Coffee Break's Troost stickers are all the rage
By Nadia Pflaum in It's Five O' Clock Somewhere, Out & About
Wed., Jul. 1 2009 @ 7:25AM
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| Nadia Pflaum |
| Troost sticker |
If you've driven down Troost Avenue, oh, ever, you might have found yourself behind a vehicle sporting one of these blunt, black-and-white bumper stickers. They're the creation of Mark Holmes, the 41-year-old owner of Coffee Break, the quirky cafe that serves Rockhurst University and University of Missouri Kansas City students on the corner of 54th and
Troost.
Holmes sells the stickers for $1 apiece. His first 300 went pretty fast. After donating the $300 in proceeds to Durwin Rice's Tulips on Troost efforts, Holmes broke even. Making money wasn't the point. The stickers are advertising, sure, but more than that, Holmes is using them to try to drive away the negative connotations associated with Troost Avenue.
"It's all in how you interpret it," he says of the design. The street's name is big, bold and ambiguous. "Coffee Break" is on there, too, in such small letters across the bottom left that motorists never see it. "If you don't get it, you don't get it," Holmes says. "That's why it doesn't say something like, Troost is where you need to be."
The message is getting out, obviously, because Holmes' stickers are gone. His next batch of 1,000, still $1 each, should arrive in a few weeks. He sells t-shirts of the design too.
Opening a storefront cafe on Troost didn't seem like a stretch to
Holmes, a KC native who graduated from Rockhurst High and went to UMKC for a degree in mass media and communications. But it didn't take long to realize that the the
street's name is still loaded. "The people who stress the hardest that
Troost is the dividing line don't come here," he says. "Ask Kurt Wirken (of Mike's Tavern).
If you saw the diversity of his bar on any night for any of his events,
you wouldn't see it. I didn't think people still believe that kind of
stuff, but they do."Troost.
Holmes sells the stickers for $1 apiece. His first 300 went pretty fast. After donating the $300 in proceeds to Durwin Rice's Tulips on Troost efforts, Holmes broke even. Making money wasn't the point. The stickers are advertising, sure, but more than that, Holmes is using them to try to drive away the negative connotations associated with Troost Avenue.
"It's all in how you interpret it," he says of the design. The street's name is big, bold and ambiguous. "Coffee Break" is on there, too, in such small letters across the bottom left that motorists never see it. "If you don't get it, you don't get it," Holmes says. "That's why it doesn't say something like, Troost is where you need to be."
The message is getting out, obviously, because Holmes' stickers are gone. His next batch of 1,000, still $1 each, should arrive in a few weeks. He sells t-shirts of the design too.
The summers are slow at the shop, so it's fortunate that Holmes owns his building, formerly the home of his father's business, Razorback Plumbing. He appreciates the traffic he gets during the school year from Rockhurst and UMKC, but his relationship with the latter is made complicated by the fact that UMKC gobbled up a significant stretch of vacant property to his north for which there seems to be no immediate plans. Without any other retail neighbors to bring in pedestrian traffic during the hot months, Coffee Break can feel like a desert island.
Holmes used to create his own neighbors-for-a-day by hosting events like WearHaus fashion shows and marketplaces. It's something he'd like to get back into, so he says he welcomes artists and designers to hit him up for a place to show off in the fall.
Oh and p.s., Coffee Break is hosting "Cup of Kindness," a summer benefit series of concerts benefiting causes like the March of Dimes, Bridging the Gap, KKFI and the Midwest Music Foundation, and featuring acts like Howard Iceberg, Scott Easterday, Luna Cantera, Dino O'Dell, Cheri Woods, Elaine McMilian, Nick Baker, Dennis Porter, Mikal Shapiro and others. The next one is Friday, July 17.
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