My Biz: Center caters to quilters, seamstresses

Owner: Jill Reicks

Owner and store manager: Therese Gansen

Company: Pine Needles Sewing Center

Address: 1000 Old Marion Road NE, Cedar Rapids

Phone: (319) 373-0334

Website: www.pineneedles.net

Elevator Pitch: 100-plus classes a month

CEDAR RAPIDS - As Jill Reicks tells it, “I am a third-generation business owner and I swore I'd never be in business.”

But the former elementary teacher ran a sewing business when her children were young. When it came time to return to teaching, she said she “fell into business.”

That business, Pine Needles Sewing Center, today is home to sewing classes, hundreds of bolts of garment and quilting fabrics and supplies, the Swiss-made Bernina sewing machine line and full tech and service support for all makes of sewing machines.

The store, which originated in Cresco, Iowa, in 1999, opened in Cedar Rapids in 2003, then expanded and moved into its current location on Old Marion Road.

Reicks, whose duties include marketing and instructions, owns the business with her husband Henry. Their daughter, Therese Gansen, manages the day-to-day business operation.

The store employs 20 people - 11 full time and 9 part time - and is open 7 days a week.

“We teach over a hundred classes a month here in this store,” Reicks noted. “Many of them are free or very inexpensive.”

But Pine Needles is not geared solely toward quilters, she said.

The center brings in sewing experts and national speakers, as well as stocking for the fabric and sewing needs of quilters and garment seamstresses alike.

“We carry 10 full lines of fashions fabrics - everything from corduroy to rayon to knits,” Reicks said.

The store also teaches an ABC sewing class - that is, Absolute Beginning Creative Sewing, exaplined Gansen, who came into the family business right out of school.

“We want people to understand that you don't even have to know how to put one of those little threads in the bobbin,” added Reicks.

“With the ABC class we do aprons, tote bags, home decorating projects, place mats, table runners and the like because not everyone has the time and the money to invest in a quilt,” Gansen added.

“In our industry, the demographic for the quilter is aged 57,” Reicks continued. “But our target market that we're in now has lowered in age - there has been a great resurgence of interest in people creating and making their own, so we've seen the influx of the 20- and 30-somethings come in the door.”

The store owns all 600 quilts on display, and proceeds go to local charities, such as the Catherine McAuley Center for Women in Cedar Rapids. To date the store has raised over $65,000 for the center.

“We are working to launch a new website called Stitches for Hope, but it isn't done yet,” Reicks added.

Know a manager or owner of a business in operation for at least a year that should be considered for “My Biz”? Contact business editor Michael Chevy Castranova at michael.castranova@sourcemedia.net