Our business today is very different from its beginnings in the electronics business over 25 years ago. We began the journey opening on November 19th 1992 with Mall based NOBLES in today’s Destiny USA. The environment was intense. It was characterized by unique acts of commitment to our collective goals of excellence and sustaining the business operations. We had a full line offering in TV’s, Home and Car Audio, Portable Devices including Cell Phones and Pagers. Those early years were exciting as the technologies we provided evolved at a pace no one could have predicted. The distribution of the products associated with them evolved in ways that were new to the industry and just as exciting.
By 1998 the strategic decision was made to focus all our collective efforts on the wireless business for a variety of reasons. Our initial operations were spread across the non-white goods segment with TV’s, VCR’s, Camcorders and Stereo equipment demanding a majority of our attention. Wireless was a segment of our product spectrum that would have been allocated 5% of our retail square footage. We quickly recognized that this emergent wireless product set was providing more than 60% of our profits and the need to change was apparent. South Western Bell was acquiring the CellularOne operating franchises nationwide and Upstate NY was in their sights in the early 1990’s. Focused indirect Wireless-only retail distribution was introduced to upstate NY and with that wave our current company was spun out of it more diverse roots.
Our first wireless-only location was in Ithaca NY in July of 1995 and was an out of the box success at an unanticipated level. We grew quickly adding locations in Auburn, Rome and Fayetteville. All were successful as the market demand was high for the newly available to consumer product. SBC remained committed to developing a dealer network and we benefited from their direction. By ’98 we were out of our original Electronics operations and were focused exclusively on Wireless with South Western Bells evolving business.
Today we’ve grown to 21 AT&T locations, 6 Greenfield Wireless Cricket showrooms and are the solid leader in wireless & entertainment retail distribution in UNY. We geographically span from Dunkirk to Albany and from Corning to Malone. We’ve remained focused on UNY. We know the geography we serve well and are integrated and active in our operating markets. We care about these communities and work to advance opportunities for economic growth and career development.
We’re at the beginning of the next big wave of growth in our industry. Wireless is now an integral part of our day to day lives. We’re all connected at levels we couldn’t have anticipated 10 years ago and couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago. Delivery of content to our personal iPhone or Android is nothing short of exploding and that trend is going to continue to see geometric growth into the foreseeable future.
What’s next for us in the context of this expanding technology? We expect to continue with our growth trajectory and accelerate. How are we going to manage this growth? People. Our people are the key and our business model of operations remains our “secret sauce”. We focus on developing our people to be positioned to deliver the customer experience demanded in today’s world of rapidly changing customer needs and technology complexity. We’re adapting and changing as the times dictate. It all starts with a relentless pursuit of understanding our customers wants and culminates with being positioned to satisfy them. We do this with services and technology that integrate to synthesize solutions that seamlessly facilitate their lives. It all starts and ends with the customer. It’s up to us to fill in the middle. And make it fun.
Dave Mueller Founder of The Cellular Shop began this business with an understanding of Technology and an abundantly clear vision of growth potential. His personal philosophy has been incorporated into our every day...it has carried us through our years of growth and understanding.
OUR MISSION STATEMENT
"To deliver personalized customer experiences through emphasizing and building our human capital, while simplifying the complexity of technology in a world of rapidly evolving customer needs. Through a community minded approach, we earn the trust of our customers, and the loyalty of our employees."
