Many people love animals, but few, if any, have been brought up as surrounded by them as Shawn Rosen, the owner of Koi Market Aquatic Nursery in Dix Hills. He grew up in Massapequa Park in a house filled with 85 parrots, kinkajous (tropical rainforest animals similar to racoons), monkeys, snakes, lizards, ferrets, five Newfoundland dogs, what he calls “too many cats,” a mountain lion, and, in his words, “fish, fish, fish.”
“I grew up in a household known to the neighborhood as the zoo,” Rosen said of his father’s passion or near obsession with animals. “It wasn’t like a dog to walk. We had hundreds of animals. We had a mountain lion in the basement. My dad was obsessed with animals. He was obsessed with tropical fish.”
Shawn’s father, Joel Rosen, who owned Motion Performance, a muscle car builder, complete with a lion at the shop, collected animals as well as pets. He even opened a pet store called Aquarius Pet in Wantagh.
“It was a unique household. There were so many different animals,” said Bonnie Cabot, Koi Market vice president of operations, who lived across the street as a child. “Tanks were always being cleaned. New fish were always coming in.”
Rosen’s father asked Shawn at age 15 to build a koi pond, which his son, if reluctantly at first, did, building what would become a lifelong passion and business.
“He said, ‘Let’s build a pond out front,’” Shawn recalled. “We bought some pond liner. Pond supplies were very hard to come by. The hobby barely existed here in the states. We started our first pond and I was completely obsessed. I remember the first waterfall I built.”
Shawn said they bonded over an appreciation for the beauty and craft of caring for koi as well as creating and maintaining koi ponds. He designed and built a koi pond on his property followed by two more, picking out rocks, fish, water lilies and other furnishings. The pond led to a two-page write-up in Newsday in the mid-1980s.
“My father and I didn’t talk about anything else, but when it came to ponds and koi and landscaping around the pond, we talked,” he said. “I learned foreground and background and how to place stones. It was like putting a puzzle together.”
From Hobby to Career
Although Koi was a hobby for Rosen as a young man, it would only truly become a career many years later. He got a job at a nursery that was supposed to build ponds, ending up doing just about everything except that.
And he began working for video game maker Acclaim Entertainment, rising to executive producer. For more than 20 years, Rosen produced and designed video games, but in 2004, when U&I Entertainment, a video game maker he worked for, changed directions, he decided to build a pond in his backyard.
“They paid me full salary for a year, but said I didn’t have to do anything for them,” Rosen said. “I was twiddling my thumbs. So I decided to dig a pond in the backyard and I was hooked all over again.
“I decided to figure out a way to pay for this hobby so I started koimarket.com,” he said. “I was surprised it was available as a URL, but it was. We started selling pond supplies from my living room.”
Rosen started an online business, selling pond supplies, not selling fish yet. He reached out to Blackwater Creek Koi Farms in Florida, saying he could convert his backyard into a sort of store.
“They were only selling wholesale,” Rosen said. “We did a consignment deal. He picked his best fish and sent them to me and we split the profits. We became the first and only outlet store for Blackwater Creek Koi Farms.”
He put lawn signs along highways and Expressways and people started coming to his house, even as he ran ads in Chinese in a Flushing newspaper.
“A busload of customers came in one day,” he said. “I had 30 people walking around in my backyard. My wife said, ‘You proved yourself. Go and figure out how to open a store.’”
Rosen bought a one-acre property at Exit 51 of the LIE service road at 539 Deer Park Avenue, in Dix Hills, and a business was born.
Koi Market today is the biggest such koi business in the region, operating half a dozen koi houses with tanks, including quarantine tanks for fish coming in from Japan. They care for more than 15,000 koi divided by age, including a 13,000-gallon koi pond showcasing the latest in pond construction and health practices.
“We have a massive pond showroom we built for customers to see what we do,” Rosen said. “We design ponds from the basics up to the professional pond hobbyist. We sell everything including filtration systems, pond liners, skimmers and pumps.”
Rosen has since grown Koi Market into the region’s prime koi, koi pond and koi care business, caring for Japanese koi in what he calls “a responsibility we take seriously.”
They also run a Koi pharma business, selling koi care products they developed to care for koi in their facility and made commercially available. But their core business is selling koi.
“We have the healthiest koi in the country,” he said. “We follow Shinkokai standards for koi health, including koi health quarantine practices.”
For two years, Rosen also has been doing a livestreamed broadcast every Saturday at 11 a.m. on Facebook (@shawnkoimarketrosen), talking about koi, even doing episodes live from his buying trips at breeders in Japan.
“Koi hobbyists can be obsessed with finding the right koi, how to care for them, learning about the hobby and talking with other people,” Cabot said. “Shawn brings people together.”
Rosen loves letting people share their passion and answer questions, while creating a forum to teach and spread the word.
“We’ve created a huge community that — rain or shine — spends their breakfast on Saturdays watching and asking questions,” Rosen said. “It’s a live show where our audience can interact.”
Koi Market is also the home of Long Island Bonsai Supply, a bonsai store, which offers classes and what they call the largest collection of bonsai on Long Island. But koi and ponds, like small paradises, build a bridge both to his childhood and to the future.
“It’s the American dream, to be able to do something you love and make a career doing it,” Rosen said. “To be able to turn a hobby into a business that supports our family is unbelievable.”
For more information, contact Koi Market Aquatic Mursey at 516-809-6771 bonnie@koimarket.com, shawn@koimarket.com, 539 Deer Park Avenue, Dix Hills, NY 11746. Entrance on North Service Rd of Long Island Expressway at exit 51
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