MILLEDGEVILLE — Adam and Lindsey Smith are in the midst of preparing to expand their business space at The 42nd Floor to provide customers a hands-on shopping experience of customized fashion apparel.
When Villane’s Jewelry & Unique Accessories officially closed its doors Saturday next to Amici Italian Cafe on West Hancock Street, the couple saw the neighboring vacant space as the perfect fit to increase business.
“We will have two dressing rooms, a selection of over 1,000 pieces in the store you can pick up and try on. Customers will have the opportunity to buy straight off the rack, and it helps people envision all that we really can do,” Lindsey said. “We thought going custom was easy, but here it will be even easier with the expansion.”
With a current showroom space of about 350 square feet, the expansion will “over triple the space.” The current space will house the creative side while the new area will be called The 42nd Floor’s Stockroom — Back to Basics shop with its own front entrance.
“We will drop the first two walls on the right as you walk in so the store is continuous between both spaces. Then we will hang all of the fixtures and finish all of the cosmetics, and set up displays and get the inventory in,” Adam said. “We will be getting more space in the back to be able to space out some machines and work more comfortably, and add a couple of work stations.”
The duo plans to hire an additional consultant to join The 42nd Floor team. With the help of enlisted family members, the Smiths will break the wall to conjoin both spaces Saturday in time for a grand re-opening in two weeks.
“This past Saturday, we did walk-throughs, dropped the dry wall, and made plans for every single little detail. Friday when we close, we will start work and Saturday morning the rest of the family will get here to help and we won’t stop probably until early Sunday morning,” Adam said. “Depending on how quickly we get everything rolling, we could do a soft opening in the middle of next week.”
Since The 42nd Floor officially opened its doors in July 2010, the Georgia College graduates have offered a wide range of one-of-a-kind apparel and accessories with more than 16 million colors and unlimited amount of graphic designs to choose from.
“The 42nd Floor was created to be a custom option for anyone. People can come in and customize as little as one shirt to 1,000 shirts. We offer free design services so customers get exactly what they want at affordable prices,” Lindsey said. “The reason we opened the store is because we really care about each and every order. We take a lot of pride in what we do and we strive to knock the socks off of every customer.”
The printmaking business also offers monogramming, custom embroidery and screenprinting services.
“We are monogramming for $5.99 and for a white custom shirt it’s $14.99. We also have name brands like Comfort Colors and American Apparel, which cost between $17 to $19,” Lindsey said. “If pieces are cotton wearables, we can customize it. We have equipment that we haven’t been able to use and offer those services, so now with the expansion, people will realize even more what we offer and see some new stuff from us. You will see more accessories, more fashion apparel and name brand apparel; more than just T-shirts.”
In addition to normal business hours from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, The 42nd Floor will also extend hours from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday starting in April.
“We originally opened with one machine and weren’t anticipating adding four more machines within the first year and a half. We started with one process and now we have six different processes we offer. We’ve been extremely pleased and fortunate. We can’t thank customers enough; they have made this experience so much fun and so rewarding. We haven’t done much advertising and about 90 percent of our business is from either returned customers or word-of-mouth; as a small business owner, you can’t thank them enough,” Lindsey said. “We’re really excited and super pumped to see how everything plays out once we finish the expansion. We always saw more potential in what we were doing.”
For more information about the downtown merchant, call 478-295-2622, visit www.the42ndfloor.com, or like The 42nd Floor Facebook page.
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