After 22 years in business, Keith Marzek, owner of Nickel City Shirt Co., consolidates his screen printing and embroidery operations into one building. Marzek bought 3763 Delaware Avenue in Kenmore (formerly Graser’s Florist) as a successful way out of the pandemic, while embracing a “new normal.”
“Things fell apart two years ago,” Marzek said. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do? I could lose 90% of my business. I knew I had to survive and fight. I called a staff meeting. It was their idea to fire everyone immediately and go on unemployment. Then when business started to pick up, I started bringing them back on board one by one. During the downtime, I decided to learn about it. more about business analysis. I knew I had to consolidate my two locations, one on Kenmore Avenue in Buffalo and the other in Niagara Falls. I had the Kenmore location for ten years and I expanded with the Niagara Falls location in 2018 because we ran out of space. It was a long time coming to buy this building on Delaware Avenue. I realized how important it was to do something like that – buying a building and bringing it all together under one roof – with an apartment upstairs for extra income.
Listening to Marzek describe how he reinvented the business during the pandemic was encouraging. One of the things he did was come up with a plan to create custom online stores for his customers.
“People always say they like to support local, but you have to make it easy for them,” he told me. “It is easy for us to produce the goods and we have simplified online sales processing for our business customers. This is one of the things that has saved us over the past two years. We do a lot for the school district. We provided the service side, with a local person to talk to. The process allowed organizations to host online fundraisers as there were no in-person events, bake shows or cookie sales. We had to be inventive – to find ways to get more companies to work with us because they weren’t coming into the store during the pandemic.
Marzek said it was during a 4-hour drive from Pittsburgh, just as the pandemic hit, that he was able to formulate many of his decisions in his head. He knew he had to do whatever it took to make it work.
“I started the business in my buddy’s basement,” he says. “I wasn’t going to let that go. I also knew that I had to take care of my staff. I told them that I would do everything I could to help them and that we would find a way to make it work. I had their back, and they had mine. My staff are an incredibly tight-knit group – I couldn’t have done this without them. And very soon we will be back to meet customers in person. It will be nice to see someone in person – I look forward to that day. I’m also excited to have all of our resources in one space again. We will move everything forward. »
Although Marzek is remodeling, he has already moved his Niagara Falls outfit into the Delaware Avenue building. It also currently does business from there, although customers won’t be able to enter the store until April 1. But that date is fast approaching – a turn that Marzek damn sure was going to happen… come hell, high water or even a raging pandemic.
Sign in: Nickel City Shirt Co. | 3763 Delaware Ave | Kenmore, NY 14217 | (716) 207-3803 | Facebook