Greater Bay Shore coverage is funded in part by Shoregate, now leasing brand-new premium apartment homes in the heart of Bay Shore. Click here to schedule a tour.
Editor’s Note: Sugared Up! has since moved to a larger location at 522 Main Street.
Click here to follow them on Facebook.
Original story: Islip is getting a candy store.
The local family behind the new shop is working on the interior renovations now and is looking to open “Sugared Up” on Sept. 1 at 488 Main Street.
The Saggio family, also from Islip, had been planning to open a clothing boutique called Preppy Parrot — modeled after an idea Julianna Saggio, 13, came up with at school — but switched gears last month and went with candy.
Even the last-minute move away from clothing was an early lesson in business for Julianna and her brother, Frank, 14, who will be very much involved in Sugared Up, said their mom, Lisa.
“If something doesn’t feel right, even just a little bit, then it probably isn’t,” Lisa Saggio said during a joint interview with the family inside the 750-square-foot shop.
Lisa Saggio said she really liked the idea of selling a product her two children know a lot about.
“I’m not a kid, so I’m not sure what that market it,” she said. “But they know.”
“If demand goes up for a certain brand of candy, we can get it. And then we just see which does better,” said Frank, whose dad, also Frank, is doing the interior work.
The family also thought a candy shop would work well with Islip High School close by.
Sugared Up will be selling traditional loose candies, packaged candies, candy sushi, “smoking” candy bowls, hot chocolate in winter and frozen, alcohol-free mixed drinks all year-round. Those are just some of the ideas for initial offerings.
As for the candy kids are eating nowadays?
The 1990s favorite Warheads are back in full swing, as are a Japanese candy called Pocky, which are chocolate-covered biscuit sticks of varying flavors that date to the 1960s, Julianna and Frank explained.
Then there’s the interactive Bean Boozled, a sort of Russian roulette for jelly bean-eaters
‘There’s two flavors,” Frank said. “Basically a good flavor and a bad flavor.”
And the bad flavor is really bad, mom interjected.
“They’re gross,” she said. “They’ve tried to give them to me. One flavor is dirty socks.”
As for the name, Sugared Up, that’s basically the kids teasing their parents over an-often repeated phrase, said if the young ones are acting wild after eating sweets.
“We’d have the kids with us and they were always with sugar, and we would say, ‘This kid is getting sugared up again,” Lisa Saggio said.
“But something good came out of it, eventually,” Julianna said.
