Amy Phillips Puts Her Personal Touch on Sag Harbor Hardware Store

Amy Phillips is not exactly the person you’d expect to find running a hardware store.

She holds a doctorate in social work and was happy teaching social policy to graduate students at Stony Brook University until her husband, Gene, the owner of Persan’s Hardware in Sag Harbor, died in early 2023.

Phillips, who admits she really didn’t know a screwdriver from a socket wrench, began to help out at the store when her husband was recovering from chemotherapy treatments after being diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer in 2018.

“I needed to have my eyes on the store, so he could take breaks,” she said, adding that she tried to keep a low profile. “I called myself ‘the decorator.’ I tried to keep the place nice and clean and pretty.”

As her husband’s condition worsened, Phillips, the mother of three young daughters, faced a tough decision. “The people who loved and cared about me, including Gene, said, ‘Sell the store,’” she recalled. “I had seven people offer to buy it. I had conversations with financial advisors, conversations with my family.”

She thought about moving back to her native North Carolina, going so far as to visit the state to check out houses. “I knew I could live pretty well there,” she said.

But something held her back.

“I didn’t really want to move,” she said. “I wanted to stay here and maintain a semblance of order for the kids. And that’s when I made the decision to hold down the fort.”

Once she made the decision to stay, Phillip wasted little time in bringing her personal touch to the business. “I told myself, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m going to make it mine,’” she said.

Phillips changed the name of the store to Amy’s Hardware. Then she set to work redesigning the interior.

“It served a psychological purpose for me,” she said. “I just stayed busy. Every day, I came in and found something to do.”

Gene Phillips had been thinking about shifting the layout to allow for taller shelves and a more streamlined checkout area. Last year, Phillips went ahead with the project, aided by a team from Ace Hardware, which installed the new shelves and updated the stock, leaving Phillips with pallets full of surplus goods that she sold at steep discounts at weekend “yard sales.”

She expanded the paint department and recently replaced high wooden shelves, where nuts, bolts, screws and washers were stored and accessible by a library ladder.

She gave the interior of the store a fresh coat of aqua paint that reminded her of the Caribbean Sea and cleaned out the crowded office, painting the walls purple, except for a black chalk wall on one side, and applying a coat of gold metallic paint to the old oak desk. A disco ball — which came from Studio 54 — hangs from the ceiling in the front of the store.

“Besides hardware, I wanted to have pretty things for the ladies, toys for children and good music,” she said.

Among the hand tools, plumbing and electric supplies, are scented candles, board games and even Barbie dolls.

Phillips installed a new sound system, and has classic rock on the playlist. But perhaps the biggest change is the addition of musical instruments. Phillips played flute in the high school marching band and eventually learned to play nine different instruments.

“Music is always something that brought me happiness and joy,” she said.

Working with a pair of distributors, she has stocked guitars, both acoustic and electric, violins, drums, other percussion instruments, and even the occasional mandolin or cello, all modestly priced to encourage people who are interested in learning to play an instrument but don’t necessarily have a lot to spend.

Phillips has taken to regularly redecorating the windows with lighted displays that provide a more whimsical appearance than in the past. In one window, where dusty antique hand tools used to be on display, is a trumpet and flute — symbolic, she said, of the instruments she and her husband played in high school.

Symbolism also played a role in the designation of the store’s mascot, Puddin’, who is based on the family dog and can be seen with a paint brush, driving the delivery truck or carrying a guitar.

Phillips said the summer after her husband’s death, she took her kids to the Hampton Classic. There, they came upon the Last Chance Animal Rescue booth. The kids became attached to a dog named Puddin’, and Phillips said she could not say no to adopting him when she noticed a heart-shaped patch on his head that was similar in size and shape to a heart-shaped necklace her husband had given her during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Theirs is a classic love story. Gene Phillips’s family owned a decorative lighting company, Quoizel, that was based on Long Island. In October 1995, he was in High Point, North Carolina, helping prepare the company’s exhibition at a major trade show held there. He and several other employees went to the Rock Ola Café, where Amy was working as a waitress. She said she thought he was cute and served drinks to the table, even though it was not hers.

Six months later, the couple married.

In 2003, they moved to East Hampton. Amy attended graduate school at Stony Brook University, and he became the manager of the hardware store, later buying it from Bob Persan in 2016.

Gene Phillips was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, when his wife was pregnant with their third child.

At first, things went well. “He won the lottery,” she said, and was placed on an experimental drug that reduced the size of his tumors by 75 percent. “We thought we had this,” she said.

But after four years, they learned the cancer had spread. Phillips died a few months later.

Two years after her husband’s death, Phillips has another project in mind. She plans to ask the village permission to have members of Sag Harbor Boy Scout Troop 455 paint a mural of sunflowers on the store’s back wall dedicated to her husband’s memory.

She said when they lived in South Carolina, they lost a tree in the backyard, and her husband planted sunflowers in the space.

“There’s symbolism there, too,” she said. “They’re like Gene: Always finding the positive, always looking to the light.”