one savvy business owner made a big change when he noticed his customers buying a lot of beer tap handles. products that weren t even part of the original plan. when you get customers calling every day, it s hard to turn them away. you know? nice people. want do give you money. i think it s a good thing. mark supic never could have guessed what his best-selling product would be when he started his small business in 1981. 20, 30 years ago, beer taps didn t play that big a part in the retailing of beer. and my feeling is that now it s a huge part. i think something we ve been very lucky to have this market find us, you know. this market grew around us. the owner of mark suphic and company in baltimore, maryland, says his clients are the reason he decided to sell his now-popular custom-designed wooden beer tap handles. before this, the customer demand was not that high. it kind of came in the back door, it was an aside and we made them because it was a good fit for us.
we have employees who really work on only tap handles. we have employees who only work on custom work. joseph supik, mark s nephew, believes the company has found a way to balance their workflow. we re fairly flexible with a lot of the stuff we can do, so we can adjust for customer nand as needed. demand for beer taps has been steady. those customers have given the business stability at uncertain times. when the millwork has fallen off, we ve been able to fill in the gaps with that. the decision to grow the beer tap handle line has worked out so well that sales for the product now account for more than 50% of business. the one catch about following customer demand is that the business is headed in a direction that mark didn t predict. he admits that making the tap handles can be a bit repetitive. it s not stimulating. so we try to move people around and we try to you know make things interesting. that being said, clients are
mark originally focused on carpentry work, building pieces like cabinets for homes. but conversations with other small business owners pushed him in another direction. i had a couple of local brewers come to me and said we want a tap handle. we made it for them. and that s where that took off. so the beer taps, i just started doing sales work. rather than drag his heels, mark recognized the potential. fortunate will making beer tap handles didn t require a major pivot in production. it wasn t difficult, we just did more of what we were doing. there was plenty of wood-turning being done on site. we make beer taps, which are primarily lathe-turned. they go directly to the breweries. we do millwork, which is primarily lathe-turned. we make stair parts, newels and spindles and handrails. the team figured out a way to accommodate all customers, especially newer ones. the answer was to simplify the design. we are a wood shop and we re