Tivol partners with Shinola Detroit in new Plaza pop-up shop

In the two years since Shinola Detroit was founded, it has opened stores only in its hometown of Detroit and the trendy Tribeca neighborhood in New York City — and now a pop-up on the Country Club Plaza.

If all goes well this holiday season, that temporary store at 415 Nichols Road could stick around for the long term.

Kansas City-based Tivol opened the store in conjunction with Shinola. Cathy Tivol, chief executive officer of Tivol, was first attracted to the craftsmanship of the Shinola products and their classic lines, from watches to bicycles, and then by Shinola’s “feel good story and message.”

Shinola had once been a shoe polish brand before new owners resurrected the name for their business launched in 2011. The watches are assembled in Detroit, and prices run between $400 and $800. Bikes come out of Wisconsin — the Bixby or the Women’s Bixby at $1,950, or the Runwell for $2,950.

Customers also can pick up artisan leather goods including wallets and journals, apparel including denim, and Shinola’s namesake shoe polish.

The two Tivol stores, on the Plaza and in Overland Park, also are carrying some Shinola watches.

Mike Draper has been scoping out the Crossroads Arts District for about six months, looking for a location for one of his “Midwestern-centric” screen-printing shops.

Now he is completing a lease for 1803 Baltimore Ave. He would take over the space in January and open a Raygun shop there in early April 2014.

Azalea Home is operating in the spot but plans to close in December.

Draper started selling T-shirts his senior year of college and never stopped. He opened his first shop in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2005 as Smash, but the name was trademarked by a California company. So Draper changed the name to Raygun.

“It is a futuristic, non-existent weapon, something that was dangerous. It also was a name we could trademark,” he said.

He added another location in Iowa City in 2010.

The shops screen-print T-shirts, along with notebooks, posters, and coasters. They also carry buttons, stickers, postcards, clothing, socks, wallets, magnets and more.

Shirts have such saying as “Quit playing Ames with my heart” and a popular Kansas City shirt that says “KC — too much city for one state” with the K in Kansas and the C in Missouri.

“Kansas City has made a lot of progress in the last five years, and it is on the upswing,” Draper said Monday from his Iowa headquarters. “Before you needed some sort of reason to go down there. ‘Are you going to a funeral or something?’ But now if you are in your 20s that’s where you go when you want to get away for the weekend.”

Draper also published and has sold nearly 10,000 copies of a book, “The Midwest: God’s Gift to Planet Earth,” an illustrated guide to the history and culture of the Midwest.

This story was originally published October 14, 2013 at 8:52 PM with the headline "Tivol partners with Shinola Detroit in new Plaza pop-up shop."