ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL KIMMEL
What started as a ho-hum assignment—picking up items for this month’s gift guide, serving as a sort of courier of consumerism—quickly turned into a whirlwind adventure in retail, with stops across a veritable cross-section of St. Louis. Among them:
- A toy store in Sunset Hills, reminiscent of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, with Playmobil playsets and puppets, trains and Tonieboxes. (Not familiar with a Toniebox? It’s a screen-free savior for my 5-year-old daughter, with some of her favorite Disney and Pixar characters reading and singing her to sleep.)
- A collaborative creative workspace for women in Midtown, replete with bottomless tea and coffee, workshops and networking events, in-house photography and design services.
- A nondescript space in Maryland Heights that houses exquisitely colorful handwoven baskets from a Senegalese-born fiber artist who pays “radical respect” to her native country with her business.
- A rugged industrial complex just south of downtown Maplewood where a popular St. Louis company with its own creative twist on the bottle opener recently set up shop. (We can only imagine what it took to transport all that heavy equipment.)
- A soaring space with Monets, Van Goghs, and century-old Roman sculptures made of marble—OK, yes, we’re referring to the Saint Louis Art Museum. (After far too many months cooped up at home, we must admit that a stroll through SLAM provided much-needed respite.)
That’s not to mention the entrepreneurs without brick-and-mortars (the crafter who elevates serving boards to art, the couple who carves wooden trucks for kids), and the more traditional retail stops (the embroidery store in DeMun, the shop at The Boulevard specializing in St. Louis–centric apparel).
As we discovered along our trip, any feature about shopping local is ultimately a story about our region’s neighborhoods and the entrepreneurial spirit that brings out their very best. Likewise, for this month’s cover feature, we asked in-the-know residents about favorite spots on their own blocks, from Cherokee to the CWE, St. Charles to Kirkwood.
With the holidays quickly approaching, these neighborhoods’ shops are facing an especially critical time of year as the pandemic continues to take its toll. As Union Studio co-owner Sarah Kelley told SLM in 2020, “This last quarter of the year is what makes or breaks small businesses and retail businesses. It’s going to take some extra effort for shops like us to be able to pull off the season in the way that we need to.”
To that end, many St. Louis stores have expanded their online selections—an important point to consider while deciding whether to point your cursor toward Amazon or a big-box store instead. Some organizations are getting inventive with alfresco options. The Women’s Creative hosts Procure, its monthly maker event featuring women-owned businesses, at City Foundry STL, while South Grand regularly offers sidewalk sales and art walks. And some local businesses are pivoting in other ways.
As we saw while gathering the items for the gift guide, what Union Studio’s owners emphasized last November still rings true: “It really is going to inform what our community looks like after the pandemic.”
