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

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