After 30 years, Kansas Citians are still discovering this ‘lost city’ of a shop
It has all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned head shop: hemp necklaces, tie-dye shirts, abundant Grateful Dead iconography, air thick with patchouli and incense.
But inside the hippie hideaway It’s a Beautiful Day — 3918 Broadway Blvd., since 1991 — you will find no pipes, no bongs, none of the usual marijuana paraphernalia found at similar shops across the country. There’s a reason.
“We didn’t want to give up our freedom of speech,” said owner Erik Branstetter. “When we opened, if you sold pipes, you had to say it was for tobacco. But we wanted to be a part of the marijuana legalization effort, and the issue was already so clouded with lies that we didn’t want to contribute any more to that by pretending pipes were for tobacco.”
Instead, the shop carried pro-pot propaganda — literature, pamphlets, magazines, bumper stickers — and embraced a business model that Branstetter describes, with a touch of irony, as a “family head shop.”
Thirty-some years later, cannabis has gone corporate and It’s a Beautiful Day’s local countercultural contemporaries like 7th Heaven, Temple Slug, Aquarius and Vulcan’s Forge have fallen by the wayside. But over on the edge of Westport, IABD is still vibrating, still clinging to its peace-and-love ideals.
Both time capsule and survivor, it is quite possibly the least capitalistic business enterprise in all of Kansas City. Sales are logged in a spiral notebook; money changes hands with almost palpable reluctance.
“The vibe is unbelievable,” said Wendy Scott, who owns Cherry Bomb Tattoo in Lee’s Summit but has also been selling prayer candles at IABD for about 15 years. “You can leave and come back two years later, or a decade later, and it’s like you’re home again. And they’re so fair to their vendors. It’s the only place I will sell on consignment.”
The shop carries handmade goods from about 200 vendors, Branstetter estimated, joking that some of that inventory has been sitting inside IABD since the early 1990s. Back then, the shop was a partnership between Branstetter and Dean and Lisa Muzingo. Branstetter was primarily a woodworker, making bookshelves, desks and tables in the back and selling them up front alongside the Muzingo’s tie-dye shirts and jewelry.
The Muzingos were killed in a car accident on Easter Sunday of 1992, leaving Branstetter to sort out the future of the store. “There were some hippies who would spread out blankets and sell jewelry and other crafts near that caboose that’s behind Harry’s Bar and Tables,” Branstetter said. “I got some of them to come up here, and we started a co-op at that point.”
Branstetter also changed the name from Top Shelf to It’s a Beautiful Day — the name of a late ‘60s Bay Area rock band.
“But it was as much a Mr. Rogers thing as it was about the band,” Branstetter said.
‘Peace, love, kindness, acceptance’
The co-op arrangement lasted a few years, with artists working shifts on the register in exchange for selling their goods in the shop. Then a fire ripped through the building in 1996, after which IABD became more of a traditional consignment type of store, selling mostly from local vendors but also buying wholesale items that appealed to their hippie customer base.
That’s also around the time Fran Stanton came on as a partner; she and Branstetter have been the main faces of IABD ever since. (They bought the building in 2007.) Without really trying — perhaps because of that lack of pretense — they have created an enduring mystical sanctuary that beckons counterculture-curious teens and hippie elders alike.
“I’ve just always thought of the shop as a combination of the literature and music and alternative ways of thinking we found in our own self-discovery as young people,” Stanton said. “Peace, love, kindness, acceptance.”
“We’ve always kept a low profile, and we never really tried to have a ‘brand,’” Branstetter said. “I think there’s a little bit of mystery that comes from that. We are a little bit like a lost city over here.”
Stanton is the more outgoing of the two, more likely to interface with customers and vendors while Branstetter busies himself repairing vintage stereo equipment, an outgrowth of the business. Higher margins there? Branstetter shook his head and offered a wry smile. “There are no margins here,” Stanton said, punctuating her point, as she often does, with an unexpected burst of laughter.
Prices, to put it mildly, have not kept pace with inflation. Incense sticks are 10 for a dollar, same as the day the store opened. Tie-dye shirts are $22 now, up from the $20 they’ve been for most of IABD’s existence. Bumper stickers — these days, just as likely to be laptop stickers — are $2.
“We probably need to raise that to $3,” Stanton said, gesturing to a wall stocked with dozens of stickers bearing philosophical pronouncements about war, peace and consumerism.
Quietly, It’s a Beautiful Day is also the oldest used record store in Kansas City, 7th Heaven having gone out of business last year. Vinyl and stereo equipment reside in the back of the shop, where local concert flyers are pinned to the wall and the speakers are often tuned to 90.1 KKFI community radio.
“We don’t have a lot of rules,” Branstetter said, “but one of them is that we don’t play commercial radio in here.”
On a recent Wednesday not long after the shop opened (hours are Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.), a KKFI host named Steve Stemmerman stopped by for a meeting with Stanton. He came bearing a fresh batch of stickers that said “Liberty and Justice for All,” which he said was a response to recent actions by the Trump administration. He wanted to sell the stickers on consignment.
Or, sort of.
“I’ve been giving them away,” Stemmerman said, “and if people want to give me a donation, it goes to the next order of stickers. And if you want to take 30% of those donations, or whatever, that’s fine with me.”
They struck a deal: It’s a Beautiful Day would not take a cut of the donations. Neither party would be making any money at all. Transaction complete, Stemmerman wished the pair a good afternoon and stepped out onto Broadway, where it was, in fact, a beautiful day.
This story was originally published April 24, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
