Well-crafted niche strategy
Entrepreneur's Jewish art kits beautify articles used in worship

By staff writer Danielle Kost
Photo by Aimee Wiles, Staff Photographer

To Yorron Hackmon, paper challah covers don't convey the importance of Jewish traditions. Yet when he was a teacher, he saw his colleagues passing out crayons and plain paper to students to make covers for the bread traditionally served during sabbath and holiday celebrations. "Starting out, working with other educators, I would see them giving children 'schlock' to work with," said Hackmon, owner of Rochester-based Judaic Art Kits. It inspired Hackmon, a former religious educator at Temple B'rith Kodesh on Elmwood Avenue in Brighton, to develop his own high-quality Jewish craft kits - a project he has since developed into a growing business.

Hackmon, 36, was frustrated by the lack of Jewish craft projects, so seven years ago he started looking for better cloth and paint markers for his students to use to make prayer shawls. The beautiful projects that resulted prompted Hackmon to show his kit at a Jewish educators conference, where they were a hit.

Hackmon took $5,000 of his savings and started selling prayer robe and prayer book cover kits from his Rochester home. He had about 20 Jewish schools and temples around the country as costumers. Now, Hackmon regularly supplies more than 600 institutions in the United States and Canada. He declined to give specific sales figures but estimated that sales have more than doubled since the early days of his business. Hackmon has quit his teaching job, hired seamstresses and artists and poured money into marketing, he said. His catalog and Web site (www.artkitsetc.com) list more than 30 products - from $4 skull cap kits to $92 wedding canopies. The kits include everything from patterns to cloth and let families personalize items they use when they worship.

Though material success is nice, bringing generations together to work on a craft and livening up Jewish education has been more fulfilling to Hackmon. Robin Shiffrin, education director at Temple Sinai in Penfield, has bought Hackmon's prayer book cover kits for her classes for six years. "He fills a niche that has been missing in terms of giving parents and kids the tools to make beautiful Judaic crafts," she said. "It's part of the whole package of trying to make religious school and culture more interesting." One time, Hackmon received a call from a customer whose son crafted a prayer shawl for his Bar Mitzvah using one of the kits. At the ceremony, the rabbi called the boy's father up to the front of the congregation, where his son presented him the shawl. "It's really an amazing thing," Hackmon said. "It makes your heart warm."