Getting Trophies in New Hyde Park

on Jericho Turnpike is nationally-known and locally-owned by Ron and Claudia Shapiro, who essentially fell into this business and started from scratch.

Before officially opening in May 2005, Shapiro said she and her husband started selling products out of their garage in 2004 until all the permits were cleared for the store.

“My husband had been in sales for 25-years of medical equipment for hospitals and the job was getting more and more strenuous on him…and he wasn’t happy where he was,” Claudia Shapiro said. “I was basically out of a job and I had started my own translation business from home but it didn’t really generate much income.”

When a good friend of the Shapiro’s, who knew the owners of the Crown Company, came to them with the job offer, they didn’t hesitate to take it. The location was already set in New Hyde Park, and the Shapiro’s thought it was perfect, only being 20-minutes away from their home in Port Washington.

“We talked to the owners; we had no idea about the business," Shapiro said. "I thought when I heard engraving that we would be sitting there with an etching needle, but the first time I saw the laser machine going, it was much easier."

Now, six years in, business had been good to the couple, who sell everything from sculptures, glass, plaques, acrylics, pins medals and trophies.

“Our top product to sell is [probably] the Rosewood plaque,” Shapiro said. “It is $50 dollars and with engraving it is $65 or $70 dollars depending on how much engraving you have, but there’s crystal and so many different styles of trophies, so it’s hard to say.”

Crown Trophy does engraving for different sports, churches, leagues, , committees, businesses and universities such as Adelphi and St. John’s.

“Most of the engraving we do here, but we cannot do engraving on certain things like actual brass or crystal and we can only engrave on flat surfaces,” Shapiro said.

If a customer wants engraving on something like a trophy cup, they send that product to other Crown stores to do the engraving there.

The full-time engraver for the store is Phil Siegel, and he uses two different machines which gets work done faster.

“Most of the time [our customers] just come in, we’re luck we’re in a very good location, so we get a lot of walk-in people and they tell us what they need and we go over it with them,” Shapiro said. “Most of the time it’s fairly easy.”

Other than the couple, Crown Trophy employs part-time helpers and trophy assemblers, but they also have a program with the Summit School in Queens, which sends children with learning disabilities to the store, among other businesses, once a week to learn and help out.

“This year it’s two [children] and they help us two to three hours to learn a little bit about the business about working together, building stuff, coming up with solutions and it helps them get a little more confident and dealing with people because a lot of them are very shy and can’t express themselves very well,” Shapiro said.   

During business hours, Ron and Claudia deal with customers, process orders, answer phones, do some engraving and trophy making.

 “I was always bad in math in school and now I’m doing the bookkeeping,” Shapiro joked. “I like best that it’s always different because I used to work in offices a lot before I started this…and I found it very boring because it’s always the same every day.”

The New Hyde Park Crown Trophy just adopted the new process of sublimation, which puts color onto plaques, cups, T-shits and more.

“We want [our customers] to feel happy and feel that they really got their money’s worth—or better—and that they are giving out something that is really worth what they made the effort for,” Shapiro said.