This 82-year-old sports shop is up for sale, complete with a pot belly stove
Leanne and Dave Frandsen decided it was the right time to put their shop on the market.
After 32 years of looking after his sports shop, Dave Frandsen reckons he could quite happily stick around for another three decades.
But the 63-year-old also knew the era of running Stratford's Magnum Sports had to come to an end at some point and decided at the end of last year it was time to put it up for sale.
The shop sits on Broadway, the main street of the Central Taranaki town, and from the outside it looks like any other shop.
The shop is always filled to the roof with stock, and has an old school feel to it.
But inside, the homely feel takes customers back to a time before big chain stores became the norm and that's just how Frandsen and his wife Leanne, 57, want it.
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"We've kept our shop kind of old school and how we do it, and people like that, they really do because it's a point of difference," Dave said.
Dave said some of the heads hanging above the counter could be older than the shop itself.
"We get so many people that come in and say 'this is different, don't change anything'.
"They just love stuff everywhere and kind of just the way it is because every other store you go in everything will be neat and tidy."
Dave's shop might not be neat and tidy but it is organised and everything has a place; either on the shelf, in a box on the floor or hanging off the wall.
It's hard to find a sport that isn't represented in some way.
There's magazines and boxes of ammunition piled up on the counter and the mounted heads of deer, pigs and goats dating back from before the shop opened in 1935 look down on the customers who are often the third generation to shop there.
In the 82 years that it's been open, the shop has only had three owners: Fred Clarke, who opened it and named it Clarke's Sports, Colin and Nora Sangster, who moved the shop down the street to its present location and renamed it Magnum Sports, and Dave and Leanne, who bought it in April 1985.
Since then, every other shop between the roundabouts along Stratford's main street has changed owners at least once.
The shop has been a familiar site along Broadway for decades.
Customers come from far and wide, like the 93-year-old from Patea who came in a few years ago to buy a brand-new shotgun for duck shooting.
"A lot of people actually come down from New Plymouth for the free parking and they tell us that," Leanne said.
The pheasant sitting watch over the gun cabinet was shot and taxidermied in the 1950s.
"I'm getting in wood for that at the moment, we've run that fire every winter for the past 32 winters," Dave said.
The customers, who also became friends, would often head out the back to make a coffee before sitting down for a chat around the fire.
It wasn't unusual for the hunters and fishermen that frequented the shop to send in a few venison sausages or a freshly caught fish for Dave and Leanne.
One hunter had even loaded a freshly caught pig into the back of the rural delivery post van and asked for it to be dropped in.
Dave's story is as interesting as the shop's, after serving in the New Zealand Army for two years in Singapore.
After returning to New Zealand, he worked as a shift supervisor at the Lactose Company of New Zealand in Kapuni before his interest in target shooting led him and Leanne to buy the shop.
"I really enjoy it," he said.
"It's not like work, it's just something I love doing."
The rise in online shopping hadn't slowed down sales, with last year their best ever and this year also starting strong, Dave said.
"I don't know what it'll be like when I knock off but it gets to the point where you, you just have to knock off.
"It's just not like a job."
- Stuff
