Sam: “When we moved to the area, there wasn’t much of a music scene in Gardiner so we wanted to throw ourselves into the middle of the community and share the world of music as much as we could. I had a small vinyl collection my dad gave me and that kind of sparked my interest. We both love music and seeing live shows and collecting vinyl and just being around it. Jason wanted to have his own business, so we just merged those things and now we’ve been here five years. Everybody we met was really excited about having a music store downtown and they really gave us the fire to keep going and try to keep it on the street.”
Jason: “I knew coming into this it was going to basically consume my life, which isn’t a bad thing. I enjoy it and it’s where I want to be. Plus, I think we’ve been really good at adapting to recent challenges. Before Covid, our entire business was based on people coming in and doing shows and gaming events and our Music Walk, just big things that required groups of people. All of that just came to a complete stop where we couldn’t even be open for three months. It was a huge challenge to try to figure out if we were even going to be able to open again. So that’s what sparked us ripping out our stage and bringing in more retail as opposed to hosting events. It kind of changed our entire business model.
I just want everyone to know we’re here and we’re open and we love discussing music and games with people. I think it’s so fun when people come in and share their likes and we are able to share new artists with them based on their other favorites. There is so much great music out there that’s just not on the radio so when people tell us about stuff we don’t know about, we go home and get on YouTube and start listening and can then share that with more people which is very cool. Another one of the things I want to do here is to share the world of local music, so we try to push what we can for local folks.
We have the Record Store Day Black Friday coming and that’s our next big event. We also have quite a few ukuleles and instruments at a really decent price point. We are offering online instrument lessons because of the pandemic, as well as in person. We stay six feet apart and we are doing it out in the open store now instead of the separate room so we have space. I’d like to also highlight our games we have. We are hoping we can get a few more titles in before Christmas. Friday nights are usually game nights right now and we play a lot of card games like Magic and D&D. Those seem to be the most popular around here.”
Think Jason and Sam first when you #ThinkGardinerFirst this holiday shopping season. You can connect with Niche, Inc. on Facebook (@nicheinc), Instagram (@nicheinc.musicandgames), email (nicheinc.music@gmail.com), phone (207-588-7725), or in person at 307 Water Street in Gardiner.