Noelle Goudy, 27, daughter of Kilian’s owner Russell Goudy, Jr. is the fourth generation to work at her family’s iconic, nationally known hardware store. And though she’s been a full-time employee for just three years, Noelle has already placed her imprimatur on the 112-year-old business.
The brooms are levitating.
In a large display window on the Highland Avenue side of Kilian Hardware, an All Broomcorn Broom with chocolate-brown fibers and a wooden handle appears to float above a scatter of autumn leaves.
Also aloft — suspended horizontally with clear fishing line before a backdrop of orange sheeting dotted with white spider webs — is a bright green Buddy Broom, a Libman micro- fiber duster and a push-broom with a dense moustache of bristles.
That inventive tableau is the handiwork of Noelle Goudy and her involvement with the enterprise goes far beyond window dressing.
She’s been coming to Kilian’s as long as she can remember. As a child, she says, “I was asked to organize the boxes. It was more like me sitting in the boxes.” Later, along with her older sister and younger brother, she would carry batteries up from the basement. The store, with its expansive, eclectic, floor-to-ceiling inventory, became a second home.
“I liked seeing all the items: the tools, the bakeware, the different bird houses, how high the shelves were. It felt like an exciting environment; there was just an energy in the space,” Noelle says.
Even the smell enticed her: scents of new metal and old wood, freshly cut keys and just-mixed paint. She learned to stock shelves and help customers find odd items.
“All Noelle wanted to do was be on the cash register,” recalls her father. “It’s exciting to push the buttons and take people’s money.”
She remembers the first time she got paid for her work. “I’d been there all day — I think I was working on the boxes — and we went outside. [My dad] said, ‘You did so well today.’” He pulled a dollar bill from his pocket, unfolded it with a snap and handed it to his daughter.
“I was very excited that I’d helped in some way,” she says.
While Noelle had other jobs throughout high school — babysitter, tutor, counselor at a science and robotics camp — she kept coming back to the family business. “It felt normal since it was what my family did, and my dad was here.”
In small ways, Noelle began to steer the store’s direction. After attending an Ace Hardware show with her father, she urged him to stock Audubon stuffed birds — a yellow American goldfinch, a great horned owl, a blue grosbeak — that make actual bird noises when squeezed. Now tiered bins of those birds sit in the aisle near the birdseed and gardening tools.
After graduating from Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, Noelle headed to Princeton University. She thought about mechanical engineering but was drawn to the smaller stratagems of chemistry, even winning a prize upon her 2022 graduation for exceptional performance in organic chemistry. “It was appealing to understand at the most basic level how things were made and worked.”
She considered, and even applied to, medical school. She thought about a career in biochemical research, perhaps working for a pharmaceutical company. Some family members urged her to pursue those dreams; others encouraged her to come back to Kilian’s.
Her father, typically laconic, says he figured his daughter would work in academia or research. But he also remembered his own career path: He majored in math at Bard College, and professors encouraged him to go on to graduate school. “But it just wasn’t for me,” he says now. “I’d had enough school.”
In the end, Noelle deferred medical school admission to work at Kilian’s for a year. She never left. “I was very torn… but I just felt like working here made me happy. I sincerely think that I made the right decision.”
Now, Noelle can reel off the names of door hardware manufacturers — Emtek, Acorn, Baldwin, John Wright — or help a customer find the right sash pulley for a century-old, double-hung window.
She also keeps a keen eye for offbeat items that might sell well alongside Kilian’s voluminous inventory of practical things: waterproof Rite in the Rain notebooks that occupy a prized impulse-buy spot near the cash registers, or winter hats that come with three different snap-on pompoms.
Her chemistry degree hasn’t gone to waste. “It’s sometimes helpful in the store,” she says, “because I can understand when things will rust and why.” When the manufacturer of Scand- Oil, a polish for fine wood furniture, stopped making the product and refused to sell the recipe, Noelle helped figure out how to reproduce the formula.
Noelle’s sensibilities are as varied as Kilian’s stock. She loves birdwatching and painting. She dabbles in stained glass and uses her sewing machine to add pockets to her clothes. She hikes and bikes and dotes on her 9-year-old goldfish, Jay.
The seasonal window displays — not only the Halloween-themed floating brooms but one on Germantown Avenue featuring unpainted cabinets, cookware and an array of candles in autumn hues — reflect Noelle’s ingenuity. So does the store’s website, which her father first launched using a rudimentary template in 1998, the year Noelle was born.
By the time she was in college, that website was a clunky mess that relied on a near-obsolete platform. Noelle brought it into the 21st century.
“She found a new provider and redid the entire website,” says her father. “She’s done a lot of coding things that are a little beyond me now.”
If Noelle has had an impact on Kilian’s, the store has also shaped her. She remembers her grandparents, Russell Goudy, Sr. and Rebecca Shallcross Scull, the second generation to own the business. In his later years, her grandfather would sit on a chair near the entrance to greet customers by name. Her grandmother was gifted at math, interested in art and spun wool from her own sheep.
Noelle has acquired their do-it-yourself habits. She’s painted her apartment — a peach accent wall in her bedroom and a rust-orange kitchen — and installed a water filter under the sink, routing the plumbing to connect with her refrigerator’s icemaker.
“I like doing things myself,” she says. “Everything we have is built by people. I can at least try and start building a skill and ask for help along the way.”
Noelle envisions taking over Kilian’s someday. Her father’s not quite ready to retire — at 64, he figures on another half-dozen years — but he’s grateful to have his daughter as a colleague.
The feeling is mutual. When Noelle was in high school, her father gave her an Apollo tool set, 39 pink-handled pieces; for each purchase, the company donates 25 cents to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Those tools went with Noelle to college, where she used them to anchor a heavy wardrobe to the wall and tune up her bike.
Recently, when the plastic case broke, she e-mailed the company, and they sent her a new one. “This tool kit I have is really good. I’ve brought it everywhere I’ve lived. It has a lifetime warranty on it.”
Perhaps Kilian’s hold on her does, too. Even in an age of ubiquitous e-commerce, Noelle says, “There will always be a place for us. When you come here, you get to talk to someone and they can help you find what you need… I think about my grandparents working here, and even before them. It means a lot to me to know my whole family has been here.”
