The Get Up Kids might be spread out all over the country, but the band's Matt Pryor loves their connection to Lawrence, Kansas, and says Blue Collar Press is part of that.

Since 1995, indie rock band the Get Up Kids has been making energetic, catchy music and touring the world. While the group formed in Kansas City, in recent years, the band has become more and more connected to the city of Lawrence. The group played a free concert in the middle of Massachusetts Street two summers ago, they shot a video for their “I'm Sorry” video at the city's White Schoolhouse, and the album release show for their latest LP, Problems, was an intimate affair at dive bar the Replay Lounge.

This is to say nothing of the fact that drummer Ryan Pope and bassist Rob Pope co-own downtown Lawrence bar and coffee shop the Bourgeois Pig, with Ryan making his home in Lawrence, as well. Singer and guitarist Matt Pryor also lives in Lawrence with his family, and seems kind of surprised when I bring up the fact that the Get Up Kids are kind of considered to be a “Lawrence band” nowadays.

“Is that true?” Pryor asks over beers one Friday afternoon, noting that they're a Kansas City band, in that that's where they started. He points out that he and Ryan Pope are the only ones who actually live in Lawrence, with the rest of the band spread out over the country. “We're not from anywhere now, technically. We're from America. We learned from Boys Life you could book your own fucking life and tour the country, and eventually, the rest of the world.”

While the band might not be “from” anywhere, the city of Lawrence seems to be pretty proud that the Get Up Kids are from here, ostensibly, and that's why the band's done so many cool things within the city limits.

“Anything we can do here, feels like a unique thing,” Pryor explains. “I don't know if I ever want to play like, a regular show. I've done too many fun things here. I'd rather play at the Arts Center and do a black tie event or something. Something weird, you know?”

In the early days of the Get Up Kids, the band would drink beer and screen shirts in Rob Pope's apartment, which they'd then sell for $5 at their shows. While they crushed and did really well, it was soon thereafter that the band realized that they'd have to find someone else to do the shirt-making for them. They went with some friends in Louisville for a while, but eventually found that they had their friends nearby making shirts already. To that end, the band partnered with Blue Collar Press, in order to meet their merchandise needs, and even bought into the company.

“We all worked there at one point or another – Rob, Ryan, and I,” Pryor recollects. “I remember cleaning screens there.”

Ahead of the recording of last year's KickerEP and this year's Problems, Pryor went to Blue Collar and spoke with the company's Burton Parker about upping the band's merch game, which he felt had gone stagnant.

“We had just gotten new management, and I sat down with Burton and said, 'This is where we're at,' and he was like, 'Okay, we'll make it work,'” explains Pryor. “It was like, we'd been running in the same hamster wheel, and we needed everyone to come at it with fresh ideas and breathe new life into it from all aspects.”

He says that since then, it's been gangbusters, with the Get Up Kids trusting Blue Collar to create new designs for their summer tour.

“It's trying to run [the band] like an actual business, which we never did before,” explains Pryor of the Get Up Kids' newfound energy. “If that part is running smoothly, then it really opens us up to just write songs and play shows. We don't have to worry about as much of that, and so we were very comfortable making that record, which shows.”

Part of what makes the Get Up Kids' connection to Blue Collar Press so integral to the band's operations is that they use Blue Collar's sister business, Merchtable, to run their webstore. It's convenient for a couple of reasons, Pryor says.

“One thing is that, for that Replay show, we were like, 'We should sell shirts at that show!'” he offers as one reason. “It's like, 'All right – go get 'em. It's just down the street.' It's very convenient, because it's also like, 'Hey, we're going to Europe: can I swing by and get a couple of vinyls that I can stick in my suitcase?'”

It's not only pick-up, but drop-off, as well. Coming back from tour means that the Get Up Kids might have unsold shirts, hats, and assorted other merchandise, which they can then hand over to Merchtable to have sorted and added back into their store's inventory.

“It's not the same thing as owning a record, but it's still a piece of art,” says the singer about shirts and merchandise. Pryor himself, it must be noted, is a self-professed “black t-shirt and jeans kinda guy.”

“Some of my bandmates are more fashion-forward,” Pryor continues, explaining that the Get Up Kids' new LP has kind of a beach vibe on the cover. “That means a lot of pastels, but I just want to make sure that we have a one-color print on a black shirt, that's available on large and extra-large.”

Pryor and I discuss the fact that trying to puzzle out sizes and styles can be a nightmare, and that's where the knowledge and research of the BCP team comes in so handy.

“I trust them, and I trust our people, even if it's something like, 'Well, I'd never wear that,'” Pryor concludes. “But if we only sold things that I would wear, it'd just be black t-shirts and that's it.”

Story: Nick Spacek. Photos from bands instagram

“The more people on a local level we can involve with what we're doing here, the better,” says The Bourgeois Pig's Ryan Pope.

While the Bourgeois Pig, located at 6 East 9th Street in downtown Lawrence, will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The Pig – as it's usually known – was previously owned by Charles Whitman and Russell Livingston, but current co-owners and brothers Rob and Ryan Pope took over the longtime bar and coffee shop in 2007.

“It was our favorite bar. It felt like home and we wanted to make sure that it kept going – keep it alive,” Ryan Pope explains as we sit on the small back deck of the bar one spring afternoon. “The previous owners, Russ and Charlie, they had done a great job and then they kind of ran out of gas for running the business. Then, they kind of tapped me on the shoulder, and were like, 'Hey, do you want to buy this place,' and I was like, 'Yes. Absolutely.'”

As Rob now lives in Brooklyn, Ryan is the one who oversees the regular operations.

“He hasn't lived here in a really long time, so I guess you could say, 'operating owner,'” Pope suggests as his job title.

In addition to co-owning the Pig, Pope also co-owns Repetition Coffee – a specialty coffee roasting facility located at 900 New Jersey Street in Lawrence – with his wife, Amy. Their unique and flavorful blends supply the shop with its coffee, and are available at various shops in Lawrence, as well as a weekly Saturday morning coffee cart as part of the Lawrence Farmer's Market.

“She runs things more than I do there, because I've got this place and I'm traveling quite a bit, so that's her main gig, whereas this would be more my main gig,” Pope explains of his multiple enterprises. That's understating things a bit – Pope's travels are as the drummer for the long-running indie act, the Get Up Kids, which is another endeavor he shares with his brother, Rob, who plays bass.

The Pig's experienced some renown over the years: in 2011, Complex magazine named The Bourgeois Pig the fifth best College Coffee Shop in America and the magazine Travel + Leisure named it as one of “the greatest college coffee shops in America” in 2015. 2011 is also when the bar and coffee shop underwent a bit of an interior redesign, renovating the entire area behind the bar and putting in striking black and white tile floors.

“Basically, we ripped this whole place apart,” Pope recalls. They'd been doing what he refers to as “incremental, small things” up to that point, but that's when they decided to just go for it, for a couple of reasons: “One, for functionality; and two, to improve the overall experience to the customer.”

As Pope explains, everything the bar had for sale – liquor, beer, et cetera – was hidden beneath most customer's line of sight. The item which was the most prominent was cigarettes.

“That wasn't necessarily the kind of business we wanted to be running, so we fixed it,” he says with a shrug. Now, however, a veritable panoply of attractively-displayed bottles line shelves behind the bar, along with tonics, syrups, and more eye-catching items. Prominently displayed next to the register are bags of Repetition Coffee to take home, along with locally-produced snacks.

All of that's to a point of connection with the community, Pope continues when I ask if, given that he's on the road so much, touring and otherwise traveling, it's important to have a connection to Lawrence as a town.

“I think so,” he replies. “I even lived in France for two years while we owned this place, so having this here definitely makes it feel more like a home.”

Given that Pope is on the road so often, the staff of the Bourgeois Pig is, as Pope puts it, the part of the business that makes it all happen. Part of why Pope fell in love with the Pig twenty years ago was the people who worked there.

“Any time you walk into a business and the staff is unhappy or unfriendly, it just spreads throughout the whole vibe of the place, so it's important for everyone to feel connected to the place where they spend so much of their time, and hopefully enjoy that,” Pope muses, acknowledging that it's still work and a job, but the atmosphere of the place is due in no small part to the fact that employees like bar manager Adam Lott do a great job of creating it.

“I always say to people that work here, 'Think of that bar like a stage,'” Pope says, drawing on his decades of live performances. “'Essentially, everybody's going to be looking at you, and for better or for worse, you're on display, here.'”

Also on display at the Bourgeois Pig are rotating monthly art exhibits from local and regional artists, many of whom – such as Alicia Kelly, Molly Murphy, and Wayne Probst – can be found hanging out at the bar and coffee shop on a regular basis.

“The more people on a local level we can involve with what we're doing here, the better,” Pope explains of the art and all the other local items on display. “Back to the whole idea of the community coffee shop/bar as a place where people come and take meetings or blow off steam or whatever needs to happen – I think people in Lawrence are searching for that, and if they're not, they go to Starbucks.”

Continuing on with the idea of community, it therefor makes perfect sense that the Bourgeois Pig would use Blue Collar Press for their merchandise.

“I've been friends with those guys since forever – since I was an adult,” recalls Pope, who was one of the original founders of Blue Collar, along with his brother, Rob, and the company's president, Sean Ingram. “They've continued to get better and better at what they do, and expand in what they're able to do, and – in my opinion – they're just one of the coolest local businesses around.”

Pope says that he wants to support not only his friends, but local businesses which are doing cool things and employing people of Lawrence, as well. Plus, he says, they have a brand there at the Pig, and they want to be able to work with that in terms of freshening up the brand's image with a haircut and a shave.

“We want to be able to do cool things, but also make that readily available,” he explains. “Blue Collar allows us to make that happen.”

Also in terms of community, Pope and the Bourgeois Pig will bring back their block party, the Big Pig. While the first installment took place during the summer of 2017, they took 2018 off, but return this year to again block off the section of 9th Street in front of the building. And this time, they're bringing air guitar.

Specifically, the stage in front of the Pig is where, on June 22, “the Midwest's best air guitarists battle it out to represent Lawrence in the US Air Guitar Championships in Nashville.”

“I mean, we're turning 25 this year,” Pope concludes. “We got to have a party.”

Lawrence's Greenhouse Church has moved and grown in many unexpected ways.

Greenhouse Church has undergone quite a few changes lately, and most notable is their name. Formerly known as the Greenhouse Culture, the house of worship has dropped “the” and “culture” from the name, and everything is now operating under the aegis of Greenhouse, proper. Secondly, they've moved – but not far.

 Greenhouse recently relocated to 1012 Massachusetts Street in downtown Lawrence, from its former home across the street, in the former Masonic Temple at the corner of 10thand Massachusetts. While they'd only been in their new space less than two months when I first spoke with Sean Hatch, Greenhouse's executive pastor  – there were signs everywhere with the hashtage “#supersoftopening” – they already felt right at home.

 “We were in that building for a little more than six years,” says Hatch of the Masonic Temple, which was actually the church's third home since it launched in January of 2012. “For a short period, at the very beginning, there were some meetings in the [SpringHill Suites] by the riverfront, and then the church met at Maceli's for about six months.”

 Hatch and his family moved to Lawrence about a year into the church's existence, and by that point, Greenhouse had moved into the Masonic Temple. The church's senior pastor, Jared Scholz, struck a friendship with someone who worked for First Management, and the church was able to get a great deal on the Temple – with the caveat that it came as-is.

 “There was like, a decade of nothing in there and it was just – well, some folks I'm guessing didn't have homes found their way in through the roof hatch,” offers up the pastor as an example. While he and his family missed all that, Hatch says that some of the church's members have some crazy stories of the things that they cleaned in the process of rehabbing the building. While it was a good home – to the point where Greenhouse had considered purchasing the Masonic Temple – rules governing what can and can't be done to a historical building meant that the church's future plans couldn't happen in that space.

 “The ability to divide up space and make it what we want it to be is a really big upgrade for us, as opposed to taking a building as-is,” Hatch explains. While he's quick to note that Greenhouse's former space served them well for the six years they were there, as well as it being pretty cool to bring new life into an old building, finding a permanent home that fits them better is a wonderful thing.

 “We lost a little bit of storage space under the sidewalks, but other than that, it's the exact same footprint,” offers the pastor when I comment as to how big their new location feels. The office space upstairs was quickly converted into kids' classrooms for Sunday mornings, which the pastor says is a big improvement from the previous children's space, which was one big open basement, subdivided with partitions. “There's natural light in the kids' rooms, which is huge. There's a lot of families that come and having them go down to the basement – as nice as we had made it – these new spaces feel much more modern.”

 Greenhouse closed on their new location – a former Buffalo Wild Wings and Jazz: A Louisiana Kitchen – in July of 2018, and then had their first Sunday in mid-December.

 While there was still work to be done, like clear-coating the concrete floors, or getting the cafe up and running, getting the new space up and running has happened remarkably quickly: “I keep running across old photos of things we were doing in here four or five months ago, and I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh, this is crazy how much things have changed.”

 “We dreamed: like, 'Maybe sometime, five years down the road, we'll open a cafe in here,'” Hatch says of how the new space has changed what Greenhouse can do. “And in this space, there's already a kitchen. We figured out that, 'Oh, we can open a cafe in the next year.' So, that was really huge.”

 The list of positives is huge: a better heating and cooling situation, that aforementioned natural light, and – while not quite as obvious, but still really big – accessibility. There are big plate-glass windows out front, which make for a much more inviting appearance.

 “That building – for all the history and beauty and stuff that goes with it – it's a pretty imposing building,” says Hatch of the Masonic Temple. It was a building built for a secret society, and regardless of whether the door was painted an inviting bright green, it still had that feeling to it. “That's not the vibe we're trying to put off. The windows out front are part of that: you can walk by at any time, and see what's happening.”

 What's happening is pretty great: Greenhouse, in late February, opened a cafe, with 50% of the proceeds from its sales going to fight human trafficking, a cause which the church has long been supportive of. The cafe is something that the church hopes serves the city well, and speaks the language of Lawrence – they're focused on creating a comfortable space, rather than somewhere visitors feel like they might get a presentation on the four spiritual laws.

 “We want to support the stuff that we feel passionate about,” continues Hatch with a smile. “It gets us really excited. We want to create a space that, really, anyone feels comfortable and welcome in. The whole point is to just create a space for people to hang out.”

 The soft opening party on the last Friday of February drew a packed house – Hatch mentions that they made nearly 500 chicken nuggets to sample out to curious passers-by – and the pastor is really happy with the response from both church members and the public.

 “That night felt like such a huge pay-off for the amount of work that we put in this place,” he says. Doing all of the demo and finish work themselves (the construction was contracted out) while running the church and starting a new business had meant 8 months of “just craziness.”

 “Finally, that night, it was like, 'This is what we've been working towards,'” Hatch says with no small amount of relief. Since then, the cafe has been open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7am-3pm, and Greenhouse has had no small amount of great feedback. “We've gotten great reviews from both people that we know and people that we don't know. I'm going to go broke and get fat, eating down there all the time.”

 Part of the amazing story of Greenhouse's cafe is the fact that Hatch's mom, Sherri McGuffin, is the general manager. She came to the cafe after nearly 35 years working for KFC, and she's been part of the development process since the concept was first developed, back in September of 2018.

 “Long before there was ever a cafe,” McGuffin says. The family aspect doesn't just stop with the relationship between her and Hatch, though – the development of the cafe's recipes took place in pastor Schulz's house: “We bombarded his kitchen: myself; Brianna, my kitchen manager; and Debbie, who's Jarod's mother-in-law.”

 The recipes they developed weren't just pulled from cookbooks and the Internet, though. McGuffin and her crew sourced recipes from members of Greenhouse's congregation. That signature gluten-free fried chicken recipe they use to make their nuggets and chicken sandwiches?

 “That was a recipe from a member of the church family,” McGuffin says, all happy. “Hand-cut, hand-breaded – we do a lot of work for that one, but it's crispy and has just such a great flavor to it.”

 Greenhouse is also out in the community on a food-related tangent, with members volunteering at the Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen, or LINK, every other month and Blue Collar Press president Sean Ingram's wife, Chela, was leading the charge.

 “Sean was just like, 'It would be really awesome to have aprons!'” Hatch says with a laugh. “So, I sent him this circle logo thing that I had made and next thing I knew, we had aprons and they looked awesome.”

 Additionally, the press donated over 100 shirts for the Greenhouse float in 2018's St. Patrick's Day parade. It's been a really great relationship through and through, the pastor continues.

 “I started working with Blue Collar at the church I worked at in Olathe,” says Hatch. “We started ordering all of our stuff from them. So, when we moved out here, and it was more of the local place to go, it was even more of an 'Of course we'd go to Blue Collar.' We've always had great interactions. All of the people I've worked with there have been super, super easy to work with.”

The pastor mentions that he's dealt with other companies for merchandise in the past, and customer service has been “lacking,” so he appreciates that he's never had that vibe or any sense of pretentiousness from anyone at Blue Collar Press, and that working with them has always been super-easy.

“I remember the first t-shirt order that I was in charge of for this place,” the pastor recalls, saying that there must have been a dozen different variations. “One person wants it on long-sleeve, another wants it on woman's short-sleeve in this color, and all of our designs were like four or five colors, and I don't think we had formatted some of them properly, and all of this stuff. But everyone was cool. Everybody was like, 'No big deal,' they were able to handle it, and it was just awesome.”

While Hatch doesn't know everything Blue Collar does, Greenhouse's experience with the press has been so positive, he says, that for any future branding needs, they'll be calling.

Story: Nick Spacek
Photos: Austin Snell

As Lawrence's Bon Bon renovates and adds a new chef, general manager Ryan Bowersox is excited about the changes in store.

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“I was definitely a regular when they first opened,” says Ryan Bowersox, general manager of Bon Bon, the restaurant located at 804 Pennsylvania Street in Lawrence's Warehouse Arts District. She's been with Bon Bon since February of 2017, about four months after owners Simon and Codi Bates opened the restaurant in October 2016. The restaurant – the first to open in the district – has always been rather unique. When Bon Bon first opened, the kitchen was run out of a food truck parked next to the building's west side – a thing which, Bowersox says, was definitely a point of interest in the restaurant's early days.

“I think the food truck and the garden were the two things – and obviously, the beautiful building – that brought people over here, and were definitely curious about right off the bat,” the general manager continues, saying that with Instagram, things like those really appeal to people. The food truck kitchen, however, was born out of necessity, rather than a sense of whimsy.

“This is a historical building,” explains Bowersox of Bon Bon's home, originally built in the 1880s as a storage facility for the nearby Poehler Mercantile building, which is itself now renovated into loft apartments. “So, no kitchen could be built in this building, since it is protected. The food truck was kind of a creative solution to the lack of a kitchen.”

With it, of course, arose some issues. Most food trucks don't operate year-round in Kansas, and there's a reason for that, Bowersox says: “It was pretty hot back there. It got a little crowded. And, it also just limited what we could do, culinary-wise. We really wanted to start pushing the envelope more, and bring Lawrence unique dishes they'd never seen before.”

So, while the folks at Bon Bon were able to work with the food truck for a while, it became more and more of a hindrance as time wore on, and it became clear that an expansion would be necessary. To that end, the restaurant owners filed plans at the end of last summer to enclose the current outdoor seating area and build an actual kitchen.

“It became necessary for us, if we were going to fulfill [our] vision,” says Bowersox of the renovations, which are currently in process. “Maybe not the vision we started out with, but the one which we've morphed into.”

Bowersox is guarded when it comes to when the renovations will be complete – “I get asked this question 13 times a day,” she says with a wry smile – but explains that she's been telling people that they're targeting late spring or early summer, with the full confidence that it will be worth the wait.

One of those things which will be worth the wait is Bon Bon's new chef, Devin Campbell, whom they hired when it became clear that the new construction would be approved.

“We really wanted to bring in somebody with a lot of experience,” Bowersox says of Campbell. “We really needed someone to be in here, every single day, really doing it, so I reached out to a friend of mine who had been working at The American and Corvino Supper Club.”

Lured by the restaurant's garden, located just across Pennsylvania to the west, along with the creative freedom the Bates and Bowersox would grant him, made the possibility of having to work in a food truck for a couple of months worth the sacrifice.

“We wanted someone who was excited about these things for the revamp,” says Bowersox, and that's just what they found in Campbell. He even helped create the “snack bar” menu that's allowed Bon Bon to stay open and serve food, in the midst of construction. Based off a restaurant Bowersox encounted in Toronto where, she explains, “You drink whiskey drinks and eat snacks,” it's allowed Bon Bon to bridge the gap between its past incarnation and future plans, while also letting Campbell to begin to put his imprint on the restaurant.

“I wasn't about to lay off my whole kitchen staff,” states the manager. “So, we came up with small bites and stuff like that.”

It helps that Bon Bon has been an ever-changing concept since it first opened, so that allowed the restaurant's guests to latch onto the idea, even though it means that some of their more iconic menu items – such as the French onion tater tots – aren't available at the moment, as there's no fryer in which to cook them.

 “Things are going to change, and things are changing,” Bowersox says. “But this means we get to experiment and change the menu a lot more, and it's really been a lot of fun for us.”

She points to the fact that new chef Campbell and Bon Bon's garden manager will be working closely to ensure as much of their produce and garnishes as possible will be grown across the street or sourced locally. It's really a point of pride that Bon Bon changes with what's available fresh, Bowersox explains.

“Food tastes better, if it's in season,” she says. “You know the difference if you pay attention to the food that you want to eat, so we want to play to that with our guests. When they're outside, and they feel the hot sun on themselves, and you have vegetables and garnishes that are only grown in hot sun: there's really a connection there, whether you know that it's happening or not, and it's invaluable to show people that and allow people to have that experience.”

Because Bon Bon is operating a little low-key at the moment, their merchandise needs are small, but the restaurant has ordered quite a bit of their printed merch from Blue Collar Press over their first two years: “Everything that our employees wear everyday,” Bowersox offers as one example.

Also, because of the aforementioned Instagram appeal and the experiential nature of Bon Bon, people do want to get t-shirts to celebrate their visit. They sell quite a few during Christmas. Bowersox also mentions a unique viral marketing strategy she uses.

“When I find out one of our regulars is going on a trip, I just give them a t-shirt,” explains the manager. It's another social media thing, and it's the same with the staff who might go off to do study abroad, she says. The choice to use Blue Collar for the shirts at Bon Bon came out of the Bates' other Lawrence restaurant, the Burger Stand, which had sourced all of their shirts from BCP over the course of their decade downtown.

“It's extremely easy,” Bowersox concludes, summing up the relationship between BCP and Bon Bon. “I used to to work for a screen-printing place, and I know the inner workings of [the business] pretty well,but I don't think I've ever really had an issue. I know I'm being interviewed about it, but I haven't really thought about it – which means it was pretty, pretty easy. It's like I say to my employees: 'If I don't have to think about you, you're doing just fine.'”

Friends of the Kaw has been protecting, advocating for, and helping people discover the Kansas River for 27 years.

Friends of the Kaw is a non-profit organization, founded 27 years ago in Lawrence, Kansas, by a group of North Lawrence residents looking to oppose dredging on the Kansas River, and now acts as a grassroots environmental organization “working to protect and preserve the Kansas River.” For the last four years, the group's executive director and Riverkeeper has been Dawn Buehler. The executive director part sees Buehler managing the daily activities of Friends of the Kaw. Riverkeeper, though? That might take some explaining.

“Waterkeeper Alliance is a worldwide alliance that has over 330 waterkeepers, worldwide,” Buehler explains. Keepers can include Coastalkeepers, Baykeepers, or any body of water. There's only one in the state of Kansas, which is the Kansas Riverkeeper, and that is her. “The way it works is that we're all members of the Alliance, but supported by a local non-profit – in this case, Friends of the Kaw, who joined the Alliance in 2003.”

The main job of the Riverkeeper is to protect and preserve the river, and Buehler, along with Friends of the Kaw, does that by mediating suspected pollution by working with different agencies to make sure it gets cleaned up or investigated, and holding communities accountable for the health of the river.

“I explain it to people like this: we're polite and we want to work in collaboration,” Buehler explains of the Riverkeeper position. “But we push, and we push hard until things get resolved. A huge part of what we do is advocating. We protect the river, we advocate for it, and we help people discover it. ”

Buehler has held a connection with the Kansas River which goes back as far as she can remember, growing up in De Soto on a 500-acre crop farm along the river's banks. She's had a relationship with the river her whole life, she says.

“Some of my earliest memories, we were fishing on the river from a jon boat or on the banks,” she recalls. “We would canoe on the river, we camped on the sandbars.”

Looking back on her time on and near the river, Buehler says, she realizes that every time she went through a hardship in her life, she'd go to it to reflect.

“One of my grandmothers passed away, and I would go to the Kansas River bridge in De Soto,” Buehler says, slightly choked-up and with the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “I would sit there and I would watch the sunset, and it was amazing. It was breathtaking to me. It was the most peaceful place to sit and think and reflect about how your life has changed so much.”

 So, Buehler had a really deep relationship with the river already, but she worked as an accountant for 15 years. She went back to school to get a Bachelor of Science degree in Fish and Wildlife Conservation, and decided she was going to do the work that she was doing on the weekends.

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 “I was working as an accountant, and on the weekends and was volunteering for Friends of the Kaw, the Nature Conservancy, or for the Baker Wetlands – anywhere I could find volunteer work,” says Buehler of her story. It was mostly outdoors, and even now, she says, she finds that most of the Friends of the Kaw volunteers are like that: “They'll tell me that they have a full-time desk job and that this is their outlet, and I'm like, 'I know exactly what you're talking about, because that's what landed me here.'”

 One of those many volunteers is Blue Collar Press president, Sean Ingram, who began showing up to Friends of the Kaw events about a year ago.

 “Our relationship with Blue Collar started when Sean started working with us as a volunteer” is how Buehler explains how Friends of the Kaw came to work with the press. “He came and volunteered with us at an event, and just kept coming back. I don't even think that I knew the name of the business he was the owner of until six months after I met him.”

Once Buehler realized the possibilities of a volunteer with a business like Blue Collar Press, she reached out to Sean, because Friends of the Kaw is an organization with a diverse set of needs. Right off the bat, she says, the press offered to make shirts for the group's Kaw River Guides, who are the volunteers on the river for things like the Friends' regular educational paddle trips.

“They donated them all, and that was very humbling to have such a large donation, and to be able to give back to our volunteers ,” relates Buehler. “People who get paid nothing and do it just because they care about the river, care about our organization, care about helping people connect with the river. It's completely selfless volunteering at its finest, and they're just amazing people.”

Blue Collar Press debuted a brand-new pop-up concept at the Friends of the Kaw's third annual Beers of the Kaw fundraiser, held at Lawrence's Abe & Jake's Landing in early November of 2018. The company brought screenprinting equipment on-site and made t-shirts, bags, and koozies while people waited, and it was a smashing success – as was the event, which sold out its 650 tickets, and brought in another 150 people in the form of vendors and volunteers.

“That was absolutely incredibly popular,” Buehler says of the pop-up. “People loved it. There was nothing left. It was amazing. They were fabulous – I look over, and there must have been 20 people in line, every time I looked over there.”

Things look big for Friends of the Kaw: they just hired their first Development Director, literally the day before we sat down and spoke. They've also already announced the next Beers of the Kaw event – November 3, 2019 – for those who like their beer local, benefiting a good cause, and tied to education. Also, with the start of the new legislative session, Buehler has some folks to meet and advocate to.

“There'll be some new relationships to build there,” concludes the Riverkeeper. “There's a lot of things that are competing for the money that we have in this state, and I fully recognize that there are a lot of other things that need that attention, but we hope that water is a part of the conversation, too.”

Story: Nick Spacek
portrait: Austin Snell
photos: FOK instagram

Fat Girl Flow founder Corissa Enneking wants everybody to feel included in her line of custom-designed plus-size clothing.

The website Fat Girl Flow is about plus size fashion, but also so much more. As founder Corissa Enneking states on the site, it's the intersection of that, challenging toxic views, sharing pretty things she loves, and triumphs through adversity, among many other aspects.

For something that started with Enneking “messing around on Tumblr ten years ago,” as she says, her once-blog, now blog-and-clothing-company, Fat Girl Flow, has grown far beyond reblogging posts. Granted, her not-insubstantial 24,000 followers were nothing to sneeze at, so Enneking's decision to move from the social media platform to her own site wasn't without good reason. Plus, as she says, the timing was right.

“Definitely before everyone was blogging, but definitely on the cusp – it was starting to become a thing,” says Enneking in her office, located above Massachusetts Street in downtown Lawrence. “I was thinking, 'Y'know, maybe I'll take this Tumblr thing legit and see if anyone will go for it.'”

One of the people whom she'd met on Tumlr was her friend, Joe, who had a hosting company called Accelerated Worpress, as well as a ton of information on how to get started. So, when Enneking made the decision to start blogging, the site's been growing and changing almost continuously since it launched in 2015. It hit the ground running, as Enneking says enthusiastically.

“I feel really grateful,” Enneking states. “Since the beginning, I've had a mentor. Since I started with it, I didn't stop – I went full-force.”

About eight months after the Fat Girl Flow blog started, Enneking started a companion YouTube channel. As she researched and followed other channels, she realized that people were doing merchandise for their shows. She started a line of shirts with the Fat Girl Flow logo on them, but quickly ran into a problem.

“No-one could find a size over 3X to save their lives,” she recalls with a bit of resignation. They did a small run with another company, and it did all right, but the lack of options was still an issue – that is, until a little over a year ago, when her friend, Mallory Wright, brought to Enneking's attention the possibilities that existed with Blue Collar Press.

Wright, who became Enneking's account manager at Merchtable, took the opportunity to tell the company owner all of the things a local company could do. Enneking was excited:

“So, there's actually somebody in Lawrence who can do this, and I can actually physically meet with the people I'm talking to?”

Still, they ran into the same problem, in that sourcing shirts above a 3X or 4X was a difficulty, and even the shirts that they could find were boxy, unisex styles that were definitely more functional than fashionable.

“I'm not saying that a unisex shirt doesn't have its place – they're great, and I think a lot of people get a lot of use from them,” Enneking points out, but she goes on to explain that her audience was not loving it as their only option. So, from there, it became fairly apparent that there was a need for Fat Girl Flow to create their own line of t-shirts, from the ground up.

“There's this thing in the plus-size community where we're always getting second-best,” continues Enneking. “It's not hard – we just want pretty-looking clothes. That feels pretty simple.”

Enneking says that it's less a matter of things being difficult, and more a cyclical aspect of the fashion industry not being willing to take the step of making clothing for the plus-sized market, because they don't think the market will buy them, then when they make substandard things, the market doesn't buy them, and then the argument starts all over again.

“You really have to let people know that you're doing this for them, and that you have their best interests in mind,” she explains, offering up a counterargument to the usual suggestion that people should just buy what's available and be happy with it.

“For us, the 5X and 6X's are the first thing that sell out,” Enneking says. “They fly, so people will buy – you just have to put the small amount of effort into letting them trust you.”

To that end, she met with Sean Ingram, and he got in contact with designers behind the iconic American Apparel tees, and explained the unique opportunity that Enneking and her idea represented.

“We were both on the same page,” Enneking says of her work with Ingram. “The thing is – nothing fancy has to happen, right? Plus-sized people just want access to the same shit everybody else has. It's not that magical: we just want a soft, cotton-blend shirt. How difficult can that possibly be?”

There was a mock-up made, Enneking tried it on, they made adjustments as to whether or not it needed to be longer, or if the sleeves needed to be shorter, and so on, and she describes the entire process as being “pretty cool.”

Also cool? The absolutely inclusive aspect of the Fat Girl Flow brand. In addition to the Fat Girl Flow logo tees, crewnecks, and croptops, as well as FGF Basics line, which offers up perfect tees, raglans, and croptops, there's the amazing Pronoun Packs. These offer up an enamel pronoun pin, several stickers, including a "Hello My Pronouns Are" sticker, a “Break the Binary” sticker proudly representing the trans flag colors, 20 “Hey friend, you misgendered me” cards, and an “ask me about my pronouns” button to get the conversation started.

“My focus has always been body positivity,” Enneking explains, and while the phrase may have been bastardized over the years, to Fat Girl Flow's founder, it's still strong. “To me, the focus is giving equal respect, dignity, and love to every body: every trans body, every black body, every fat body. It's a very inclusive thing, and for me, in my mind, when I think about designing products, I want everybody to feel included. I don't want people to feel, 'This is something I don't get.'”

Story: Nick Spacek
Photo: Hallie Sigwing

Standard Electric Tattooing's Jarod and Holly Hackney make pulp comic ink come alive on the skin of their clients.

Sitting in Standard Electric Tattooing, the tiny shop owned by Jarod and Holly Hackney at 19 W. 9th Street in downtown Lawrence, you very quickly get an idea of what the pair does best when it comes to their art. There's a stack of vintage science fiction paperbacks on a shelf, flash sheets featuring classic designs, interpretations of scenes from iconic horror movies like Suspiria, and – dominating the back eastern wall – a canvas featuring a print of Japanese artist Hokusai's “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.”

“I think, sometimes, it's easier to say what we don't specialize in,” says Holly, when I ask how all of this factors into what styles the husband and wife duo work in when they're tattooing. “We love doing traditional. We love doing black and gray. We love doing fine-line black and gray. We don't like doing a lot of watercolor. We don't do portraiture. We maybe do a little neo-traditional? It just depends.”

Jarod, thanks to an early mentor, ended up falling into black and gray. He'd worked at several different establishments in Lawrence, Wichita, and Overland Park over the eight years before the couple opened Standard Electric in August of 2016, but he credits his time at J. P. Cruise Professional Tattooing in Wichita, and the shop's owner, Josh Cruise in really helping him find his particular niche.

 “It was the best thing that could happen to me,” Jarod recalls.”He really kind of retrained me really quickly, and I ended up falling into black and gray. That was where I really blossomed, because you can turn anything into black and gray. As a matter of fact, in tattooing, all tattoos start out with black and gray before you put the color on top of it.”

He brings up the fact that he had always been an all-around guy, prior to that experience, taking all the simple tattoos which walked in the door, but he quickly realized that the easiest tattoos are also the easiest to do wrong.

“The ones you can see from across the room – where if it's not a perfect heart or a star behind an ear, it's warped, and everyone can see it,” Jarod says, pointing to the fact that these are shapes people have known by heart since kindergarten. “So, I learned to go really technical.”

Holly, prior to apprenticing under her husband, had worked in education since she was 19. She quickly learned that working for the school district, opening a new business, and apprenticing – to say nothing of the couple's three children – was more than she could handle. 

“We opened this place in August, and by October, I quit my job,” relates Holly. “Just to focus on tattooing, because it was just way too much. Basically, I dropped everything so I could just focus on appreciating, because it was just really overwhelming, it was really emotional, it was really fucking hard – really taxing.”

She says all of this with a smile and a laugh, and you can tell just how much the couple enjoys working together after just a couple minutes sitting with the pair. It's a good thing, too, because taking on their own business was a real learning experience, especially for Jarod, who'd always worked in a shop wherein all he had to worry about was coming in and working at tattooing.

“I didn't realize how much of an office a tattoo shop was,” he explains. “It's like, 'Oh, we gotta have a stapler.' 'Oh, we gotta have staples.' 'Oh, this stapler sucks. We gotta get a new one.' 'Where's all the scissors?' It just kept going and going and going. I never thought I'd be ordering clipboards and things like that.”

Sorting out the practicalities of the shop on the tattooing side was easy, because the pair knew what they needed on that end – gloves, ink, disinfectant wipes, and so on – but things like tape? Who knew you needed to buy tape?

“Working in a big shop, you can just bounce around and it's like, 'Dude, you got those medium gloves for me?' offers Jarod as just one example among many of the things beyond one's personal station that become something to consider when you're the boss.

Thankfully, one of the things which happened a little more smoothly was when the Hackneys decided to order their shirts from Blue Collar Press. A prior experience with a different press shortly after opening Standard Electric had resulted in less than stellar results, with the design looking fine on smaller sizes, but when blown up to extra-large, it ended up being unfortunately small.

“We weren't too impressed with them,” says Holly. “We just ended up giving them away. So, we knew the second time around, we wanted to do it right – that we liked the shirts and the quality and everything.”

They point to the fact that the Bourgeois Pig, just down the block, has really wonderful stickers, and an inquiry into who'd made them was the Hackneys' first introduction to the Blue Collar name. So, when it came time to order their next set of shirts, they had a name and a sense of quality to start with. Holly credits the online ordering process on the Blue Collar website as being a breeze and helping make their second batch of shirts far more appealing.

“I just shot over an email, and I shot over our design,” she says. It helped that the Hackneys knew what shirts and colors they wanted, thanks to really doing some research on their end, but the ability to email a local company with everything they wanted, approving the price, and then receiving an invoice and a timeline as being wonderfully easy and simple.

“[Blue Collar] made it really painless,” Holly concludes. She reaches under the desk to pull out a tri-blend t-shirt so that we can ooh and ah over how nice the shirt looks and feels. The experience has been so positive, the pair is looking to using the press for future merch, like stickers and enamel pins. While they offer up free buttons to clients, they'd like to have something a little more fancy.

 “We do hat buttons, but when it comes to enamel, with the backing on them?” Jarod looks off into the middle distance, kind of dreaming at the prospect. “That's my jam.”

Story: Nick Spacek
Photos: Austin Snell

Ad Astra Area Aquatics' Patrick Norman runs a swim team that's a coach directed, parent supported, and athlete centered.

When Patrick Norman started Ad Astra Area Aquatics in 2010, he had 13 athletes enrolled as part of the Lawrence swim team for which he is the head coach. Along with his wife, Katie Price-Norman, who is the head age group coach, they've grown the squad to more than ten times that, with 140 area swimmers.

“We've grown a lot since then,” Norman states matter-of-factly about those early days over kombucha in downtown Lawrence one late summer morning. Ad Astra started when the coach left the other Lawrence swim team for which he worked, in order to follow a different model than what his previous team had offered.

“It's coach directed, parent supported, athlete centered,” he explains. “It's a little bit different than running a parent-run team, where a lot of the decisions are made parent board of directors.”

There is a board for Ad Astra, but as Norman notes, it's more of a sounding board, and less involved in what he refers to as the “wet side” of things. In addition to being head coach, Norman is the president of the Ad Astra organization, and his wife is the business manager.

“It was a bit of a movement in terms of what people wanted here in town, and so we started with that in mind and that's how we've been operating ever since,” states the coach. The growth wasn't all at once, obviously. The Ad Astra Area Aquatics team has grown steadily, but Norman says that he thinks they've exceeded any expectations folks might have had when they began, especially as there wasn't a plan, so to speak, when he started.

“I would've been happy coaching the 13 kids – and having the sort of job security that I have now – for a long time,” Norman says of Ad Astra's growth, which he says came from the success that they've had. “I had been coaching for a long time and I had coached all over the country, so I had had some success in the past, so I think once people saw we were being successful in swimming, people just kind of jumped on board.”

The head coach does acknowledge that they had some good athletes when they started, so it wasn't starting from scratch, but that first year saw the team place place 16th at the Sectionals, and was the third place team at the Missouri Valley Swimming LSC Championships, Small Team Division. The very next year, 2011, would see their rankings move up to 14th at Sectionals, and Ad Astra would be the first place team in the Missouri Valley LSC Championships, Medium Team Division, and be the fourth place team overall. That's an impressive jump, and might explain why the team has qualified four swimmers for the USA Swimming Olympic Trials in Omaha since 2012.

“It's just kind of fallen into place,” Norman continues. “We were going to create happy kids and happy families, and teach their kids how to enjoy swimming and love the sport.”

Norman says a lot of that has to do with the fact that there's a sort of swimming family in Lawrence. He started coaching in 2001, and swam for the University of Kansas, and some of those kids whom he coached in those early years now work for him.

“There's one who I coached when she was like, eight – I literally taught her how to swim,” the coach says with a sense of wonder. “Now she's finishing her schooling to be a teacher and coaches for us, and does other swimming and coaches on the side.”

Those are the kinds of stories, Norman says, that when you're really passionate about swimming and love what you do, are really cool. That's sort of the reason why the whole Ad Astra perspective is to start kids out, and getting them in the water with a sense of loving swimming, rather than immediately immersing them in competition. Even as the kids age, however, there are some who aren't necessarily aiming for lifelong athletic competition, and Ad Astra wants them to be part of the community, as well.

“Not everyone's gonna want to be that sort of swimmer who's going to go to college and swim, and just keep doing it forever,” Norman says, although he's quick to point out that swimming is the kind of activity you can do all your life. To the end of keeping the folks who want the team atmosphere to encourage them to push the beyond their limits, they have the One Day A Week group.

“We've had so many people that we kept involved in our sport, and we realize that swimming every day of the week – including Saturdays – is a huge commitment,” he says of the group. “We've kept people not only involved and joining the team, but that's a huge group right now.”

That flexibility in terms of what Ad Astra Area Aquatics does is reflected in their relationship with Blue Collar Press – a willingness to find different things, and work with someone in order to make them happen.

Norman's a graphic designer himself, so he comes up with all of the different looks the team has had over its history. He started working with the Press during his final year with his previous team, and he says that, when they started Ad Astra, it just made sense to keep working with Blue Collar.

“Even when we had small orders at the beginning – we had 13 swimmers, so not too many – we were able to utilize them to help us customize our orders,” Norman says of the days, going on to say that he never even considered going with anyone else. “I really liked going in and being able to talk to them and say, 'This is what I want to do' and ask questions like, 'What kind of shirts are popular right now?' and just have them work with me.”

Norman also likes the fact he's working with a company which has been growing alongside his for the last nine or ten years, but has remained just as accessible as when the relationship first began.

“Over the last few years, we've gotten pretty steady with what we want, and they know what we want,” he says of the long term Ad Astra / Blue Collar pairing. “Sometimes, we try to branch out, but they've always been able to recommend things and know what – from an athletic standpoint – what we were looking for.”

Dave and Jessica Derr's Wiener Kitchen keeps it local by providing a snapshot of the farmer's market year-round

Although Dave Derr and his wife, Jessica, have been cooking together since 2001, their sausage-making business has only been around for six years. Originally started in 2012 as the Wiener Wagon, a cart which would appear at the Overland Park Farmer's Market and the occasional special event around the JoCo area, the couple opened a storefront location – Wiener Kitchen – in December of 2017.

“We were taken with that hot dog cart / food truck movement,” Derr explains of the sausage business's start, sitting at a table in the lobby of Wiener Kitchen's storefront at 9645 W. 87th Streetin Overland Park. “At the time, we were cooking at the Art Institutes International, being college professors for culinary arts.”

They had some free time, so they figured, “Let's fill this up with a hot dog cart, just to see what happens.” Of course, Derr says, it was possibly the worst time to start a project like that – their four kids were all still really little, and they were also redoing their kitchen.

“Their claim was 'Build a hot dog cart out of used stuff and things from Walmart and Harbor Freight for $399' or whatever,” Derr says, but admits that they decided to go bigger. Their garage was filled with coolers and equipment, and after some mucking around, they built their custom cart. “That took us four, five, six months, off and on, building it, and then, there it was.”

Derr says that at the outset, the couple had no purpose, but they did a few small events like a carnival and the Pendleton Heights homes tour, and steadily stair-stepped upward after their first appearance at the farmer's market later that summer.

Derr attended Johnson County Community College, as part of their culinary arts program, and during their garde manger class, wherein students learn the art and science of a cold kitchen, sausage-making was one of the weeks.

“I just got it,” says Derr with emphasis. “I loved it.”

 Derr would belt out links for dinners at the golf course restaurant he and his wife both worked at, or at home for a cook-out, and it was just something he never let go. Once the available teaching hours at his regular job started to wind down, he voluntarily stepped aside to focus on the family-owned Wiener Wagon, and now also, Wiener Kitchen.

 While there's now a brick-and-mortar location open year-round, it's not changed the fact that the business is very local. Derr's daughter can ride her bike to the shop from her house and the farmer's market – where the Wiener Wagon can be found every Saturday, from April to November – is just 3-4 minutes down the road by car.

“It's one of the places that's really helped us gain clientele around here,” explains Derr. “It's all very local to us. We love it – we're neighbors. I'm starting to get to know a lot of the families around here – like, 'Where do your kids go to school?' It's great.”

In addition to growing the business's locations, the offerings have increased from Wiener Wagon to Wiener Kitchen. While those early days might have seen only Italian sausage and bratwurst on the menu – as well as the unlikely turdurcken (a combination of turkey, duck, and chicken) – the Kitchen's menu sees bacon sausage, chorizo rojo, jalapeno cheddar kielbasa, and a vegan dog, among others, as well as a constantly-rotating menu of seasonal offerings.

“It's gone from three or four to start off with to – I don't know – 50? 60?” Derr guesses. He credits the vegan option to Jessica, upon their acceptance to the farmer's market. “She's like, 'It's vegetables. It's 2013. It's gotta happen,' and the several times we've gone out and said, 'Let's not do a vegetarian one,' we shot ourselves in the foot, because vegans and vegetarians, and saying, 'I can put some toppings in a bun'? That's not fun.”

The food is amazing and delicious – everything's made from American Homestead Natural Meats pork and chicken from Gerber’s Poultry – and the folks in the kitchen have paired the right sauce to put on your sausage, no matter what you order. The bacon sausage comes with homemade country gravy, for instance, and if Jessica's behind the counter, she'll even help you pick out the right kind of Jarritos soda to drink with it.

In a further effort to listen to their clientele and offer up what they hear is wanted, Wiener Kitchen is now supplied with a vegan bun by Farm to Market Bread. As Derr points out, the business is constantly evolving: “We're good about listening, and transparent about what's in there.”

A way in which the Derr's product line has expanded is that not only does the store carry a wide variety of their sausages, along with drinks and homemade chili or gravy, but customers who walk into Wiener Kitchen can also snag some local and regional products to dress up that meat.

“We're just trying to carry all of the stuff from our friends at the market,” he says, pointing to jars of locally-made KC Canning marinara sauce along the lobby's east wall. “Buy some Italian sausage, buy some marinara from them, and handmade pasta – done. You can even get cheese and have a meal.”

He points to the cold cases along the opposite wall, which feature locally-made cheeses from Skyview Farm & Creamery out of Pleasanton, Kansas, and Hemme Brothers Farmstead Creamery of Sweet Springs, Missouri. Both are producers who've been alongside the Wiener Wagon at the farmer's market for years, as well as Teabiotics, makers of the kombucha nestled next to the Lost Trail root beer.

Of course, what local sausage shop would be complete without a t-shirt to show your love? While maybe not as attention-seeking as shirts claiming to be “Best of the Wurst,” the Wiener Kitchen tees are nicely done, with logo work by Blue Collar Press from the get-go, going back to the original hot dog on a fork for the wagon, as well as the new Wiener Kitchen baseball-style version.

There's even a neon version of the kitchen's logo for an upcoming shirt. While the Derrs don't have an actual neon sign, folks can brighten up their wardrobe with one on themselves, which the shop's owner really digs.

“I love how we can bounce ideas off of them – whether it's a sketch or verbal,” Derr says of the Blue Collar design team. “They're awesome. There are some bro tanks coming – gotta have those. We're gonna do one of those refrigerator bags, so you can reuse it, and we're finally going to do bumper stickers – 'Honk for Hot Dogs,' 'I Brake for Bratwurst' – something to keep it fresh, man.”

Story: Nick Spacek. Photos: Austin Snell

The Raven Book Store works to make Lawrence the “culture capitol of Kansas”, resisting the notion of flyover country.

Tucked away on a side street, just around the corner from downtown Lawrence icon Liberty Hall, The Raven Book Store has been the city's independent “purveyors of print on paper since 1987,” as the shop's Twitter bio cleverly states.

However, owner Danny Caine took over the store at 6 E 7th Street just a little over a year ago, when he purchased the longtime establishment from owner Heidi Raak. However, it wasn't the start of his time with The Raven, as he'd been an employee of the store for several years prior. Caine's ownership of the store comes down to what he describes as a combination of a lifelong dream to own a bookstore and a little bit of dumb luck.

“It was always a dream, but it was a dream I didn't let myself [have],” he says with a grin. “It was like, 'Well, on the off chance that anything ever leads to this, I'd love to do it, but I should probably plan on being a teacher' was kind of what I did.”

Caine actually had a teaching career – high school and college for nearly seven years – and he learned through various ways, at various times, that it just wasn't for him. So, he came to Lawrence to attend the University of Kansas in pursuit of an M.F.A. in poetry, and immediately started trying to get a job at The Raven.

“I moved here, Lawrence was cool, Lawrence had a small bookstore, I knew somebody who worked here, and I started this campaign,” explains Caine of his goal to work in the sort of place he'd dreamed up growing up in a Borders town, where the only bookstore was the big chain. “It took about six months to convince them that they even had a job opening, and that I was a good person for it. 

Caine worked at The Raven for two and a half years, and as he lost interest in teaching, he started becoming more interested in the book business. He took on more and different responsibilities and looked into different aspects of bookselling as a career. Then, one night, Raak made an offhand joke about selling the store to Caine.

“I was like, 'This could be my moment,' right?” the now-owner says with obvious excitement. He knew she was joking, but just in case, he seized the opportunity. “I was like, 'Well, if you ever think about it, I would love for you to talk to me first.'”

Then, as jokes sometimes do, it turned into something serious. It took Caine a lot of research to determine whether or not it made sense – whether he could afford to take it on, whether it would be a viable business, and so on – and after nearly a year, he decided that this was his chance, and he took it.

“Thankfully, Lawrence has always been kind to The Raven,” says Caine appreciatively. “It's been great.”

One of the notable changes during Caine's time at The Raven – aside from more shelves and fixtures around the store since he took ownership in August of 2017 – is that, while the store has always hosted readings and visits from local, national, and international authors and poets, they have certainly ramped up over the last couple years, both in terms of number and visibility.

“That's definitely my favorite part, and the part I'm working on the hardest,” Caine says of the reading series. “It's something I have a lot of energy for. I really love bringing authors to town, and once you have a couple that work out, they very slowly begin to beget more.”

He points to a partnership with Liberty Hall as being a large part of it. While The Raven has always done library events at the Hall, they've recently begun putting on their own events there, teaming up with The Commons at KU. To say they've gone well is a bit of an understatement.

“In January, we had 550 people to see Eve Ewing, who's a debut poet in her 30s from Chicago,” offers Caine as an example. “That's amazing numbers anywhere for a poet. You could throw a poetry reading in New York City that wouldn't draw 550 people.”

Caine hopes numbers like that will make Lawrence the culture capital of Kansas, and for folks to view Lawrence as a Midwestern literary hub, not unlike Iowa City. As he says, the city has the authors, the audience, the book store, the facilities, and the energy.

“I would love for people to see Lawrence as a city where cool literary things are happening,” he explains. It's definitely a possibility, and we discuss various other bookstores in middle of the map – Iowa City's Prairie Lights, Denver's Tattered Cover, and Austin's Book People – as shops which offer up examples of how it's happened elsewhere.

“I resist the notion of flyover country so much,” Caine definitively states. “Just because we don't touch an ocean doesn't mean interesting art isn't happening here.”

Bringing in authors and sponsoring events around Lawrence is definitely a way to develop the community both in general, as well as one related to The Raven itself. It's important to do these community events, Caine says, but there's also a practical element to everything the bookstore does.

“I love Lawrence, and we love to bolster the community here and we think it's important to bring people in, but it also helps us to stay afloat,” says the owner matter-of-factly. “We have a table in the back selling books. It's a great way to sell a lot of books, and to make sure we can keep doing this.”

In addition to the thousands of books which populate The Raven's shelves, you can also take home items which demonstrate your love for the store. There's the usual – what's a bookstore without a tote bag or coffee mug? –  as well as “Make America Read Again” hats, which the owner can be seen wearing most times you spot him. Caine has also increased the number of t-shirts options available, and he's done it in an interesting way.

“Beyond mugs, The Raven had never done merch before I took over,” he explains. He's designed all the merch, except for their most recent shirt, which features an image of the store taken from Kevin Cannon's Midwest Indie Bookstore Map. There's also what Caine calls the “retro” design, which looks like an old physical education shirt from the '70s. That's where things get clever.

“I wanted to only print one color once,” he explains with excitement. “Each run is a limited-edition one, partly because I think it's fun. It's totally a gimmick, but it's also fun.”

The store printed a limited run of shirts on red and gray as a test when Caine took over, so whenever he sees one of those colors, he knows he's looking an OG, early-adopter Raven customer. It's another example of just how hands-on he is in terms of deciding what merch goes where. Caine was also pretty particular about the look and feel of the shirts, and worked closely with Blue Collar Press to determine what kind they should be.

“Blue Collar was really good about that – I love the shirts we print on,” Caine says. The quality and the price point on those shirts, he continues, allows the bookstore to make their margins and sell the tees for ten dollars less than similar-quality apparel from other places. It's the tote bags, though, that really demonstrate what The Raven is all about.

“Even if it wasn't a bag I had designed and sold to that person, I would think that a bookstore tote bag is such an important marker of who you are,” Caine concludes. “You shop local, you like to read – so that's really cool.”

715 simultaneously promotes itself & local arts scene with uniquely original idea.

With its classy simplicity, restaurant 715 is one of the gems of downtown Lawrence. The 2018 Best of Lawrence awards – voted on by the people of the city – named the eatery at 715 Massachusetts Street “Best Dining Ambiance,” “Best Date Spot,” and gave the bar “Best Wine List” and “Best Place to get a Mixed Drink/Cocktail.”

While awards are impressive and bring notice, the European-style restaurant and bar has really made its bones by paying attention to the little details, and changing with the wants and desires of its customers since it opened in the fall of 2009. According to Matt Hyde, manager and part owner of 715, the restaurant has evolved over time, depending on both what the owners have felt like and what the guests are in the mood for. He points out the current 715 menu as an example.

“Right now – this time of year – with our new chef, Jake Dodds-Sloan, it's very vegetable-focused,” Hyde explains. In summertime, vegetables are plentiful, since they're in-season, and it's something that's light and fresh. “This time of year, I don't think anybody wants to eat squash – like, butternut squash. They want zucchini.”

However, while 715 tries to be flexible and pay attention to seasonal availability, there are core items that stay on the menu year-round. As a recent Instagram post noted, when they attempted to replace the spaghetti with tuna, mozzarella, and capers with something else, “a bunch of people freaked out,” so they “un-replaced it” and “people chilled.”

“We have a core menu of things that are on there year-round, and then we rotate things in,” Hyde says. Even the cocktail menu follows suit. “We've broken it out in to 715 standards, classic cocktails, and then seasonal cocktails. We do an early spring, then a late spring, a hot hot summer.”

715's bar manager Katrina Weiss swaps out her cocktails not just four times a year, because it'll still be summer at the beginning of September, explains Hyde. They never set a date – the folks at the restaurant just look at the forecast and plan accordingly. Case in point: the day we were talking, it was sweltering hot out, and thanks to a suggestion from Twitter, they were making sangria.

As 715 has aged, the way the restaurant presents itself has changed somewhat. When they first opened , they had several different t-shirts available for purchase, and they were prominently displayed above the host station by the front door.

“We had some for the staff, and people asked about them, so we sold a few of those,” Hyde says of early merchandising for the restaurant. However, merchandise never really became a solid thing for 715 – he says they probably still have a bunch of shirts in storage – so, they've pivoted in terms of what they do to promote themselves, and it's quite novel.

“What we've done to try to mix it up a little is the coasters,” the manager says, lifting up a water glass to show off one of the drink mats 715 has custom-made by Blue Collar Press. “We're on our second series of coasters with local artists. We've got four different coasters, with the story of the artist on the back.”

Hyde has been part of the Lawrence arts scene for years – his first restaurant job was washing dishes at the former downtown institution, Tellers, because he needed a flexible schedule to be involved with music things (he helped found the Lawrence record label, Lotuspool, in the early '90s). The building in which 715 sits was Silverworks, a jeweler, which was around for nearly 30 years, so Hyde says that's a way to maintain a connection to the history of the building, as well as the present of the arts scene in Lawrence.

The coasters feature work by local artists, and with the assistance of Alicia Kelly, the curated series has an image of a piece on one side, with a brief explanation of it, along with biographical details and contact information on the reverse. It's simple, but it's different, and it's definitely far more interesting to see artwork – especially, say, artist John Niswonger's image of Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rendered in stained glass – as opposed to the restaurant's logo or yet another Budweiser advertisment.

“Just trying to hit the arts, because we don't have art displayed on the walls,” Hyde says, pointing to the bare stone of the south wall, and the plain, painted north. “We wanted to have a way to get the word out about artists.  There's also a poetry installment coming soon, curated by the Raven Bookstore's Danny Caine.

“Jim McCrary, the poet came up with the idea,” Hyde continues. “He was like, 'Why don't you do poetry?' and I was like, 'That's a great idea.'”

Local musician and Raven employee Chris Luxem even suggested using compact discs as coasters, but the restaurant will be sticking with the thick, hefty coasters they've been getting from Blue Collar. As Hyde points out, these four-inch by four-inch squares are pretty much ready for display, as is.

“What I like about these is, you can clip a little magnet on them and put them on the fridge,” he suggests. “Because I'm such a fan of the arts, it's great to be able to have some [artwork] here, because then, if you end up going to any of the Final Fridays or the [Ladies of Lawrence Art] events, maybe you'll see it again.”

It's great, Hyde says, because the 715 staff sees older women in their 60s and 70s quietly sneaking coasters into their purses when they think nobody's looking, but he assures everyone that they're meant to be taken.

“They're pretty – having a set of these on your coffee table at home is kinda cool, because it's not same-old, same-old, you know?” Hyde gestures to the rest of the restaurant from where he's seated by the front windows. “It's pretty monochromatic here, with the wood and the rock, but then we've got the black tables, white dishes, white napkins – so it's nice to have this little bit of color without it being obnoxious.”

Hyde points to any number of art openings, concerts, readings, and multiple other events taking place in Lawrence on any given night, and how great it is that 715 gets to be a part of that on the regular. He hopes that the coasters can give back a small amount of that joy to community.

“We like to have all of that interaction with the arts, and this is just one way we can continue to have that interaction and support the local scene in our own way,” Hyde concludes. “I have no idea if it's provided anything other than enjoyment for me, but it's cool to help people, you know?”

Story by Nick Spacek.  Photos by Austin Snell

Wild Territory introduces multiple generations to science through merchandise

Before opening Wild Territory Science & Nature Store, her science and natural history shop at 942 Massachusetts St. in downtown Lawrence, owner Joyce Donham worked as the Oklahoma City Zoo for 11 years, where she was the education curator. It was during her time there that she started the business that would turn into the cool and quirky shop.

“On the weekends and stuff, I started going to flea markets, selling science items and biology – alligator heads and stuff like that,” is how Donham describes the store's early days. Then, when she moved back to Lawrence after time away, she figured she'd either get her Masters or open a store.

“If the hills weren't so bad here, I'd've gone to KU for my Masters,” she says with a grin and a laugh. Wild Territory first opened in 2002, just a block north on the other side of the street, operating out of the back half of a storefront it shared with Prairie Pond Studio. After two years, though, Donham was able to find a storefront of her own, and has been in her current location since 2004.

The store is described on the Wild Territory website as a “unique education store,” which specializes in “providing basic as well as unusual and intriguing natural history and science products for our customers,” but that only scratches the surface of what you can find in Donham's shop. It's a veritable cornucopia of products to tempt kids and kids-at-heart.

A glance in any direction will reveal fossils, mounted insects under glass, microscopes, a Lost In Space action figure, and t-shirts featuring everything from the caffeine molecule to glow-in-the-dark skeletons. It's all tastefully arranged, and pretty amazing, but the counter with insects, fossils, and a dizzying array of animal bones attracts the most traffic. It's no surprise, given Donham's background.

“We emphasize every aspect of science, but biology is really my forte,” the store owner explains, as her degree is in biology education. It's a very tactile kind of store, and Donham loves the fact that her store is a place where kids can see things in person they might have otherwise only viewed online or in books, as well as the fact that they can touch them – which is so much better than a museum.

“It's really great, because we get to introduce [kids] to science,” Donham describes the way mothers and fathers in Lawrence bring their children to Wild Territory. “This town is a very educational community.”

She's quite proud of living in a town that cares so much about science, and the fact that her store is now something of a multi-generational favorite. Having been open for almost 17 years now, some of the customers who came in when they were young, now bring in children of their own to Wild Territory.

“It drops me for a loop,” Donham says. “I heard one lady tell her child, 'This was mommy's favorite store when she was little,' and I was just – 'Holy cow! How old am I?' It does shock you, but it's very nice.”

Located just two doors up from The Toy Store, the science and nature store sees a lot of business during the summer holiday break, as well as at Christmas, but people are in and out of the shop year-round (during our short conversation at the shop's front counter, two entire families come in and make a circuit around the store).

While Wild Territory sells quite a few t-shirts with logos ranging from Star Trek to an Einstein t-shirt that looks like the Aerosmith logo, in terms of store-branded merchandise, Donham says that Wild Territory logo t-shirts are very popular. When she sees someone wearing one, it makes her happy.

“It's like, 'Wow, that's great,'” she says. “It's fantastic – we know that what we're selling is working, and that people enjoy and like it.”

It's not just Lawrencians who buy those shirts, either, continues Donham, because visitors to Wild Territory are the sort who, if they stop there once, will stop by every time they're in town.

“We have a lot of people who come for conferences at KU,” she says, listing off a slew of international visitors to the store: “From Norway, Africa, England, Canada – you name it. Everywhere. They'll come in for a conference, and then buy one and take it back to their university or their museum.”

While some of Dunham's shirts are ordered pre-made from other companies, she gets her Wild Territory logo t-shirts from Blue Collar Press. She describes the positives of working with a local business to get that merchandise as being on the same wavelength.

“I can just call and say, 'Can you change this a little bit?', and get it right down to exactly what I want,” Donham says of her experiences working with Blue Collar Press. “It can be real simple, and it's taken care of, and I get exactly what I want.”

A further example of just how far Blue Collar is willing to go to help a customer started with Donham. When she'd come to pick things up in winter months, the front desk manager would carry out her shirts to her, due to ice on the steep incline to the front door of their current warehouse.

“It was just the nicest thing,” Donham says. “I didn't even ask – they just started doing it for me.”

After taking notice of the trouble Donham had with the large boxes in which her shirts came, Blue Collar started a free Friday delivery for her, and eventually extended the service city-wide to their Lawrence customer base, essentially starting an entire business initiative out of a desire to help just one customer who needed it.

The logo, found on those t-shirts, was designed by a customer, who did it as a favor, freshening up the shop's original sign – which still hangs on Wild Territory's back wall. While that logo was designed by an advertising professional, the current logo was a fan of the store who just wanted to give something back to a place she liked.

“She just came in and said she could make it look nice, and that's the one we're using,” Donham says with no small amount of amazement. “They're so nice! Just lovely people.”

As far as niceness goes, Donham and Wild Territory give back to the community which gives to them, especially to charities which go along with the store's mission of biology and education, like the Lawrence Humane Society, the Special Olympics, or the Jayhawk Audubon Society's annual Kaw Valley Eagles Day every January.

“We give away shirts all the time,” says Donham. “We donate a lot – probably more than I should, but sometimes, it's a worthwhile cause that I support wholeheartedly.”

Sunflower Outdoor & Bike spreads the love through bike repair and free T-shirts

Dan Hughes has owned Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop at 804 Massachusettes Street since 2001, but has been at the shop since 1989. He started working there while attending the University of Kansas, when it was owned by Susan and David Millstein. They opened Sunflower in 1972, but then, it was known as Sunflower Surplus.

“Dave's dad was an Army/Navy surplus guy in Kansas City, so they opened one here,” says Hughes of the original incarnation. How he came to take over the long-running business from the Millsteins is a story of finding one's niche.

“I got my degree in anthropology, and that wasn't going anywhere,” the store owner says with a grin. “That was in '91. I started working here full-time, and took on more responsibility and more responsibility and more responsibility until I was pretty much runnin' the place.”

Around 2001, the Millsteins – though not in their golden years, by any stretch – were looking for someone in the next generation to take Sunflower over. That led to Hughes and his wife, Karla, purchasing the shop. They took over a store with nearly thirty years of history, including a disaster which could have ended it.

On February 26, 1997, a fire gutted almost the entire bike shop side of Sunflower at 802 Massachusetts, as well as damaging much of the outdoor gear portion next door. Hughes was the bike shop manager, and he describes it as a seminal moment as an employee.

“It nothing but a shell left over – no roof, no second floor,” Hughes explains. The building his office is in at 804 Mass, has  one million gallons of water pumped into it to keep the fire from marching all the way down the block. The employees met the next night at Free State Brewery, and in the midst of libations to take off the edge of the hurt, David Millstein took Hughes aside.

“He took me aside and said, 'Dan, I know the bike shop was your baby, but this is our chance to rebuild exactly the way we want to,'” says Hughes. The process of rebuilding Sunflower Outdoor and Bike into the warm, friendly wooden structure it is today would take a year. “We feel fortunate – it was not the ideal way to remodel the space, but it turned out okay, I think.”

Sifting through the debris after, Hughes would pull out bike frames, rating them as rare, medium rare, and well-done, with tags to that effect and priced accordingly. It was rough process, with the shop being ran out of a much smaller location down the block and employees who knew the right end of hammer helping to rebuild the store itself.

Since then, Sunflower has only continued to grow. In addition to selling a variety of bikes, kayaks, hats, knives, camping equipment, pants, and everything one could possibly need to go have fun outside, the shop has a variety of programs which encourage and help people who want to do so.

“Obviously, we're big supporters of the area clubs that are in line with what we do,” the owner explains of Sunflower's work with Lawrence Mountain Bike Club and the KU Rock Climbing Club. He also points to their sponsorship of the annual BANF Outdoor Film Festival at Liberty Hall. The sell-out, two-night event allows Sunflower to pass along funds to various charities, as well. When local schools like Woodlawn Elementary have a bike rodeo, Sunflower's there, tuning up bikes.

“We also doers – I like to say that we have a bunch of nerds on staff,” says Hughes enthusiastically. “They're outdoor geeks – not for love of money, but for love of doing stuff, so being out there and being part of that community and participating in paddle sports or trail running or backpacking is kind of familial. Any chance we get to help, we do.”

Sometimes, there's merchandise to support those events – some bike bottles, for instance – but you're actually more likely to get a free Sunflower t-shirt if you're already wearing one. Hughes pulls a card out and passes it over. In the middle is the Sunflower green and yellow logo, with text on it reading, “Thanks for sporting our shirt! Redeem this card for a free t-shirt. It's our way of saying thanks!”

“All of the managers have these cards in their wallets,” he says. “It's viral marketing – sort of a random act of kindness. Every time I see one of our logos it makes me feel like, 'Yeah, we've got a fan.' That's worth a lot. We want to reward that, if at all possible. It spreads the love a little, for relatively low cost.”

There are also pictures out there of Sunflower t-shirts which have been taken all around the world.

“Just a couple of months ago, I think we got a family of four in Antarctica wearing their Sunflower tees,” Hughes offers by way of example. “It's a whole thing: saying, 'Yeah, I was at Machu Picchu with our t-shirt.' It's super cool.”

Given that Sunflower sponsors races and an outdoor and bike shop offers no end of possibilities on items which can be branded with the store's logo, there seems to be quite a variety of Sunflower Outdoor and Bike merchandise.

“We've been very fortunate with Blue Collar, in that we come to them with a crazy idea, and they seem to figure out how to do it,” chuckles Hughes, as he lists off everything from t-shirts to embroidery to hats. “They've been a very capable and accommodating partner in that.”

He admits that a fair number of the Sunflower design ideas are homegrown. Employees with experience in art or graphic design bring ideas to Hughes, and suggest them, to say nothing of Hughes' father-in-law, Jim Smith, who is a former Hallmark artist.

“We basically call him up and say, 'We need a t-shirt with my face on Mothra's body and Uri's face on Godzilla, and it needs to say 'Battle of the Gravel Monsters,'” Hughes says, pulling a shirt off his desk which, in fact, features just that image and text. “We send it off to Blue Collar, and  – poof – they get it done. We're very grateful they put up with our shenanigans.”

by Nick Spacek
photos: Austin Snell

Love Garden Sounds has a blast experimenting with merch

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Lawrence's downtown record store, Love Garden Sounds, has been in operation since 1990. It started out upstairs at 936 ½ Massachusetts Street, before moving to its current location at 822 Massachusetts in 2009. Current owner Kelly Corcoran has been an employee of the store since 2000, and has owned the venerable vinyl emporium since 2004.

It was originally just t-shirts and stickers for Love Garden merchandise, but over the course of Corcoran's time at the shop, customers have seen a variety of merchandise made: messenger bags, pint glasses, coffee mugs, stickers, hats, and of course, more t-shirts.

“Why am I willing to try new stuff? Because I think it's fun,” Corcoran explains over iced coffee. “I think it's worth the energy, because then [customers] go, 'Oh, they have these hats!' and then they're gone. It's fun to try different things. People like the logo. And, frankly, people bring me different ideas all the time.”

Corcoran points to the trucker hat that he's wearing, with the Love Garden logo embroidered onto the front. He explains that a customer was working with his landlord for a company that did graphics, and had the graphics company turn the Love Garden logo into an embroidery file, which the customer then just gave to Corcoran. A particularly novel example of how Love Garden sells merch is also tied into those trucker hats. The hats were stored in this place where one of the shop cats, Chardonnay, would hide from another cat, Stuffing.

“She would go and hang out there, and she would knead the hat. She would mess them up, but you could still wear them – but, they weren't like, new, so it was like, 'How am I gonna have fun with this? Okay, I'll just make them incredibly cheap.' Made them five bucks, so it was like you don't care that it's kind of messed up.

The 18 hats went in two days. Corcoran says that Love Garden experiments with merch in ways like this because they can get away with it and it's fun to do different stuff.

“For a while we had deals where someone would call us and say, 'We have a bunch of leftover shirts,'” he says. “I'd be like, 'What do you need for them? If you put the logo on them, what do they cost?' I don't get to pick sizes or colors, and then I'd put them all on a rack and see what happens. Some of them would be atrocious.”

The Love Garden logo is recognizable and distinct. Someone might be able to puzzle out what the squid enveloping a planet might be, should they come across the version saying “Sonic Reverberation Studies,” but for the more common “Lawrence, Kansas” incarnation, the Love Garden logo is a secret handshake for record nerds all across the country. Corcoran explains that if you know what it is, it's like code.

“If you know what that is, you know that it's a record store, but if you don't know the brand, you don't really know what it is at all,” says the store owner.

Blue Collar Press is actually the impetus for Love Garden's merchandising push, Corcoran continues, saying that when he bought into the store in 2004, the only shirts available were full-color logo t-shirts. The single-color Love Garden logo was mocked up at Blue Collar's Eudora home at the time, and changed it to the “Lawrence, Kansas” style. The low price point for basic shirts was also a great selling point.

“We started doing single-color shirts, and we would just sell them for $8,” Corcoran says. “And it just turned into us not being able to keep up, and we had to start making enormous quantities. That was the beginning of the merchandising aspect, and I just stumbled into it, because I was like, 'Can we make a cheaper t-shirt?'”

At first, Corcoran didn't think it would go on forever. His initial thoughts were that it would be a novelty, but it became clear that this was something which customers were very interested in. To that end, they keep things at a reasonable price.

“I don't know if there's something culturally different in people wanting to buy local business t-shirts, from 2010-2018,” he muses, but recognizes that the merchandising game, and the idea of brand building wasn't something that was discussed in 2000. It was just a case of making t-shirts for your shop.

“It's great that people want to promote your store,” Corcoran says. “I like that there's a layer of mystery behind the logo if you don't know what it means. It's intriguing, and I like that, and it meets the dynamic of Love Garden, in that you can come in and do your business, and we will interact with you, but we will leave you alone if you want to be left alone. It's important to me. I like to go to places where you get a little recognition, and then you get to explore – that's what I think record stores should be.”

Love Garden's owner understands that people want to buy merchandise, because they identify with what it represents. He points to the fact that people buy sports gear all the time, and it's because of similar reasons, thinking of how common it is to see a new KU student wearing one of the eight free t-shirts they got.

For Corcoran, seeing a Love Garden t-shirt on someone, or a sticker on the bumper of their care, doesn't offer up just a thrill of recognition that someone supports his store, but also a reinforcement that he's doing something right.

“I'm glad that they like the store well enough to represent it, but it's nice to have the reinforcement on those days where I'm like, 'Ugh, I don't really wanna work,'” he admits. “The motivation is great: 'Oh, you're doing a good job,' and I can keep going. It reminds me of the value of the store, the things that come with it, what it's supposed to do, and what it's supposed to represent to people.”

Essentially, Corcoran says, it's more a pleasant reminder of the thing that he does and that he takes pride in it than anything else. He tries not to get caught in the ego boost of it, and uses it as a reminder that he's doing a good job and he needs to continue doing that job well. To that end, charitable giving is simple and easy.

“Anytime a charity comes in asking for something for a raffle, I say, 'Cool! Take a t-shirt,'” Corcoran explains. “I do that all the time, for any charity I think has value.”

It's a smart choice: not only does it reinforce the secret code, but when people see it in the context of a charity raffle for a cause which they appreciate, the store's brand is further strengthened by association.

“It's just a lot more fun to buy interesting merch and see what happens,” concludes Love Garden's owner. “And, if it fails – there's always sidewalk sale.”

by Nick Spacek
photos: Austin Snell