Jarmazing thrives at new Freeville location

Over Independence Day weekend, Freeville and Dryden residents had the chance to attend an open house at local company Jarmazing’s new location, which finished construction in October of 2020. The new space has already allowed the business to expand, helping to counteract a tough year due to the pandemic.

Jarmazing, based on Union Street in Freeville, sells products made from Mason jars and glass bottles, including soap and syrup dispensers, spray bottles and toothbrush holders. Jarmazing owner Danila Apasov created Jarmazing in 2015, and for the first several years, the business was based at an old honey butter factory in the village, sharing a space with two other businesses.

One of those businesses was EcoJarz, a company now based in Colorado that Apasov helped found and later worked for. And it was while working at EcoJarz that inspiration came for Jarmazing, as Apasov described.

When Apasov first moved to the area in 2008, he was working remotely as a translator and video producer. But after deciding to stay, he thought “it might be a good idea to start a business of some sort to be able to continue living in the area,” he said.

“And with a group of friends back in 2011, we started a small company called EcoJarz,” he said. “And EcoJarz made and makes stainless steel and silicone Mason jar drinking tops and stainless steel straws and things like that. And then, [Jarmazing] kind of grew off as a side project of that, starting in 2015.”

Apasov explained that because he founded EcoJarz with five other friends, when the business was formed, it was successful, but it had “six heads trying to make the decisions.”

“It was like a six-headed monster,” he said. “And it was basically the equivalent of getting a master’s degree in business because none of us had any experience running a business, other than one, the majority owner of a company.”

And in 2015, Apasov read a few articles about a company in New York City whose product line was mostly based on reviews left on other products’ web pages.

“What they did is they read product reviews for different products, and they looked into those product reviews to see if there were things that customers wanted but didn’t exist,” he said. “So, for instance, they’d see a product and [customers would] say, ‘Oh, I wish this came blue,’ or ‘I wish it had an ethernet port’ or whatever it was. And they would listen to that feedback and create new products.”

Inspiration struck when Apasov checked similar pages for Mason jar items and found that there was considerable demand for better products, especially when it came to Mason jar soap dispensers. Many reviewers wrote about generally liking the product at first, but then, several months later, the metal lids would start to rust, and they had to throw it away.

“Based off that, I said, ‘Hey we’re already making stainless steel items. We’re making stainless steel parts for Mason jars. Can we make a stainless steel soap dispenser that wouldn’t rust? It’d be better quality than ones available,’” Apasov said. “And the other owners, they thought that it was a good idea but didn’t want to spend the money to do that because we were kind of tight on cash flow, but they encouraged me to do it on my own.”

And thus, Jarmazing was born. Apasov launched a stainless steel soap dispenser for Mason jars, and much to Apasov’s surprise, it started selling right away, giving him enough momentum to start the company.

For its first few years, Jarmazing saw exponential growth. But after about four years, it hit a plateau, and while the slowdown was a welcome change of pace, COVID-19 hit Jarmazing particularly hard.

Since it specializes in products that were in high demand during the pandemic, Jarmazing saw an initial large boost in sales, quickly followed by a series of supply-chain challenges.

Between the increased need for hand sanitizer and increased interest in crafts like canning, many manufacturers Jarmazing works with told Apasov that they had too much demand to be able to deliver his orders, and that delay went on for months. That made it nearly impossible to find the Mason jars that were so crucial to most of Jarmazing’s products.

“We normally go through pallet a month,” Apasov said. “So, we had to really get scrappy and find any distributor, any small company that had any stockpile. We bought up what we could just so our employees had stuff to do and we could continue with our sales. And just now, finally, about a year after we got our last order from our manufacturer, we finally got some last month. So, it took about a year for them to catch up on the capacity.”

The pandemic also slowed down the process of getting the new location ready for move-in. Construction began in November of 2019, and the shell was completed just before the March shutdowns. Slowly, Jarmazing was able to bring in the needed contractors to finish the interior, allowing Jarmazing to move in last October.

This year has fared significantly better for Jarmazing, as producers are catching up on back orders and Jarmazing now has the space it needs to expand into more product lines.

Apasov said that Jarmazing had been running out of space for a while before deciding to move. He initially approached the owner of the old location to buy the property, but with two other businesses sharing the space, there still wasn’t enough room. So, Apasov opted to build a new location that could meet all of Jarmazing’s needs.

Ironically, during the new building’s construction, both of those businesses moved out, but Jarmazing was already invested in building the new location to change gears. Beyond that, building a brand-new space allowed Apasov to include features that the old location didn’t have, like making it better insulated and bringing in more natural light.

“It’s pleasant to be in, and our employees have natural light,” he said. “They can see outside, there’s bluebirds flying around, and we see deer walking through and baby turtles come by. It’s generally a nice atmosphere to be in, as opposed to our old building, which had no windows and there was frost on the floor in the winter.”

The location also makes it easier to unload trucks without impeding residential traffic, Apasov added. And another plus to the location was one he discovered after picking it — its history.

“In the late 1800s and 1890s, there was a stained glass factory here,” he said. “When we bought the property, there was not even any trace of it visible; there was just little mounds of dirt and forest everywhere. But when we excavated and flattened the ground, we found tons and tons of broken glass, blue and green and purple, all kinds of colors, and a small brick wall that was totally collapsed.”

Apasov said that discovery made him appreciate the “temporary nature of our existence” and continues to encourage him to be thankful for the present and be less focused on the distant future. But that hasn’t stopped his planning for Jarmazing’s future.

Within the next year, Jarmazing plans to launch new products and expand to new distributors. Apasov said that Amazon is his biggest distribution platform, but the pandemic showed him the importance of diversifying his options.

Learn more about Jarmazing by visiting its website, jarmazingproducts.com.