50 years ago, you got jeans at Army-Navy stores. Rochester's Shed House helped change that

The Shed House was one of the first local retailers that specialized in blue jeans and mod clothes for young customers.

The business started with a single store on West Henrietta Road and grew to a chain of three dozen stores throughout the eastern United States. High school- and college-age shoppers made it their go-to place for Levi’s and other brands.

The Shed House later introduced its own line of clothing, which came with a patch of the company’s crescent moon-adorned-outhouse logo. Its commercial jingles — “Head for the Shed,” and “Everybody’s Puttin’ Us On” — were earworms for many '70s-era youngsters.

Seymour Tesler started the company in 1969, the same year as the Woodstock festival. The youth movement was in full swing and jeans were part of the unofficial uniform, but local shopping options were lacking.

“There really weren’t that many places to go,” said Eric Tesler of Fairport, one of the founder’s sons, who later ran the business. “I was getting jeans at Mack’s Army-Navy store downtown .… We were the first ones geared to teens and young adults, a place for them to buy their jeans. It wasn’t exclusively jeans, but that was a big percentage of the inventory. We probably had 50 different styles. We also sold Lee and Wrangler, but Levi’s was probably 80 to 90 percent of the market.”

Seymour was a traveling salesman who sold jeans before he opened Shed House. His brother, Sam, left a law practice in Chicago to move here and help run the business. After the first store debuted on West Henrietta Road, the company quickly expanded and had six local stores within three years.

To save space on the sales floors, changing rooms were upstairs (and the doors had that familiar outhouse-with-a-crescent-moon look). Thousands of jeans in each store were folded and stacked on shelves along the walls.

Mark Sinesiou of Irondequoit joined the Shed House in 1970 and was named general manager a short time later. He stayed with the company until the end.

“Seymour was the brains behind it,” Sinesiou said. “He just opened store after store after store. I did all the legwork for him. We started opening outside of Rochester, too. I more or less opened all the stores out of town.”

He did some modeling, too. When bell-bottom jeans were all the rage, Sinesiou was photographed for a 1972 Upstate magazine article wearing a pair of “elephant bells,” an extreme version with 40-inch bottoms. A woman in the photo was wearing “purple plaid brushed denim peanut pants (super-low rise).” The story described super-low-rise jeans as “two or three inches above the arrest level.” The Shed House stocked all of the clothing.

The pants sold at Shed House came in a selection of fabrics, including corduroy, but denim was king. “The scrubbier the better,” Seymour Tesler said in the Upstate article. He noted that Shed House even carried the popular pre-faded, soft denim jeans that were guaranteed to fade each time they were washed. “This is one business that’s governed strictly by the kids,” Tesler said.

The Tesler brothers sold stock in the family-owned company in 1973, but they remained as majority stockholders. Shed House opened its first mall store at Eastview Mall in Victor, Ontario County, in 1974. By the mid- to late '70s, the business began selling Shed House-brand jeans, work pants and more.

“A lot of the local schools required our work pants with the Shed House label to be their uniforms,” Sinesiou said. Expansion continued into other areas, including Pennsylvania, New England and Florida, and the chain eventually grew to 36 stores.

Painter’s pants, bib overalls and novelty T-shirts were added to the mix over the years. When designer jeans became popular in the late '70s and early '80s, Shed House added lines such as Calvin Klein, Jordache and Sergio Valente. But, as Sinesiou said, “Levi’s were our bread and butter.”

Things began to change when the Levi Strauss Co., which makes the jeans, began selling in national stores such as J.C. Penney and Sears. Before that, Eric Tesler said, the company was “very particular regarding the ones who they wanted to sell their product.” When the big retailers started selling Levi’s, they cut prices to levels that made it difficult for the Shed House to compete, he said.

Sam Tesler, who was company vice president, died in early 1988. and his death hit brother Seymour hard. He began closing most of the stores and had only two remaining — in Eastview and The Marketplace malls — by 1990. He sold those to his son, Eric, and Sinesiou that year.

They added shops in the Greece Ridge and Irondequoit malls and expanded the merchandise to include more T-shirts. A 1995 story described the new version of the Shed House as a “mall boutique.”

However, the end was near. The Shed House filed for bankruptcy protection in 1997. The last remaining store, at The Marketplace, began a going-out-of-business sale later that year. By 1998, the company was history.

Eric Tesler still has fond memories of the Shed House. “It was just cool,” he said. “It was a happening place.”

Countless customers from the years likely agree.

Alan Morrell is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

This article was originally published in March 2018 as part of the Whatever Happened To series.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: The Shed House sold jeans to youths in Rochester for nearly 30 years.