NEW RETAIL SWORD STORE BOSTON!!

Alas, I don't live in Boston. If you do go through with this, I wish you best of luck, and hope you check all the little legal bits too.

Outside the city proper, a number of reasons come to mind. Allston/Brighton might find ready retail lease space along Comm ave, Brighton ave, etc. Watertown, the Arsenal Mall area or the mall itself. Waltham would be a more ideal in a politically demographic kind of way.

Silvermane is up the road a piece and has both a Brick&Mortar as well as the festival calendar. Maybe they'd take on a business partner?
www.silvermane.com/acatalog/contact_us.html

There was someone other than Stoddards downtown but I can't recall who it was or if still in busines. IIRC, the same outfit was also in Marlboro. I don't rcall either if Stoddards lasted up in Chestnut Hill. There are the malls up that way as well but I imagine pretty pricy. Worcester would be dirt low pricing right now but perhaps a bit volatile in physical urban destruction. There used to be a lot of arms production out that way. Just some random thoughts and recollections. Deval Patrick is likely not going to sponsor such but a lot of the state outside of the capitol district itself is pretty laid back and blue collar.

As I will likely be moving back to New Hampshire this year, I would appreciate having a sword store within driving distance. I hate driving into Boston, though and I find the T to be horribly inconvenient, so somewhere outside of the city would be nice.
Edelweiss mentioned Worcester; If you could position a storefront near the Higgins Armory Museum, you may get good business from people who just spent hours wandering the museum and only just realized how badly they need to own a sword.

I wish you the best luck with this venture.

In all seriousness though I highly recommend gauging the market first before going for something like this. Positioning it near the Higgins Armoury sounds like an excellent idea due to the abovementioned reason (people go see sharp shiny thing, people want sharp shiny things of their own). That aside, swords are seriously a niche thing (however popular they may be in our little community!), given their lack of (modern) application and cost, at least for the functional ones. The great majority of people are going to be "Oo, cool... wait, what, this is $500??? I can buy a $20 ninja sword at the flea market on Saturday!" Never mind that the $20 ninja sword is going to be stainless crap (by the way displaying a broken generic stainless sword isn't a bad idea, actually, just be careful when breaking it), cost rules these days.

So I would suggest marketing other things as well, and perhaps figuring out how you can sell the products for their absolute minimum price and still maintain your overhead, like Kult of Athena does. I highly recommend emailing them and perhaps asking for advice; the worst they can do is say "We don't talk to potential opponents!" They seem like decent people and I'm certain they'd be willing to give you at least a little help. You could also look into becoming a vendor for them instead of actually opening your own shop; it'd be much the same, except they would be your boss, so to speak-- you wouldn't necessarily be on your own like you would be on this-- but at the same time that's much less financial risk for you...

Just some thoughts, and I do think this is a great idea... except that you need to move to Georgia, where I am

wow what an awesome idea! I found my love of swords in a retail store "Chesapeake knife and tool" back in richmond VA.
I remember I was walking through the mall and saw a knife store and thought to myself, oooh, I like knives lets see what they've got. I walked in and on the back wall behold. A full wall of hanwei swords. Practical katana, practical plus, tiger, shinto, ninjato, zatoichi and some chinese blades... They let me check one out... My life changed that day.

This idea really makes strikes a chord in me. I truly hope this pans out for you. If you get it going and I'm ever in the north eastern US I will definitely stop by!