A FEW APPLES A DAY

ON paper, Mikey Weiss doesn’t seem like your typical business owner. He prefers sweat jackets to sport coats, toured with a ska-punk band instead of going to college, and would rather play games with his employees than tell them what to do.

But over the last seven years, the musician-turned-entrepreneur has transformed a sidewalk business in Williamsburg into Mikey’s Hookup, a thriving Apple retailer and repair outfit that’s as unconventional as he is.

A bass player for the Dance Hall Crashers in the 1990s, Weiss arrived in Brooklyn from Berkeley, Calif., at the dawn of the millennium in search of a new direction.

“Some band members were settling down and having kids, and I was looking for something more stable, too,” he says. “I started touring right out of high school, so I never had a chance to figure out what I wanted to do.”

Weiss had friends in New York, and though he originally planned to stay in Williamsburg only a month, he was drawn in by the neighborhood’s sense of community. After working at a local café and video store, he came up with the idea to create eBay pages for local businesses.

“They’d tell me the minimum they’d take for an item, and anything above that amount we split 50/50,” he recalls. To hedge his bets, he also charged a 10 percent fee for his services.

In 2001, Weiss struck gold with another off-the-books business, selling audio/video cables from a table on Bedford Avenue.

“I’ve always been into recording music on my computer, but when I got here there was no place to buy stuff like adapters and blank CDs,” he says. Spending a few hundred dollars on assorted wires and plugs, he manned his counter every weekend and became a hit with the neighborhood’s many Web designers and tech-savvy artists and musicians.

When a kiosk opened up in a nearby shopping arcade, Weiss relocated and Mikey’s Hookup was officially born. The move cost him $1,100 – his life savings at the time – and consumed every waking hour, but Weiss jumped in with both feet.

“I don’t spend a lot of time writing up plans or doing research,” he says. “If it makes sense to me, I jump on it.”

Eight months later, Weiss had made enough to move into a vacant storefront, hire his first employees and start selling laptops and peripherals. In 2005, Mikey’s Hookup moved again, this time to its current space on North Sixth Street. About that time, Weiss got the store certified as Brooklyn’s only official Apple retailer and service center – although not necessarily a typical one, given the needs of its creative clientele, not to mention the ping-pong table he installed for the use of customers and staffers alike.

“Almost a quarter of what we carry is stuff you’d think you’d have to special order,” explains Weiss. “Normal electronics stores don’t carry 100-foot cables, but there are so many galleries doing weird video installations here, there’s a real demand for it.”

Like any good punk-rocker, though, Weiss gives the thumbs-down to rampant consumerism.

“We don’t have 20 different laptop bags. [And] I don’t pay on commission, because I don’t want my staff selling unnecessary products just to hit some sales mark.”

Weiss encourages his young employees, most of whom sideline as musicians or artists, to be themselves, even if that means greeting customers with a casual “Wassup?”

“I know I’m going against the grain, especially for a computer store, but I want that old-fashioned personal connection,” he says.

Last September, Weiss did “the scariest thing I’ve ever done” – branching out of Williamsburg and opening a second shop in DUMBO. It forced him to deviate from his usual do-it-yourself approach, securing a bank loan and taking a meeting with DUMBO mega-developer David Walentas. True to his roots, Weiss wore jeans and a T-shirt to the interview.

In fact, at 33, Weiss still looks like he just hopped off the tour bus. Easygoing and extroverted, he now spends 40 to 50 hours a week overseeing inventory and repairs at both locations, although he gradually learned to delegate a fair amount of the day-to-day operations to managers.

It’s sometimes hard for the unlikely capitalist to accept that he’s gone from a one-man street operation to a thriving business with 15 employees. But he says whatever success he’s achieved can be credited to his close-knit family.

“Everyone always had their own business – my grandmother sold goose livers on the street, my dad has a scrap yard,” he says. “When I was a little kid, my father took me to flea markets to rent out my little red wagon so people could haul their stuff to their cars.”

Weiss charged three times as much as other youngsters doing the same, but he still made a handsome profit.

“At 7 years old, I was already learning about supply and demand.”