Neighborhood Joint | Soho: At Dube Juggling Equipment in SoHo, Things Forever Seem Up in the Air

“Not to toot our own horn, but we’ve got a community that’s fairly geeky, fairly technical, definitely artsy,” Brian Dube, the proprietor, said. “But anyone can juggle balls.”

And balls line the laboratory-white walls of the small showroom: contact balls for body rolling, bounce balls for tricks, Russian balls for head balancing, illuminated balls for nightclub visibility and exerballs for bodybuilding. Clubs, whips and knives each have a section. Bowlers and derbies hang from a hat tree near the unicycle. Hula hoops are tucked inside Troo Hoops Alley.

Mr. Dube, 61, stumbled into the business after he dropped out of N.Y.U. and became a juggling addict. “I was eating, drinking, thinking juggling every minute of my life,” he said.

When he learned it would take six months to have custom juggling clubs made, Mr. Dube, the son of a Maine lumberjack, started building them himself in his Washington Square apartment. At his first juggling convention in Delaware he sold out of his products before he could leave the parking lot.

Thirty-seven years later, Mr. Dube employs nine people in the 5,000-square-foot loft he has leased since 1991, most of it used for manufacturing, storage and office work. Only 10 percent of his sales come from walk-in customers, he said, but the showroom is lively, often becoming a stage for the children, hobbyists and performers who hang out there.

On a recent afternoon, Kyle Petersen, 27, a professional juggler, occasional David Letterman guest and star of Mr. Dube’s how-to videos, wobbled across the floor on a miniature clown bike.

“It becomes second nature after awhile,” said Mr. Petersen, his knees practically knocking into his ears as he rode. “Before you know it, you won’t even want a regular bike,” Mr. Dube joked.

An employee, Natalie Wise, said, “My friends are often surprised to find a place where they can actually try out the products.” Ms. Wise, 28, specializes in “all things flow” — practices like hula hooping, poi and fire spinning. She said it had not been easy to impress her colleagues. “This is a serious art form,” Ms. Wise said, “but the juggling community likes to joke that we’re just a bunch of hippies in long skirts dancing around.”

Mr. Dube, who these days spends less time juggling and more in the minutiae of product design, has been working on a programmable LED hula hoop with an accelerometer that will measure movement.

“If we don’t come out with it first, we’ve probably thought of it,” he said.

Neil Abramson, a filmmaker visiting from Los Angeles, shopped while consulting by phone with his 11-year-old daughter, a performer in a youth circus troupe; he had been dispatched to find red-and-black six-panel juggling balls. Seeing Mr. Petersen spin a hula hoop from his nose, Mr. Abramson turned back to his phone and said, “You’d really like this place.”

Another customer, Aidan Dunfey, who sails schooners on the Hudson River and who hoped to replace his homemade, leaking, salt-filled tennis balls with something more refined, tossed beanbags from hand to hand.

“I have trouble quieting my mind,” he remarked, “but juggling seems to do it for me.”

Around the corner, Mr. Dube listened from a desk piled with paperwork, light strips, a melting-clock prop and an employee’s birthday cake. “Hearing people juggle in the showroom is buried in my subconscious,” he said.

Then he tossed out a question.

“What is the sound of three clubs juggling anyway?”

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