Neuma Agins and Hank Reeeve

In 1987,  Neuma Agins, a successful New York City fashion designer, decided to simplify her life by moving to the rural Berkshires to make her own sweaters. Simplify? Read on!

Neuma was longing for country life and headed for the Berkshires with about $70,000 in savings and royalties and no particular business plan. Sinking roots in the Berkshires, she put a down payment on a converted barn as her new country residence, and relaxed for nearly six months, confident that when the money ran out, she would find a way to return to fashion design. Eventually, her entrepreneurial instincts took over. She used most of her remaining savings to have a company knit six classic-looking cotton sweaters from her patterns and then hired four local women to embellish them with flower motifs and lace collars in her new home. The next year, she earned a $15,000 net profit so she decided to expand.

Wanting to expand and get the growing sowing operation out of her house, Neuma found what she needed right up the road at the Whip Shop. She rented out a section of the first floor from the owners at the time – Kathleen and Dek Tillett, who ran their hand screen fabric business from the third floor. This new location fit with Neuma’s dream of one day opening her own “factory outlet” (a popular retail strategy in the 1980s) to sell her sweaters at about half the retail price. After a year of operation, her sweater sales reached an encouraging $150,000

But Neuma envisioned far more than sweater sales. She wanted a larger mall with more outlet products and country-themed wares. So in 1986, when the Tilletts put the building on the market, she bought it for $225,000 and went looking for tenants. It didn’t take her long before she had 13, including a sportswear outlet, a group of jewelry and craft designers, and a toy store where children were invited to demonstrate the merchandise.

Her Southfield Outlet & Craft Center offered visitors her own Neuma Brand sweaters and other casual clothes at factory-outlet prices – plus toys, antiques, yarns, locally made crafts and. yes, barbecued spareribs. She then dropped the historic Whip Shop name and called her business The Buggy Whip Factory, and for the duration of her ownership that remained the name.

In 1987, she added a restaurant to her growing collection of tenant-run businesses when she convinced respected local chef and caterer, Michele Miller, to take over the oldest section of the building – the unused brick-walled boiler room – to create a restaurant in that unlikely space. Her restaurant ultimately became the iconic Boiler Room Cafe and is still talked about to this day. After three years, She moved her operation to Great Barrington. (Years later Michele created the very popular Bola Granola.) Unphased, Neuma convinced another local chef, Lisa Coyne, to take over the space, operating it as the Cottage Cafe.

One of Neuma’s greatest gifts was her ability to convince people to follow their entrepreneurial dreams as her tenants in The Buggy Whip Factory.

Eight years after buying the Turner & Cook complex from the Tillets, she was running a profitable $2 million-a-year sweater company that employed as many as 250 women who hand-decorated her designs and, in the process, turned the 200-plus year-old 20,000-square/foot factory into a rustic mall “with a strictly New England mood,” as she put it. Reflecting on those days, she said, “I had done my market research. I was optimistic that this mall was going to succeed.“ And for years it did.