Meet Tauty Shalna of The Bagel Place in Newton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tauty Shalna.

Tauty, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
The Bagel Place originally started in Burlington, Vermont around about 2012-2013 by my dad Algis, my brother in law Nate and myself. Although the obsession my family has with bagels can be derived much earlier from my dad who had a bagel as his first meal in America; we are originally from Lithuania. So once our favorite bagel spot in town had closed its doors we desperately wanted to fill the void. However, we weren’t interested in simply fulfilling the communities’ bagel needs, but really wanted to provide customers with not only the highest quality product, but also customer care. After a few years, we wanted to expand, but felt the local area was oversaturated with bagel bakeries (currently around 10 in the area), so we opted to look outside the state. Since my brother in law, Nate, family are all Boston area natives, we felt it fit perfectly with our overall mission. We eventually settled on Newton in large part to its community orientated culture and overall proximity.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It certainly has not been a smooth road, and we did and still do encounter many obstacles through the course of daily business. In general, opening a small business in a large market like Boston naturally comes with its set of hurdles. Primarily, we definitely under estimated both the attention we needed to devote marketing and consumer education. Coming in, you really need to teach consumers about who you are and what you do. Many thought we were either a franchise, or a bagel shop that brought its product in from some distant location, rather than a family operated business making its bagels in house from scratch. One thing you forget about large city markets is the people who inhabit them have so much constant marketing thrown at them that they become very good at tuning things out. So you have to be very good and creative at not only gaining their attention but also building their trust.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The Bagel Place – what should we know?
The Bagel Place is a family owned and operated Bagel Bakery that makes all of its products fresh and in house from scratch daily. We mix all of our cream cheese flavors in house, and use freshly cracked eggs on all breakfast sandwiches. Aside from breakfast we also offer a large variety of lunch sandwiches as well. For coffee, we wanted to stay local as well, so we source all of it from Red Barn Coffee Roasters in Hopkinton. However, while we devote a tremendous amount of focus to producing a great product, what truly sets us apart is our level of customer care. When opening our first store, we never understood why all the other shops in town lacked so greatly in customer service. We felt we had unique opportunity to positively influence our customer days since we were seeing them so early in the morning. By providing the absolute best customer service we could, we believed that we could both set a positive tone for the rest of that person’s day, or change the course of someone’s day who was currently having a negative experience. We sell bagels, but like many great company’s our core business is people.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
The people who deserve the credit are both our customers as well as our staff. They have both been nothing but supporters, advisors and advocates for us since the beginning. We have been extremely fortunate to have such dedicated, hardworking, and caring staff. From putting in all the hours to run the store, to providing every customer with the best possible service, The Bagel Place simply wouldn’t be what it is without their pride and commitment. The same could be said about our customers, whose loyalty and support has been beyond any of our expectations. From their patience while waiting in our lines, or forgiveness when we messed up, they are a huge part of the reason we are where we are.

Contact Info:

• Address: The Bagel Place
  300 Needham Street
  Newton, MA 02464
• Website: www.thebagelplacemass.com
• Phone: 1-617-467-4244
• Email: tauty@thebagelplacemass.com
• Instagram: @thebagelplacenewton
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebagelplacenewton

Image Credit:
The Bagel Place Newton

Getting in touch: BostonVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.