ConnectPay is all about celebrating Main Street businesses. In this ongoing series, we’ll take an up-close look at the clients who inspire and motivate the ConnectPay team every day, by carrying forward the big heart and strong tradition of small business in America.
On the first Friday of each month, you’ll find Julie Vecchio’s shop in Norwood, Massachusetts, packed to the rafters. Locals gather in the art gallery inside Vecchio’s art framing business to sip wine, eat cheese, and admire the paintings and photography. The room is full of old friends: neighbors, clients, and artists who have been showcased here in the past. In some cases, it’s literally a family affair—the room is filled with guitar music played by Vecchio’s husband, Nick. On some nights, the students from his music school join him.
The First Friday cocktail parties are among a myriad of special events—drawing classes, plein air workshops, and kids programs that transform Custom Art Framing and Gallery 9 into a community space and art hub—and have helped ensure this small local business thrives in the digital age.
Vecchio grew up surrounded by artists. Her father, Don Weller, is an American Western painter and her sisters are also artists. Vecchio learned the tools of the trade when she worked in a mom-and-pop frame shop in her 20s. She feels in love with the business, and was inspired by how much human connection it fostered. She especially loved having people bring valuable paintings or photographs of special life moments to her. “That was my niche,” Vecchio says, “enjoying people’s artwork and listening to them tell the stories behind the photographs.”
At age 30, she decided to open her own framing shop. Her passion for working with people is what brought her to this industry, so she wanted her business to be a place where art lovers and artists would feel at home, and would stop by frequently, even when they didn’t have a painting in need of framing. She launched Gallery 9 so local artists would have a place to not only frame, but also showcase their work, and so that clients could come browse, take an art class, and buy a piece they loved.
While the programming was driven by her desire to build a community space, Vecchio found that making the shop a hub also fed the business. “I needed other outlets or interests to drive people into the shop and the gallery, be it through looking at artwork, art classes or gallery events,” she said. “It started off as one thing and now they’re both equally important.” Creating events that drive customers to her physical premises has become even more important with the growth in online retailers in recent years.
Beyond the walls of her store, it’s important to Vecchio that she plays an active role in the artistic life of Norwood, a historic town in the greater Boston area whose cultural life is fed by a thriving downtown and a common where locals can see concerts, plays, and town events. She spent years on the board of the local art association, including serving a term as its president and organizing “Art in the Park” displays of dozens of artists on the common. She hosts an annual showcase of student work from the local high school’s National Art Honor Society. Each year, she travels to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design for their senior portfolio reviews to offer feedback, and gives the students advice on submitting to galleries.
Her family of artists (whose work lines the walls here) loves the store and they all visit often. When her father sends her a painting, Vecchio frames it herself. Her sister will be teaching classes at the gallery this year, and the one sibling who doesn’t paint— a singer—joins on First Fridays and sings along with Vecchio’s husband, Nick.
While Vecchio set out to build a business, she’s built something even more powerful on top of that—a community. And perhaps that was her business model all along.
“If you do a good job and you have your heart in it,” she says, “people gravitate to you”.
Copyright 2019 ConnectPay
