3 QUESTIONS
8 | F E R R E T S Q U A R T E R LY
WITH JIM & MARGIE SEIDEWAND OF PET WORLD ROCHESTER Jim and Margie Seidewand have been in business for 51 years and on their 47th wedding anniversary, I had the pleasure of having lunch with this charming couple and hearing all about their lives together. Here is their story. START FROM THE BEGINNING. HOW DID YOU TWO GET STARTED? Margie: Jim worked at the post office where I worked my first summer between high school and college. Jim had a girlfriend.
Jim’s job as co-manager of this first official fish show was to supply the show with 100 tanks. He found a place in Buffalo that would sell him all-glass, 10-gallon aquariums for $5.45/ea., but they had to spend $2500. The club only needed $600 in tanks to pull off the event. Jim bought up the rest of the tanks and had to figure out what to do with them. What is a Fish Show? A competition show for aquarium hobbyists and enthusiasts. To learn more, check out Aquafind.com, the Aquatic Fish Database.
Jim: Yeah well, that didn’t work out. Margie: When he left in August for MIT in Boston, I never thought I’d see him again. I wrote him a letter every day and I am not a big letter writer. After two years of letter writing, Margie had finished college and Jim returned home from MIT to take a year off of college. The political unrest surrounding the Vietnam War had them worried about his draft number - 203. Thankfully, Jim did not have to report for duty and the path to owning their own pet store began. Jim: I was never allowed to have a fish tank when I was younger because I had the upstairs bedroom. Just as I left for MIT, my parents had given my sister a tank. I remember writing out instructions for the filter system and mailing them back home. We troubleshooted filter problems through written correspondence! When Jim returned home from MIT, he got a tank for his parent’s basement and Margie and Jim got involved in the fish club of Rochester. They helped the club members organize and run the first official Public Fish Show in the region.
As if written in the SNL writers’ room, he returned to his parent’s basement from an amazing fish show and $1900 of fish tanks were delivered — on their front lawn in suburban Western New York during the month of August.
“We piled them in their garage, set up the tanks in the basement and filled them with fish. I guess that’s when we got into the pet store business!” This was 1970. The Seidewand’s registered their business as the Aqua Shoppe of Rochester and requested a business phone number. Their first couple of years they ran their store right out of the basement of Jim’s family home. Jim and Margie then bought their own house and ran the Aqua Shoppe out of that basement until about 1977 when they leased their first retail location from Wegmans on Lyell Avenue in Rochester, NY. Margie: It was September 1974. We got married with one night’s notice. Told our family to meet us at the chapel the next morning. I never wanted a big wedding.
The couple honeymooned in Acadia National Park, Maine in Margie’s father’s VW camper. The same VW camper that these two pet store-owning, hippy-lovers would transport their fish in from Buffalo. On Wednesdays they would close their basement store to shop the two fish distributors in Buffalo. Everything they bought they would bring back in that VW camper. Jim: It really wasn’t made for transporting things, especially fish. Until this point in their journey, the Seidewands had only dealt with fish. It wasn’t until they opened their second location that they started selling family pets and became the Pet World and Aqua Shoppe of Rochester that we know today. Jim and Margie were on the cutting edge of family pet retail. They were designing displays that created a whole new shopping experience for their customers. Jim brought that capability in-house with the acquisition of a small carpentry business and stood up ten pet stores in the Western New York and Finger Lakes regions by the mid 1990s. Word of their success started to spread. Soon they had designers from corporate box chains flying in to see what they had done so they could replicate it for their stores and a contract with a uniform retail chain for fixtures at 300 locations. For 14 years Jim maintained his position as a quality control technician for 3M. He resigned to run the business full time in 1984 with four stores open and the other six on the horizon. Margie: Back then, everything was word of mouth. We didn’t even have a sign. The only thing we had on the front of our house was this stainless steel mobile. It was two fish that swim around in a circle. Everybody knew that mobile as the Aqua Shoppe.”
