If you’ve ever taken a walk around Town, you’ve probably noticed that there’s no lack of College merch. Purple sweatshirts embroidered with “Williams” or cow-motif sweatpants, hats, bags, and t-shirts seem to be a common uniform for students and faculty alike. Even the dogs around here have Williams-branded collars.
Many students at the College will tell you that the best place to buy this merchandise is the Williams Shop at 15 Spring St., owned by the Goff family. From prospective students to alums returning for the weekend, the store seems to have something for everyone. So, how did this store we know and love come to be?
The Williams Shop was not always a merchandise store — rather, it began as a sports shop that sold everything from baseball bats to tennis racquets, and even skis. The store, called Goff’s Sports, was opened in 1969 by Rudy Goff, the head golf professional at the Taconic Golf Club and head coach of the men’s golf team from 1964 to 1983.
According to his son, Bruce Goff ’83, Rudy started the business along with his wife, Joanne, as a way to stay busy during the off-season. “His winters were pretty quiet,” Bruce Goff said in an interview with the Record. “So, he [asked himself], ‘What could I do in the wintertime when it’s not as busy?’ He decided to start a sporting goods store with my mom.”
First, they needed a location. Rudy and Joanne Goff decided to buy the Dempsey Building on Spring Street, which then housed the Williams College Pharmacy, and the couple converted the store into Goff’s Sports. In addition to selling sports gear, Goff’s also had a small collection of clothing merchandise. The clothing items became so popular that in 1985 Rudy and Joanne bought an adjacent section of the building, according to Bruce Goff. “We had two stores for a while: Goff Sports and the Williams Shop,” he said.
In 1993, the Goff family removed the wall between the stores and merged them to create the Williams Shop as we know it today.
Bruce Goff graduated from the College in 1983, and later decided to bring his wife and daughter back to Williamstown from Boston. After his father passed away in 1990 at the age of 55, Bruce Goff took over the family business. Since then, he has computerized the store, built a website, and increased the amount of custom clothing embroidered in-house. In the back of the store, they have a few incredibly heavy and complex embroidery machines that they recently purchased to keep up with the increasing demand for custom embroidery orders.
Bruce Goff said that these changes have helped the business become more efficient. “Now we can track inventory and do reorders on a timely basis instead of going into the basement and counting shirts,” he said. “It’s easier to manage that way.”
What makes the Williams Shop unique is that it does all of its merchandise buying in Williamstown, from brand representatives who travel directly to the store. “My Champion rep comes here, and my Nike rep comes here,” Bruce Goff said. “My daughter, Kim, and I do the buying.” For companies like Nike, the designs are embroidered onto merchandise off-site. But for smaller companies and smaller orders, merchandise is embroidered in-house.
According to Bruce Goff, other college stores have to outsource their merch from major cities such as Chicago and New York, which can lead to a delay of up to three to four weeks for products to arrive.
These days, Bruce Goff’s daughter, Kim, is gearing up to take over the family business. She’ll represent the third generation of Goffs to run the Williams Shop.
Bruce Goff said he feels proud of the success of the family dynasty. “We’ve had a bit of a legacy in town since ’64,” he said. “I like to consider myself the current caretaker of the family business, and my daughter, Kim, is pretty much running things now. The fourth generation helps out, too. I’m just one step in the legacy that’s going on here.”
Over the course of 57 years and three generations, the Williams Shop has endured many changes, with no end in sight. Bruce Goff said that the store is always trying to adapt to customer needs with new technologies and products. “When doing the printing [of merchandise] ourselves, people will say, ‘Do you have this, do you have that?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, but that’s a good idea, we’ll try it,” he said. “If it’s something we can print or stitch ourselves, we will. We’re always open to hearing what we don’t have and making sure we get it.”
One of these exciting new inventory items, Goff added, will be dog sweaters.
Next time you head over to the Williams Shop for a College keepsake, Bruce Goff has a standout recommendation for what to buy: “The heavyweight Champion hoodies. They’re just solid. You can’t kill them. They get stained eventually, but they last forever.”
