As the owner of Drumlins Pharmacy, Stan Meyerson began offering vitamins to his Central New York customers long before the health craze caught on.
“Now you walk into a pharmacy and there’s aisles and aisles of supplements and vitamins and herbs, and you don’t think anything of it,” said his daughter, Wendy Meyerson. “But 20 to 25 years ago? That wasn’t the way it was.”
As the owner of Natur-Tyme, the 30-year-old business her father would buy and eventually make his own, Wendy is carrying on the old man’s dream — and she’s doing it with a flair for innovation that must run in the family.
Stan died in 2002, but Wendy knows her dad would be proud of the natural health store’s most recent move from Bridge Street to Erie Boulevard’s Empire Plaza. The store celebrated a grand opening of its new, expanded spot in the former home of Goldberg’s Furniture showroom on Aug. 18.
In all, the move took about three years.
“We’re thrilled to be here, and it was a long, arduous journey,” Meyerson said. “But it’s here, and it’s up, and it’s going.”
With the move, the store has added a salon, the Tyme-Out Café and the Stan Meyerson Community Room, named in honor of Wendy’s father. Meyerson has also brought on about 25 new employees to accommodate the expansion.
“We wanted to create other areas of the store that would make people want to come in and have an experience, in addition to purchasing their products,” she said.
At the in-store salon, Natur-Tyme is offering massages, facials, haircuts and colorings using all natural, non-toxic products.
“To me, the beauty is that you can take it with you,” she said.
As for the new café, she admits to being new to it — “I am not a chef,” she said. But she said she’s thrilled to see people trying unconventional, energizing health foods like wheatgrass juice shots in her store.
She takes special pride in the community room, where the public will get to learn from practitioners, local farmers and others educators at no cost — all in the name of her father’s commitment to educating and empowering the people of Central New York.
“No money will exchange hands in that room,” she said. “It’s all about the pureness of education and information. I’m very proud of that.”
With the move, Meyerson said the store has become even more dedicated to offering locally made products. For instance, Meyerson has partnered with Nelson Farms and Regional Access, a distributor out of Ithaca, to ensure that the store’s shelves are well stocked with goods made in Upstate New York.
“It’s very exciting to be able to have milks and cheeses and meats [from local farms], and people are welcoming that,” she said.
She said that 15 years ago, new natural products would gain popularity locally, “and eventually we would set them free, and we’d find them in the mass market retail establishments.”
“The distribution has changed, and now these products go right out into mass market distribution,” she said. “So I wanted to really find some really beautiful products that are local and sustainable, and that people might know the farmers or feel comfortable that they know where their foods are coming from.”
Meyerson, who bought Natur-Tyme 15 years ago, works alongside her husband, Andy Fox, who she calls her “partner in love and life.” Fox is CEO of NEEDS, a supplemental-medicine mail-order business also started by Wendy’s father. Its offices were moved from Solvay to the new Natur-Tyme location last year.
