By Nick Norlen, Staff Writer
Name: Jennifer Schmelter. Hometown: Lawrence. Business: Jay’s Cycles. Job title: Store Manager. Job location: 249 Nassau St., Princeton.
How did you get into this business?
Jay’s my father. It’s a family business. So I’ve been doing it pretty much my whole life.
What kind of training did you need?
With cycling, you need to know mechanics and things like that about the bikes, and knowing just the way things are made. And with the bikes, everything changes from year to year. You have to know kind of what’s going on in the cycling industry as far as what’s the best product out there. We carry Trek, and we only carry Trek. They are the best bike brand out there, which is one of the reasons why we don’t carry anybody else.
It helps to love cycling. Which I unfortunately don’t do a lot of, but I do enjoy it. But I’ve been doing it since I was a kid pretty much. (In terms of the business side,) I’ve been here for 12 years, and I’m sort of being groomed to be part-owner. There’s a lot. It’s a small business, but it’s a very successful business. So we get very busy during the season. You have to know the margins and you’ve just got to keep with the times and make it a successful customer service.
One thing I like about small-town Princeton is you get a lot of one-on-one with customers. They appreciate it as customers and it’s nice not being in this big, corporate situation. It’s a little, family, mom-and-pop shop.
Describe a typical day in your job.
Depending on the time of season — this time of year, it’s relatively quiet. We do repairs — the students keep us busy pretty much year-round. But on a day like today, mostly a lot of repair work.
Right now we’re doing a lot of cleaning and reorganizing for the season. During the season, it’s pretty much crazy from the second we open to the second we close. It’s lots of selling and repairing. It gets very, very hectic, to say the least.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
I’ve always loved working with people. We’ve been here for 30 years. There’s always new families coming into Princeton that we want, but we have a lot of our old-time customers. They bought their first kid’s bikes here, and now their kids have kids, and they’re buying their bikes here. It’s just so nice when I see my customers come in with their little kids, and then I see them five years later and their kids are bigger. And they just keep coming to us. I think a lot of it has to do with our location, but also just because we’re just such a little family store. I think people, they enjoy local merchants, putting the money into something like this, as opposed to the mass merchants like Wal-Mart and Dick’s and places like that. There’s a lot of competition with those, as far as selling bikes. But we will give you everything from start to finish.
What do you enjoy least?
Honestly, I love pretty much everything about it except when it gets crazy, crazy hectic and we don’t have enough help. That’s probably what we run into the most. It’s very hard to find qualified bike mechanics. Salespeople you can train to learn things. But mechanics, they’re a bit of an art form in a way. We’re very lucky, because my other manager, Rich, he’s been our head mechanic for 25 years. He knows everything, and I don’t know what we would do without him. He’s sort of the backbone of the mechanics part of the store. But that’s it — just the craziness and not enough help. Other than that, the rest of it’s great.
What is key to success in your business?
The idea is to get repeat customers and to keep people happy, just keep up with what’s going on in the bicycling industry. We try to keep our prices reasonable. One of our key things is “Princeton quality, not Princeton prices.” That’s our little slogan. And we try to do that, because people coming into Princeton think Princeton’s so high-end, way expensive. Which a lot of it is, but we try to be very competitive with pricing and give everybody the kind of service and customer service that they deserve, which will get them to keep coming back.
