Nye

RALEIGH, N.C. —

When Mike Nye opened a cart in a Raleigh-area shopping mall, he just wanted to sell a few T-shirts. Little did he know that nine months later, he’d be operating one of the mall’s top stores in a 7,000-square-foot space.

Initially known as Carolina Moon Graphics, Moon Street USA sells Southern-themed products and recently opened a new location to supplement its flagship store at Triangle Town Center, positioning itself as a noteworthy player in the area’s retail scene. The stores feature T-shirts, hats, drinking glasses and the like for men and women of all ages.

Nye, who is 61 and lives in Raleigh, created the business in July 2013 after a 32-year career in engineering, including positions at Cisco Systems and Intel. While he was working for Cisco in 2011, the company started making cuts, and he decided to set his sights on a more creative venture.

“I took an early retirement and scratched my head for a little while. I went on engineering interviews, and it didn’t excite me anymore,” he said. “I had always wanted to own my own business, so I spent a year studying and doing research.”

When he visited family in his hometown of Charleston, Nye said, he noticed that many people had T-shirts or car stickers with moons, a nod to the South Carolina state flag.

He realized that although he owned South Carolina-themed apparel, he didn’t have similar items for North Carolina.

Nye spent the next week scouring local stores for North Carolina-themed merchandise but either came up empty or found products that he would never want to wear. So he taught himself how to do design work and created his own. Some of them featured characters that he used to doodle on the edge of his engineering notebooks — he calls them Moonies and has them playing tennis or riding motorcycles and bikes.

He then approached Triangle Town Center with his idea, and they gave him the go-ahead to open a 48-square-foot cart, which he funded through his severance package from Cisco.

When trying to find additional merchandise to supplement his own creations, many companies told him no, saying they didn’t want to sell their products in a cart, but he eventually scored a deal with Heybo, a Southern apparel supplier based in South Carolina.

“When we opened the cart, it worked,” Nye said. “We didn’t bother anybody; they just walked up to the cart.”

Several other malls took note, wanting Nye to duplicate the cart in their locations. He opened a second cart at a different mall in September 2013 and then moved to a brick-and-mortar location in Triangle Town Center. When he opened the 1,000-square-foot space in November, Nye said, there were so many people that he could hardly walk through the store.

After turning in his sales numbers to the mall, the general manager told Nye that Moon Street USA needed a bigger space — seven times bigger to be exact.

“I had my eyes on space down the hall, and he said ‘no, you need bigger,’” Nye said. “When he showed me the space, I said ‘No, that’s not a natural progression.’”

Nye eventually agreed to the expansion, partitioning off the space and opening gradually throughout the spring of 2014. Later that year, Nye said he took his first paycheck — previously he had been rolling all the proceeds back into the business.

The company also underwent a name change in 2015, becoming Moon Street USA after Nye had difficulty in trademarking Carolina Moon Graphics because several other companies also featured the name Carolina Moon.

Two years later, Nye decided to open a second shop.

“They had a space nobody wanted to rent, and it was the one with the big front porch,” he said. “It was a (former) Hollister and didn’t fit the concept for other stores.”

To make the space feel more homey, Nye did away with Hollister’s notoriously dark vibe by painting the space white and adding a real front door and a rocking chair on the porch. The location opened in early September.

Nye said his stores now have about 20 employees total, and he no longer operates his carts. Much of the design work is still done in house using T-shirts bought from Steve’s T’s in Wake Forest. They also seek out T-shirt businesses in North and South Carolina, which make up about 50 of the companies Moon Street USA represents. All of the businesses they work with are based in the United States, but some import their T-shirts from overseas.

Ney said he especially likes buying merchandise from young vendors and has provided many with their first opportunity to sell their products in a brick-and-mortar space.