as nice as online sales can be, seeing customers face-to-face has its charms as well - and Dittmann is hoping to see as many as he can.

“I know there's a lot of people out there who're map nuts,” he said.