Selling Everything Except the Apples
By Tom Incantalupo. STAFF WRITER
Sep 3, 1997
`This is my fifth time here this year. I come here for everything.' - Sister Susan Snyder, St. Cyril and St. Methodius
You might want to allow a couple of hours to browse L.L.WEANS, but you could search all day and not find a flannel shirt or a pair of winter boots on its shelves, despite the similarity of its name to the outdoor clothing retailer.
Located next to Adventureland on Route 110 in Farmingdale, it's a sort of adventureland for teachers: five aisles of educational aids in 4,200 square feet. More than 20,000 items are on display, from books to furniture to classroom decorations to stickers to hand puppets, with 60,000 others available by catalog.
As school begins this week, Allan and Michelle Lepler, who now own the 37-year-old business, are breathing a collective sigh of relief. Their busy season, the months of August and September during which 40 percent of their revenues come in and their staff of 25 full- and part-timers grows to 39, has peaked and is about to begin winding down.
"This is our crazy time," Michelle said yesterday during a post-lunchtime lull before what was expected to be a mid-afternoon rush.
Sister Susan Snyder, a fourth-grade teacher at St. Cyril and St. Methodius elementary school in Deer Park, beat the rush. "This is my fifth time here this year," she said as she gathered a stack of test record books into her arms. "I come here for everything."
The books, to be used by her and other teachers, are being paid for by the school. But, like most teachers who shop here, Allan said, Sister Snyder spends a good deal of her own money on supplies - about $200 this year.
With teachers accounting for almost three-quarters of its customers and about 80 percent of its sales volume, WEANS says it's a major player on Long Island in a niche business. "It's a very specialized business," said Allan, "a very specialized inventory."
There is some overlap with educational toy stores like Noodle Kidoodle, with several area stores, and with at least one other major local company, Economy Handicrafts, a 14,000-square-foot outlet on 69th Street in Woodside that specializes in teachers' arts and crafts supplies.
But Laurie Korobkin, who, with her husband, David, bought Economy four years ago, says it has begun expanding into more mainstream teacher supplies. She says much of her sales are from a 132-page catalog. "We're in a warehouse district off Queens Boulevard," she said. "People have to know about us to come in."
WEANS, however, is on a street heavily traveled by shoppers. And a sign out front now makes it clear that this is an educational store. "We had people coming in looking for jeans," said Allan, who is one of three sons of the company's co-founders. He said the similarity to L.L. Bean's name is coincidental: The "L.L." in WEANS' name is for co-founder Louis Lepler and "WEANS" is an acronymn created from Allan's first name, those of his two brothers, his sister and "Super," the family's pet duck.
(Copyright Newsday Inc., 1997)