Interview: Kirby & Whitney Kerr On Rotofugi's Reopening And Playboy Redux

By Ben Schuman Stoler in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 25, 2010 8:20PM

Don’t worry toy nerds! It’s only one week! It’ll all be over this Friday, when Rotofugi reopens in their new location at Lincoln and Diversey in Lincoln Park with what looks like a titillating (ha) reopening show, Playboy Redux. Earlier this week, we stopped by the new location, which is gorgeous and far more accessible than the old Chicago Ave spot, even if it is in a less “cool” area.

The Rotofugi staff was running around unpacking this and painting that, but (husband and wife) owners Kirby and Whitney Kerr assured us everything will be good to go on Friday. We also talked about how the store started, how it will change with the move, and what they added to the Playboy show:

Chicagoist: So what are you guys doing exactly?

Kirby: Oh, setting up. We’re really flying by the seat of our pants. All things considered we’re moving along pretty good though.

C: Why did you want to move?

K: We wanted more space because of a few things: Over the years we’ve grown really organically. We started with a store then we added the gallery - with the warehouse in the back - then we outgrew that, made the gallery bigger, moved, and got an off site warehouse -

C: Did you open at Chicago Ave?

K: July 2004, yeah - and we just kind of grew and grew and grew to where it was really inconvenient. We had a store, we had a gallery, we had a warehouse that was a mile away, we had a storage space. Moving things around became really a big part of our day.

Whitney: And then people had to sit and wait in different places for things to show up.

C: Why this neighborhood?

K: For this space. Period. And Delilah’s is here. Delilah’s is an institution, a landmark. I have known this building for the past 10 years, it used to be an antique store. And I always loved this spot.

W: We started seriously looking in February this year. We looked in West Town, in Ukrainian village, for a spot that was big enough and cheap enough and nothing was right. And we always wanted to be closer to train stops. We’re two blocks to the Diversey brown line here. I would have never guessed we would have moved the store to Lincoln park - I think that’s perplexed some people. But I saw this place online and I drove up here one night and called Kirby and said, 'Stop what you’re doing I’m picking you up I’ve got something to show you.' It's everything we wanted.

C: Is the new space going to change anything about the actual business?

K: A little bit. We’re going to start carrying a little more apparel - more t-shirts basically. Upper Playground, Gama-Go, Kid Robot apparel, we’re working on tokidoki. And then an expanded selection of more gifty homeware type stuff, like well designed stuff. We’re just sort of spreading out a little bit. Looking to expand our book selection, you know, have more art books. I mean basically that was one of the things - aside from wanting more space - wanting to be able to carry more things because we had maxed out that space on Chicago Ave. There were a lot of times we considered buying new items and we had no idea what to replace - so we just didn’t order them. Toys filled the entire store and it wasn’t acceptable anymore.

W: The other great thing is that now when you come see us you can always see the gallery. If someone was at lunch you couldn’t get into the gallery, you had to wait for them to get back.

C: Are the shows still going to turn over so fast?

K: It’ll slow down a little bit to actually monthly and not every 2-3 weeks. We’re intentionally slowing down to where it’s really one show a month.

C: What about the Playboy show?

K: That will be really short, just two two weeks because we had to squeeze it between other shows. For the Playboy show we added 15 new artists. There’s still the same original curator - Ned West - but we added some Chicago artists like Jeremiah Ketner, Steve Seeley, Travis Lampe, and others.

C: How does the website play into your business?

K: The online store drives a ton of traffic to our physical store. People are in Chicago for some other reason and then they come see us because they’ve seen our ads or they’ve seen our website.

W: Sunday there was a family here from Winnipeg and one of the teenage sons the thing he wanted to do in Chicago was visit Rotofugi. So their Sunday driving was nonstop to make it there by 5. We’re not the reason people come to Chicago. But we advertise nationally, a lot of people know about us, and there’s not a lot of designer toy stores in the country. So a lot of people live in places where there’s just not one. And we have one of the most extensive ones of all the toy stores in the country.

C: How much of a destination were you when you just started?

K: When we started we were the fourth designer toy store in the nation to open and of the other three before us one opened a year before and the others opened the same month as us. Munky King in LA, Robot Love in Minneapolis and Kid Robot had been around for two years - they’re the catalyst that started this business in the US.

W: And ToyTokyo for sure.

C: How did you get into it personally?

K: We got into it because a friend of mine saw an article in Wired in late 2003 that was about designer toys and, I don’t know, it just sort of fascinated me and we started buying stuff online - I actually bought Whitney a Valentine’s Day that year - and we opened the store because we were having a hard time finding the stuff we wanted. We moved to ark for 2 years and decided to move back to Chicago and -

W: I had come back to Chicago Valentine’s Day weekend to look for us an apartment. And Kirby had given me a toy and said ‘Find where we can find one of these in Chicago.’ And I brought them with me and everyone was like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ There was no place to buy them in Chicago. So we moved here and our house sold and we had all this extra money

K: Rather than invest in a condo, we started the store in July 2004 and have been doing it ever since.