 Matt Hargrove performs an "ollie to fakie" on the mini-ramp. |
Both Fine and Dehart confirmed that skateboarding was not part of the plan when they bought a T-shirt business in the Hudson Valley Mall in Kingston in 1990. After running a vegetarian restaurant in the West Village in Manhattan from 1975 to 1988, the couple opted for the comfort of their country home in Stone Ridge. They have successfully made the unlikely transition from the restaurant business in Manhattan to niche-market retailer in upstate New York, all while staying married.
Walking up to TSX one's eyes are drawn to the warehouse behind and to the right of the storefront covered with fantastic graffiti, a sample of the work inside. The interior of the store is an industrial–themed, two-story open design featuring painted cinderblock walls, steel beams, and a corrugated metal roof bisected with aluminum drainage-pipe ductwork for ventilation. The walls are covered from floor to the ceiling with T-shirts, clothing, shoes, snowboards, and of course skateboard decks and hardware. Through the doors in back is a separate wing housing both a street skate park with a variety of ramps and rails and a half pipe dominating the far end of the building.
Employees and Small Businesses
We couldn't do this without the support of a great group of people," Dehart said as she playfully ambushed manager Hal Van Etten with a hug. "Hal is like another son to me. And a lot of our employees have been with us for a really long time." TSX currently employs 17 people in three locations, and Van Etten, co-manager Alex Gabler, and warehouse manager Chris O'Leary are three keys to Dehart and Fine's success in growing their business. All three have been with TSX for several years and are entrenched in the skating world, bringing essential inside info to the business. For example, Dehart told me "Alex knows a lot of big people in the graffiti world, and every eight months or so he brings in great artists to keep things fresh." Dehart stressed the necessity of finding people that care about the business and most importantly, people who you can trust. Like a proud mother, she related, "It's been amazing to me because I see the kids who have been here since we opened, and they couldn't do an ollie or a kick flip or something like that when they got here, and now they are so good. It's great to see and it's a great lesson of life for people to learn that if you stay with something you can actually get better and improve at things." Confirming the importance of good employees to a small business, Fine talked of the necessity of crafting caring relationships between people. Commenting on managing a team successfully he said, "Remember that everyone is a person and always try to put yourself in the other person's place. Treat individuals as individuals and show them the respect they deserve. And do the research, because there is tons of great information from countless sources regarding employing people as a small business owner." —JDK |
When they took over the little T-shirt store in the mall their main product was rock'n'roll T-shirts, which remain a hot commodity (evident in the selection on the wall). Apart from their popular wall of shoes, Dehart informed me, "to this day, our best-selling item is a Led Zeppelin shirt. Everyone still loves rock'n'roll." She knows this because she's able to track their inventory through a point-of-sale-system that gives her daily tallies of all three TSX locations.
It was at the suggestion of a couple of employees who were into skating in the early '90s that they looked into carrying skateboard clothing. Dehart casually dropped the hippest brand names as she told me, "A lot of the companies that I work with now were just starting up, like Birdhouse that Tony Hawk belongs to, Alien Workshop, and Element, and we called them up and said we were thinking about carrying some skate stuff. They said we had to carry hardware, too, and we said okay. Now we have a great relationship with a lot of the major skating companies, who send professional teams to demo here because they have grown along with us."
What began as a small selection of boards and hardware has exploded with the mainstreaming of skating. Over the years, TSX expanded their mall-based chain to four stores, with locations in Kingston, Albany, Danbury, and Rotterdam. They closed the Danbury and Rotterdam locations and had just opened a Middletown site when, three years ago, the Kingston mall decided not to renew their lease on the central storefront, cutting an underhanded deal with a national chain competitor. Dehart still steams about it, but it was that incident that fomented the renovation of the former garage where we were standing. She said, "It was then we started thinking seriously about a skate park, because we realized there is nowhere for kids to skate around here, nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do, and nowhere for them to use what we're selling."
 TSX coowner Ingrid Dehart behind the counter, flanked by skateboard merchandise and paraphenalia |
"We didn't set out to do any of this," said Fine in a phone interview from a skateboard shoe expo in Philadelphia. "It's about trusting in the universe." Fine gave sage advice to prospective entrepreneurs: "I would just say to follow your heart and do what you love and things will fall into place for you. We just followed our spontaneity and our impulses and trusted they would lead to good things, and they have."