The last buttons will be counted out on Dominion Road at the end of January.

At the large wooden counter towards the back of the store, Derrol Lamb measured two meters of cream poly cotton from a roll of fabric. Once out, he deftly ran big silver scissors along the weave and then folded it up into a bundle. Last Friday morning, Geoff’s Emporium was humming. In front of Lamb, customers lined up with rolls of fabric, tubes of buttons and spools of thread. At the other counter in the middle of the store a woman and her daughter waited to buy some bundles of tinsel for 25 cents each. “I don’t want to tell the customers that the shop is closing,” said the shop assistant, pressing numbers into the till. “We know,” said the woman. She looked down at her daughter. “It’s our favourite shop.” This must have been a familiar phrase. “It’s everyone’s favourite shop,” said the staffer.

Geoff’s Emporium has filled the shopfront and warehouse space at 274 Dominion Road, Mount Eden since 1980. Geoff Lamb, who had had a string of endeavours and shops, leased the old Bell Radio & Television Corporation factory, filled it with an eclectic mix of surplus products, end of lines, fabric, manufacturing errors and anything else he could get his hands on for a bargain, and called the place his emporium, joining his friend Arthur in a fledgling emporium empire. In 1983, Geoff convinced his son Derrol (also known as Ike) to open his own emporium in Browns Bay. Then about 10 years later, Derrol took over Geoff’s Emporium, but Geoff never really retired. He came into the shop every day until his death in 2007. In the shop’s 44 years, its bright yellow and black signage has become an iconic part of Dominion Road’s landscape, and its interior a haven for locals, crafters, sewers, artists and bargain hunters. 

Despite its status in the community, and money still coming in, the time has come for Geoff’s to close. “It’s been more than a business for our family,” says Derrol. He’s asked a staff member to cover for him at the fabric counter and we’ve squirreled through a little door in the side of the shop into his office. The walls are a dark wood veneer covered in carefully painted New Zealand landscapes. There’s a larger canvas with a black and white photo of women sitting in a manufacturing line, taken here on location, when Bell radios were being made in the 1950s or 60s. The room is full to the brim of stacked cardboard boxes, a pile of which tumble when I shuffle my chair a little closer. Behind Derrol’s desk is a shelf full of manilla folders, and inside them are samples of trims and ribbons. 

Derrol is nearly in his GoldCard era and, between Geoff’s and Ike’s Emporiums, working seven days a week. “It’s too much for anybody, let alone somebody of my age,” he says. He’s propped his reading glasses up on his head, atop his silver hair. The decision to close Geoff’s was not made lightly, nor did it come easily. It’s something he’s been thinking about “​​for quite a long time”, and putting off “for a while”. What finally got the closure in motion was an upcoming lease renewal. Typically, they’d be looking at signing another lease for six or more years, but “that just won’t work for us, that’s too long for me, anyway”. The possibility of selling the shop was floated, but the landlord wasn’t too keen on continuing with a different tenant. It was decided that the building would be put up for sale, and Geoff’s would close. 

And so, the building has sold, and Geoff’s has a tentative closing date. “I’ve said, ‘look, the 31st of January’, a day I’ve picked out of the blue. I don’t think we’ll close before then, because we’re gonna need a month to clean up. We’ll call it the 31st. If we drift into February a little bit, that’ll be great.”

Lamb considers it a blessing in disguise to have a leaving date, as otherwise he says he would probably “procrastinate for another few years and keep working”. It’s hard to shut up the shop that seems to be an extension of his father, but Derrol thinks that “he’d be stunned that we’re still going 40 years later”. When you do the numbers, Derrol has in fact run the shop for more years than his father. It’s hard to beat the fact that his dad worked there till his last day though. Geoff went straight from the shop to the hospital, stayed overnight and died the next day. 

Geoff loved his emporium – in a 2013 entry to Auckland City Library’s oral history archive Derrol said, “he worked his last day, which I think would have made him happy.” While Derrol loves the shop too, he’s got more to consider. While Geoff had Derrol to take over and continue running the shop, Derrol’s children have other plans. “It’s just one of those things,” he told me last month. Now he adds that if “something happened to me” he wouldn’t want to leave his wife to cope with the “mess”. “That’s a fact that you’ve got to consider when you start to get a bit older.”

In his actions, Derrol is pragmatic. He says he’s “not an extremely emotional person”. But when talking to me his voice wavers, and his eyes mist. This has been “an especially sad time”. The hardest part so far has been telling the staff. It’s a small team, and some of them have been here for three decades. They’ve watched each other’s children grow up, and “I guess you say they become family”. The day he had to tell them was one of the hardest days of Derrol’s life, up there with the deaths of his parents. “I just didn’t want to get in the car and come to work,” he remembers. Yet despite the fact they will be losing their jobs, they’ve been “sensational” and “supportive”. 

Then the next announcement came – telling the public. Last Monday a big “closing down sale” banner went up in the front window. Another was attached to the chainlink fence by the back entrance. Near the roll-up door, an A4 printout provided more detail. “The old guy who runs the place is becoming a little too long in the tooth and needs to slow down a bit,” it read. “We have had a wonderful time here over the past four decades. So many creative characters and personalities have passed through these doors, such an amazing array and cultural backgrounds and styles. We thank you all.” A similar message was posted on the shop’s social media pages. 

The tributes started coming in. People commented online and walked through the door. For the past week, Geoff’s has been especially busy, and almost everyone has memories to share. They’ve come here since they were little, their grandmother came here or it was the very first shop they came to when they immigrated to New Zealand. At the counter, they tell the staff and Derrol how much they will miss it. In the aisles, total strangers chat to each other about the shop. “It’s meant a lot to people over the years – I did know that,” says Derrol, “but you’re confronted by it, when a situation like this comes.” The mist in his eyes is rising again. “I kind of kept it compartmentalised, it kind of hasn’t really hit me yet, but I think the final couple of weeks are gonna be tough.” Derrol says people can see he’s gotten older, and while they’re sad the shop is closing, generally the sentiment is, “Oh, you are getting on a bit. You do deserve some rest.” 

Though the “old guy running the place” is hoping to slow down and do some fishing, he won’t exactly be retired. He will be at Ike’s Emporium in Browns Bay, the shop he started in 1983 under his dad’s tutelage and that his wife Heather has been running recently. While much of the stock will be the same (whatever is left over from Geoff’s will go there), Derrol will miss the people at Dominion Road. The staff, the suppliers and the customers. He says he will even miss the one-in-100 customers who are difficult. 

When we’re done talking, Derrol jumps straight back behind the counter. A woman is buying 10 meters of black elastic. “It’s so sad you’re closing,” she says. Derrol nods. “It’s just time.”