Catering to coolest.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

Standing amid a sea of open cardboard boxes in a First Avenue warehouse, Garth Marriott doesn't look the part of a global tastemaker. But after six years at the helm of the retail Web site CoolestShop.com, that's what he's become.

Marriott, 30, specializes in rare sneakers and hard-to-find clothes. He sells $200 pairs of Pumas to "shoe heads" and $600 leather coats to style-conscious city-dwellers. His mostly urban audience lives in New York, Los Angeles, England, Japan and beyond. The business operates on a modified version of basic supply and demand principals: Marriott offers products that are guaranteed to sell, plus an assortment of shoes and clothing that simply appeal to him.

"Sometimes I wonder why we buy this stuff," he says holding up a multi-colored leather jacket that looks like a day-glo version of a Matisse painting.

But then the style guru in Marriott resurfaces.

"We're called the CoolestShop," he reminds himself. "We can't not have this jacket."

So far, Marriott's business plan appears to be working. The company, which has only three full-time employees including Marriott, will gross close to $1 million this year. Perhaps, just as importantly, CoolestShop.com has earned the respect of trend watchers, such as Josh Rubin, the New York-based designer behind the influential Web site Coolhunting.com.

"His passion for this was immediately obvious," Rubin says of Marriott. "He's got the products and he's clearly passionate about collecting sneakers. He's not someone who realized there is a bit of a trend right now and he can make some money."

The trend of which Rubin speaks is sneaker collecting, and although it's something that's been around for several decades, it's become much more visible within the past couple of years. And CoolestShop.com has been there to meet the demand.

Shoe collectors, Marriott says, are searching for quality and something that expresses their individuality. For some, a pair of sneakers is the most important fashion statement they can make.

"They say hip hop's gone mainstream, well shoe collecting's gone mainstream, too," Marriott says. "There's just a ton more people that have been exposed to it."

Marriott started CoolestShop.com in 1999, to sell a bit of everything. The shop is an outgrowth of a lifestyle magazine he published called Elixir and is based on a column in which he highlighted the "coolest" fashion, technology and lifestyle items "on Earth."

"We were busting our (rears) telling people where to find it on the Internet and we finally said, maybe we should just sell this stuff ourselves," Marriott says.

At one point his business had expanded to include a magazine, a Web site and a retail store. Elixir reviewed everything from $12 hip-hop CDs to $60,000 European automobiles and CoolestShop.com sold a variety of products. Eventually, Marriott was forced to consolidate his operation and focus on his Internet retail business.

Marriott's taste for business (and the $15,000 seed money for his store) came from his family's Portland meat packing company, Oregon Chief Meats. His great-grandfather started the Portland business in the early 1900s and built it into a 100-person operation. The company was dissolved in the mid-1990s after consolidation began to seriously impact the meat industry.

"My grandfather was very, very driven," Marriott says. `People looked back and said, `Did he ever enjoy any of this money he made?' He just worked and worked and worked. He was very old school and very driven.'

While Marriott vows not to work as hard as his grandfather did, he says that he learned about the importance of quality from his family's business.

"They had a name brand and they had a lot of pride in their product," Marriott says. "For me, the idea of "the coolest," that means a lot."

Retro-cool shoe brands

Cool shoes account for about half of Marriott's sales - clothing and accessories make up the other half. The store carries a host of retro-cool shoe brands such as Puma, Pony and Le Coq Sportif, along with limited edition footwear by Nike, Adidas, Reebok and other giants.

Marriott, himself a sneaker fiend who has several hundred shoes in his own personal foot locker, has sold limited edition Run D.M.C. Adidas sneakers for $400 and has unloaded a pair of barely-used custom-made Nikes for $1,000.

"The people who are paying that kind of money are paying for exclusiveness," Marriott says. "We're carrying products that very few people are offering."

The shoes that are drawing sneaker collectors to CoolestShop.com and to Marriott's personal shoe site (Shoezilla.com) are not the kind of footwear that's available at mainstream sporting good stores. They're the shoes that are being talked about on shoe collector sites such as Highsnobiety.com and Niketalk.com. Shoe companies are dusting off popular molds from the past and also creating new, limited edition runs to feed the rare sneaker craze, which made headlines in 2003 after Nike produced a single custom-made pair of its Dunk shoes in eBay colors and auctioned them off for $30,000.

Many of the shoes CoolestShop.com carries were never intended to be sold to American audiences and tracking down some of the rare models requires a bit of detective work on Marriott's part. The rarer the better, and in some cases, the more expensive the better.

"It's funny," Marriott says, "A lot of the stuff that we're stuck with, it's kind of the lower price point kind of things."

Marriott tried to unload his lower priced items that wouldn't sell - and cater to Eugene's thriftiness - by selling his overstock shoes and clothing out of a storefront on South Willamette Street. Prior to that he operated a Whitaker store for several years. But neither experiment worked particularly well, and he closed the South Willamette store earlier this year. The brick-and-mortar businesses ended up functioning as separate entities from the Internet store and, even at reduced prices, Marriott says, Eugene customers weren't buying.

"I would love to have a thriving retail business in Eugene," he says, "But in order to keep a retail business in Eugene, you need to sell stuff at retail prices."

"I sell more stuff to London than I do to all of Oregon by a mile and they're happy to pay the taxes and the shipping."

Marriott says that the reason that his urban customers are willing to pony up for full priced items is partly because prices tend to be higher in big cities, and partly because he has made those items accessible. While growing up in Lake Oswego, he wondered why certain products were easier to find in certain places.

`I remember thinking, `All the stuff that's cool here, isn't cool (in the next town over),'' Marriott says. ``Now, if I could just get on a bus, go over there and buy (the stuff that's cool here).''

In a sense, Marriott has achieved that childhood goal, only it's his customers who are coming to him to find the fashions they deem cool. Style watchers such as Rubin, the Coolhunting founder, say Web sites like CoolestShop.com are changing the way people look for hard-to-find-goods.

"The Internet has made collectible products more accessible," Rubin says. "Whether you're talking about sneakers, Disney paraphernalia or fine china, the Internet has facilitated the way that people connect with products."

Pet clothing, too

Marriott's main competitors include the significantly larger Web site KarmaLoop.com and the fashion/lifestyle mega-store Urban Outfitters. Part of the appeal of CoolestShop.com has to do with the fact that it isn't as big as those other stores. Marriott does no advertising, he uses no fashion models, and his store's 2,000 items are a mish-mash that includes not only clothing and shoes, but also books, novelty toys, pet clothing and other oddities.

Marriott says his store also distinguishes itself with personal service. If you call during business hours someone will pick up the phone and if it's not Marriott himself, it's probably the same guy who will pack up your order and send it to you.

"It's a really hands-on (business)," says Matt Howe, one of the store's three employees.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, co-owner of Oregon Design Collective, has shopped at CoolestShop.com, and despite Marriott's limited success in operating a storefront, says that he believes Eugene may still be able to support a brick and mortar version of the store.

"Eugene is a fairly hip little town," Morgenthaler says. "I think that there's a lot of people in town that don't really know about them. I would really like to see them become more a (local) fashion or style powerhouse,"

Marriott won't say what the next step in CoolestShop.com's evolution is, but he seems to suggest that something big is about to happen. He says he'd like to take his company to the next level, but then, just as he's getting worked up about new investors and big ideas for the future, he suddenly changes gears and isn't talking about business anymore.

He's talking about what would make the shop even cooler.

"One Utopian idea that we had for the store was trying to involve our customers more," he says.

"If we could somehow involve them in the buying process, that would be the epitome of taking the coolest shop to the ultimate level."

CAPTION(S):

Garth Marriott sells to buyers from New York City, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and other fashion-forward big cities.