Bill and I went up to Van Homan's shop last Saturday moring to ask him a few questions about his establishment, which is quite cool, by the way. His shop, or "boutique" as he described it, is among the best bmx specific shops I've ever been in. Instead of trying to describe the shop, I'll let the interview and photos speak for it.
     After the interview, Van pointed us towards a place called Big Mike's Grill to get some eats in Pennsville. The cheesesteaks were primo; Good choice and thanks!

My name is John Vander Homan, the 3rd but everyone’s always called me Van since the day I was born. I'm 26 and I'll be 27 soon.

Jeez I guess I’ve been riding over 15 years now. 15, 16, somewhere in there.

Nahh, the only memory of mountain bikes, I think, is when I was like 14. I jumped the big doubles at the trails with a mountain bike. Pretty scary.

I ride for FIT, Little Devil, Orchid Shoes, Coalition Parts, and Duo Grips and Tires.

[Laughs] Yeah, and 2 by 4 by default I guess.

We've been here about 3 months.

Yeah, we do BMX and skateboards. We stick primarily to BMX as far as bikes go. We’re kind of a specialty store; we don’t really branch out into other bikes. More of a boutique than a typical bike shop.

We're just trying to do a lot of events, not just sit back and wait for people to come through to make money; trying to give back a little bit and give people a reason to want to be here. So what we did for Halloween is...one of our team riders came by, Brian Wizmertzky, and we called the event Hallowiz and had 10% off of anything black and 20% off of anything orange. We had a Brian Wizmerzky look-a-like contest and gave away a bunch of prizes for anyone who dressed up. We also released a Brian Wizmerzky signature shirt. We’re just trying to keep it fresh.

Yeah a lot of kids came out and it was a good time. It was just a good vibe, you know, which is what were really trying to create here. Just a place where people can come chill, hang out and feel comfortable.

I definitely thought a lot in the past about starting up a company or something to that nature. The more I thought about it over the years, the more it seemed like a shop was the right thing to do because I kind of enjoy interacting with the people and being on the ground level and not just trying to run a big business

I forget exactly who thought of it but it was just in a brainstorming session, some one thought of two wheels and four. At first I wasn’t even going to call it that, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a good fit and it seemed like it would work well for logos and a lot of room artistically. You can write it out or use numbers or what ever.

Yeah it's kind of really weird because when I was growing up, there wasn’t really many riders at all, then while I was living away from here for the past 7 years I would come back and look at the old spots and I would see tire marks all over the walls and stuff and I was like man there must be riders here now. And now I moved back and there’s a whole bunch of riders between here and Penn’s Grove and the surrounding towns. There’s tons of kids, like younger generations and there really is a lot of riders for a small town. Its actually pretty unbelievable.

Yeah, I moved out when I was like 19, I lived in PA for like 7 years.

Yeah I started to go to college; I went for a year of community college, and started to travel a lot, and it just came down to choice: If I wanted to ride or go to college.

Smurf’s one of our employees here. We have two employees; we have Smurf and Ryan kid. Ryan’s actually our mechanic type guy. He’s real good at lacing wheels and working on bikes. That’s what he’s doing in the back now, putting some brakes on.

Yeah, like I said, we only do bmx bikes, we only work on bmx bikes, but yeah, we do repairs and stuff too.

Yeah it’s awesome, it seems like they're starting to happen a little more like...I always hate comparing bmx to skateboarding but it does seem like in a lot of aspects we’ve kind of been playing catch up to them and I think the shops is the final frontier. I think bmx has established itself as a industry where it's self sufficient and there’s a lot of good companies making a lot of good products now and we don’t have to depend on big corporate brands to support our sport. Now having core shops that can get the products out to kids and give them a place to hang out and come check things out is key I think.

Yeah, 2by4store.com. We’re hoping to eventually get into an online store but as of right now we’re not set up for that.

Yeah it’s definitely a lot of work but it’s a lot of fun too; It’s real rewarding to see people excited about it and people coming in. It’s kind of cool that it seems like it’s actually working so far. I think we’re off to a decent start and hopefully it will keep up.

No, well a lot of it’s inspired by me, but I have people that help me. I’m not the most artistic or computer savvy guy, so my friend Josh Clancy helped with the initial logo with the 24. And I had an idea for the Wiz shirt and this girl Lauren helped lay it all out and made it come to life. So yeah, I kind of just deal with friends. It’s pretty awesome. What’s cool too is that you kind of met a lot of friends over the years and we’re all getting older and we’re all doing our own things and it's cool to be able to work with these people on a business level. It's still fun though because it’s your friends, so it’s cool that you don’t have to deal with some stiff business guys. Like, my friend Ralph printed up the Wiz shirts for us and you know its cool to deal with people that you can relate with.

Yea, it is.