Adams — The end of 2023 had special meaning for Shire Donuts proprietors Heather and Jeff King as they locked the doors to their founding Adams shop, at 52 Summer Street, on December 31 for the last time. However, when one door closes another opens, with the two now scouting out locations in Williamstown and southern Berkshire County to unfold a new shop in the near future.
“We’re excited about those possibilities,” Jeff King said. “We’re just going to let the best location and the best situation–the situation we feel is best for us—determine which direction we go in.”
Following Shire Donuts’ October 2020 opening in Adams, the couple embarked on a second location in 2022 at 813 Dalton Division Road, Dalton, and are in negotiations for another site at either Williamstown’s Spring Street or in Lenox or Great Barrington.
Although the Dalton store has “done very well,” the business’s popularity has been “less so” for the Adams shop, Jeff King said. “I think we realized at one point, looking at our market data, that a lot of our customers were actually from Pittsfield and South County,” he said. “They were making the trip up to Adams. So, once we opened the Dalton shop, they obviously went to that shop. It was closer.”
That trend negatively influenced the traffic at the Adams shop. When a couple of opportunities emerged, the idea to move the Adams shop to a different location came to fruition, Jeff King said. Williamstown is appealing to the Kings as Shire Donuts already fills large orders for Williams College and it would provide a northern Berkshire County location, he said.
The draw for a location in the southern part of the county has come from customers. “Ever since we’ve been open, we’ve had people come in and say, ‘You need to open a shop in Lenox or Great Barrington or Lee,’” Jeff King said.
He said the optimum path for the store would have been to have a new location for the Adams shop waiting to move into as the Summer Street site closed, but the end-of-year closure allowed the Kings to avoid permit renewals and fees for the site they knew would be shuttering soon.
They worked together at the Adams shop on its last day, a time both Heather and Jeff King described as “emotional.” Overall, the comments were positive since the couple posted the closing on social media, Jeff King said, with many coming into the shop on its last day to wish them luck and “to stop at the Adams shop one more time.”
The Adams store’s opening is attributable to the King family’s love for the intricate, artistic-style doughnuts they found at an Outer Banks doughnut shop while on vacation years ago with their three now grown daughters. “We often thought, ‘Gee, this would be really cool to have a shop like that back home,’” Heather King said.
Although Jeff King had a career in finance/business development at the time and Heather worked as a nurse, a job she still retains, as well as the two professionals serving as real estate agents, the pandemic allowed them the flexibility to enter the doughnut store market, she said. They also owned, and still own, the Adams building with their business partners and, with the building space available, the timing was “perfect” for the new venture, Heather King said. The vacated Adams storefront is now leasable and has been the subject of inquiry by a few people in the food industry, she said.
The Kings have been residents of Adams for decades and, as real estate agents, have bought and sold homes for customers in the area, making them “very tied to where they are,” Heather King said. For Jeff King, the shop provided an avenue to meet more locals who soon became regulars. “We got to know a lot of people that we didn’t know,” he said. “So, there’s lots of people that we saw every week. I think that’s the part we’ll miss the most.”
