Business owners share winning strategies with LACC

LYNN – Three local business owners shared their strategies for success during a Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce breakfast forum at Porthole Pub Friday morning, and while each work in very different industries, perseverance was the obvious common theme.Pauline Spirito, owner of Infinity Skate Skins Boutique in Swampscott; Tom Demakes, owner of Old Neighborhood Foods and Larry Groipen, owner of ERC Wiping Products, discussed the history of their respective companies, the challenges they’ve overcome and mistakes they’ve learned from along the way.Infinity Skate Skins BoutiquePauline Spirito, wife of retired Lynn school principal and School Committee member Vin Spirito, turned her hobby of adding her own artwork to children’s shirts in the 1970s into a retail fashion career that has spanned three decades.”At a time when small independent retailers have all but disappeared, I’m thrilled to be celebrating 30 years in business,” Spirito said.It was the early 1970s when the mother of two who worked as an executive secretary started drawing sunflowers, disco frogs, musical gators and moonwalkers on shirts, which she would sell at evening home parties for $9 each.”I actually lost money doing it but I loved what I was doing,” she said.Then in 1979, when her daughter was involved in figure skating, she had the idea to make custom design skating apparel. With $400 she borrowed from her parents she purchased 20 dresses and a second-hand display and launched Skate Skins from her home.”I would sell the dresses to the other skating mothers,” she said. “The fitting room was my bathroom ? The money from the sales I invested in more inventory.”As people at the time were becoming more fitness-conscious, she said she expanded Skate Skins to offer other types of fitness-wear including dancewear and roller skating outfits, and from 1979-1982, she and her husband would load her car every Sunday and sell her designs at the Roosevelt Field Flea Market, where the North Shore Community College Lynn Campus is today.In 1982 she sought to open a storefront, and after being denied loan applications from two banks, she obtained a minority business loan from the Small Business Administration. She was a minority, she said, “because at the time there were very few women opening businesses.”Spirito opened Skate Skins in July, 1982 at Fisherman’s Crossing Mall in Swampscott, and just three years later, after friends and customers encouraged her to expand to offer a variety of women’s clothing, she also opened Infinity Boutique just a few doors down from Skate Skins.”The only way to succeed is to live it (your business), and work it 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” she said. “And that’s what I did. I’d wake my husband up in the middle of the night and say I’ve got an idea what do you think about this?”Essential to the growth of her business, she said, has been constant advertising in local newspapers including The Daily Item.”I am a firm believer in advertising,” she said, displaying old full and half-page ads from the Item. “That’s what drives people in and that’s how people know you’re there ? people knew where Infinity was.”What’s also essential, Spirito said, is to learn from mistakes. She said she attempted to add men’s clothing to Infinity and swimwear to Skate Skins, but both of those attempts failed, the latter because of all the major brand manufacturers.”You learn that you cannot be everything to everyone. You have to focus on what you know and what you’re best at, and for me that is women’s fashion,” Spirito said.In 1997 Spirito combined her two stores and moved them to Vinnin Square, where she opened Infinity Skate Skins Boutique, and after 15 years in business, she said, she had no trouble then obtaining a business loan.Eleven years later, Infinity Skate Skins Boutique at 427 Paradise Road has persevered, even as other businesses at Vinnin Square have come gone. Spirito assigns much of the credit for that to her 11 employees.”We have a great group of a