We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mike Brancaccio . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mike below.

Alright, Mike thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The idea for our business was born from several conversations between my business partners and myself and my wife about doing something on our own outside of and different from our normal day jobs. We all work full time jobs. My business partners (Betsy and Lenny Smith) owning another business that was featured here previously, Atomic Beauty and Barber Lounge, as a hairstylist and barber, my wife (Dawn Brancaccio) has been an elementary school teacher for 20 years and I work for Harley-Davidson and have been in the motorcycle industry for the past 15 plus years. The location was available and familiar, being the previous location of our partners salon and barber shop prior to moving to its current location, and in a great location we all felt would suit a small business like ours. The idea came from a mutual love of both aspects of our business, music and skateboarding, by all of us. Lenny and I have both been skateboarding since we were kids, Lenny also being a musician and all of us having a real love for music, it just made sense to combine these things and make this idea come to life. Skateboarding and music have always gone hand in hand. As a kid growing up skating, every skate video we watched was filled with music from start to finish. Sometimes music you already knew and loved and sometimes amazing new music that you never even knew that you needed in your life. For me, music and skateboarding are as complementary as anything. The combination of what we offer is definitely something new and fresh in our community and that’s what we intended it to be. Above all else, both music and skateboarding are FUN! Who wouldn’t want to be able build a business around things that are fun and enjoyable and make people happy?!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve been skateboarding since I was about 11 or 12 years old. It started with moving in to a new house with my family and having a neighbor who I rode the bus to school with that skated. Once I started, that’s all that mattered. I didn’t want to do anything else. I grew up playing team sports, baseball specifically, which I loved, but skateboarding was just different. All along, music was always a big part of skateboarding for me. I think I speak for a lot of kids growing up skating, but at least for me, opening my own skate shop one day was always a seemingly unrealistic dream. Which brings us to where we are now. Our shop is a record store and skate shop. We sell vinyl records in all genres of music, from punk and metal to country to hip hop and everything in between. We are also a skate shop and carry all the skateboarding hard goods (skateboard deck, trucks, wheels, bearings, etc) that you could possibly need or want. We definitely set ourselves apart by offering both of these things in one location. We’ve only been open since October of 2022 and continue to work to expand our selection and are proud of what we’ve been able to build thus far and intend to keep growing and getting better moving forward!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

So far, daily posting on social media and word of mouth have been most effective for us with bringing in new people to our business.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We used the Atomic name from my partners’ barber shop and salon, which was already recognized and has a stellar reputation in the community to help make the introduction of our business more familiar. Also, I believe if you are genuine and truly enjoy and love what you’re doing, people will recognize that and be attracted to what you’re doing.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @atomicrecordsandskate
• Facebook: Atomic Records and Skate