By JOHN BARTIMOLE – Special to Olean Times Herald
Oct 5, 2024
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(Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles on the members of the 2024 Laine Business Accelerator cohort).
PORTVILLE — Jean Smith certainly bucked the typical business trend.
While many business owners shutter their retail shops and turn their focus on their online presence, Smith did just the opposite: she took a successful online business and melded it with a variety of other products into a retail outlet — the Rusty Rooster.
“I never had any dreams of being a retail store owner,” she said. “But things just sort of came together, and here we are.”
Indeed, what began as the purchase of a building so Smith could move her online business — the sale of architectural salvage, such as lamps/lighting vintage goods and woodwork — morphed into not only a storage space for those items (“I really wanted to get a lot of items out of my home,” she said) but a home for a wide variety of other, often different items.
Visitors to the Rusty Rooster, located at 484 Highland Terrace in Portville, can browse through a bevy of finds, including custom, heirloom-quality woodwork and DIY slab lumber to reclaimed furniture, fine chocolates and coffee to houseplants, architectural salvage to custom metal art, vintage treasure to trendy new home décor.
“We literally have something for everyone,” she said. “When people come into the store — our entrance is a bit narrow and a bit deceiving of what’s inside — they are flabbergasted about how big the store is and how many rooms we have.”
The business is also hosting its 5th annual Harvest Fall Fest today, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with apple cider pressing, a fall craft station, doughnuts and funnel cakes, door prizes, a candy count, photo stops and live music.
Smith admits that the off-the-beaten path location is not the most ideal of sites for a retail store.
“But, when we were looking to buy a building to get some of the inventory out of the house, we weren’t concerned about location,” she said. “We just needed a place big enough to store our things.” Still the store’s appeal and uniqueness have made it a destination for those seeking hard-to-find items.
The Rusty Rooster is in a historic building on a site that once housed a tannery decades ago that was destroyed twice, once by fire and once by a tornado.
“Justin and I fell in love with this historic building and we said, ‘We have to have this,’” she said. As a result of the purchase and the evolution of the business, Smith said her home “…is a little less cluttered,” though her life itself is no less hectic.
“I love what I do,” she said, “and not many people can say that. I love to hunt for bargains, I love to hunt for different types of items. This is my full-time job, and I enjoy every minute of it.”
And where did the name of the business come from?
“When I started the business, I was a stay-at-home mom and I had a little hobby farm at our house,” she said. “Since I was doing a lot of salvage items, I was playing off the saying of rusty gold and I just thought Rusty Rooster was a fun mix of my ‘work/hobbies.’ It just seems to still work because we still do a lot of salvage and farmhouse decor.
“We’ve also played other areas of the business into the name, like our ‘re-coop’ room and then when we added the chocolate shop it became the Chocolate Roost,” she added. “I sometimes joke now that my husband is getting older and now he’s my ‘Rusty Rooster.’”
Smith says she hopes the Rusty Rooster’s involvement in the Laine Business Accelerator “helps to give us some focus,” she said. “We want to grow. We have so many avenues to expand and different product lines to explore. Up until now, we’ve sort of just been plowing through with blinders on. I think the Accelerator will help us to focus and expand.
“As our area has suffered losses of major employers over the years, I think the economy starts transitioning to small businesses. We’re excited to be part of that transition and a revitalizing of our community.
“I’m a dreamer. I have lots of ideas,” she said.
And she’s not afraid to buck the trend to follow those dreams.
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