Cool Stuff: Eclectic retail store turns 20

Time flies fast for downtown veterans

Arnie Fagan, the owner of Cool Stuff, was walking around a village in Peru during a festival this summer when he spotted a hat for sale that had the widest brim he had ever seen, other than a sombrero.

“I said, ‘Ooh, that’s COOL.’ It was made of palm leaves,” Fagan recalled.

That, of course, is the operative word when trying to get a handle on how Fagan chooses the fanciful-yet-shrewd array of items collected from around the world that end up with a price tag in his store.

Fagan decided to keep the hat for his personal collection. “For the store, it’s more, ‘Ooh, that’s cool – and it will sell,’” he said about the reaction that leads him to buy products for Cool Stuff. Fagan describes his customer base even more broadly — college students and their parents, teachers, tourists, children, old people… well, basically everybody who passes by the store.

Here’s just a sampling of items located somewhere between the $4,000 bicycle rickshaw shipped over from Indonesia at the front of the store and the 9-foot-tall, hand-carved tiki figure from Java along the back wall: incense, candles, Buddha statues, tapestries and wooden sculptures out the wazoo. There are supplies to make beer and wine and, in a series of display cases and containers, supplies to make beaded jewelry.

Most of the imported items are from Asia, Central America and South America, with a smaller selection from Africa. He still takes a few buying trips to exotic places every year, but not as much as he used to. With all the contacts he’s developed over the years, Fagan can make his purchases via phones and computers.

One item he doesn’t carry any more are tie-dyed T-shirts, which is ironic because that’s the product that got him started in the retail business.

After leaving his hometown in suburban Chicago and graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Fagan decided to travel with the Grateful Dead concert caravan and sell tie-dyed T-shirts. Fagan, whose mother sold fine jewelry started large-scale production after returning to Columbia — using “every laundry in town” and opening a warehouse downtown. The T-shirts he put on racks outside the warehouse beginning in 1988 sold so well that he decided to move the retail operation to south Ninth Street in 1990.

Fagan opened The Bead and Rock store a couple doors down in 1992, and in 1994 he combined the operations and opened Cool Stuff at the current location in the historic Metropolitan Building on Broadway.

The Metropolitan Building originally housed J.J. Newberry’s, a general merchandise store with a lunch counter and soda fountain, also known as a Five & Dime. (Fagan tried to recreate the atmosphere, selling ice cream, soda and hotdogs, but the experiment ended in 2003 after three years.)

But he seems to be in no hurry to sell, just biding his time until the right offer comes along, keeping cool.