Community Highlights: Meet Korey Massey of The Mark-It

Today we’d like to introduce you to Korey Massey.

Hi Korey, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, you could tell our readers some of your backstory.
I (Korey) was working at The Mark-It throughout college for another owner at that time. The owner would shut the store down; he didn’t realize the amount of time and money that went into owning a store like this. So I asked my parents to look into the books and see if this was something they thought we could make work. So, on the word of a then 23-year-old, they put a second mortgage on their house and bought the shop. We became the owners in September 2009. Since we’ve owned the shop, we’ve moved into a larger building and have expanded 3 times. We are no longer just an embroidery and t-shirt shop; we are a custom gift shop. What makes us unique is we have no minimums or maximums at our shop.

Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We have had some struggles along the way and still do now. With growth, there have been staffing issues. That’s not necessarily unheard of anymore, but we’ve always taken pride that our turnover hasn’t been high over the years. It’s just more challenging for us to find the right fit for people willing to stay around and for those who have a great work ethic. Sales are only for some and especially working with the public, people can have many challenges with that. COVID-19 also presented problems in the beginning. When things started shutting down, things began to get scary for us. We knew we had to regroup, refocus, and find a way to grow our online sales. Foolishly, when Covid was going strong, we took a leap of faith and bought a big piece of equipment to help us reach the next level. I had to learn how to run this machine online, in which I am a visual person, so the learning curve was extremely hard for me, and I wanted to give up. It took me 6 months of frustration and feeling like a failure to get myself together and tell myself I had to figure this machine out because, at this time, we were losing money by letting this machine sit.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about The Mark-It?
We are a custom gift shop. When we bought the shop in 2009, we were known for custom t-shirts and embroidery. We have expanded over the years to not only do those two things, but we do UV printing, laser etching, sublimation, etc. One thing that sets us apart from others in our area is that we need minimums. We pride ourselves in the fact that we can help everyone with their needs, even if it’s for one item or thousands; we are just that flexible. We take pride in the fact that we try to stay up with the ever-changing times and equipment. We are always buying new machines and ensuring we are current on printing processes.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
People are shocked to know that we have an Etsy shop: TheMarkItShop

It’s like running another business! We enjoy it and get to show many creative things on it, and we do offer stuff that we don’t necessarily sell in our store. We are also having fun with Tiktok and making videos there. We are pretty new to it, but in the store, we are constantly listening to music and dancing, so we made a dance video, and it became viral for a couple of weeks. We like to have fun and show funny videos or let people see how things are made throughout our store.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.themarkit.com
• Instagram: themarkitshop
• Facebook: The Mark-It

Image Credits
Pictures taken by: Corey Meyers