Tim Harty, The Business Times 

You can find ColoradoCool Apparel’s T-shirts, hoodies, ball caps, beanies, stickers, magnets, tapestries and posters in more than 200 stores in Colorado. Plus, ColoradoCool leases 10-foot-by-10-foot consignment booths inside seven stores inside malls on the Front Range.

That’s pretty good growth for a Grand Junction-based wholesale company that CEO and Head of Design John Clinton started in the Fort Collins/Loveland area as a side business in 2016 to sell merchandise with his designs on them.

He and his wife, Erika Clinton, moved the wholesale headquarters to Grand Junction in 2021. And recently they took the next step in the company’s evolution. They opened a brick-and-mortar store in downtown Grand Junction at 443 Main St. on May 15.

It was a logical move, as Erika said, “We’ve been living here, have our warehouse here, enjoy all the outdoor activities and things to do out here and realized there’s a hole in the market. I mean, there’s only a couple of other souvenir shops around here – I think just one downtown – so there’s just kind of a need for it.

“And we realized that could be something that we were really interested in doing and not just having our spaces over in the Front Range – those have gone really well – and we were just thinking, ‘Hey, why can’t we do this ourselves?’ and, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’”

They knew exactly where they wanted to be in Grand Junction.

“We only wanted to do it downtown,” Erika said. “We weren’t interested if it wasn’t downtown, because with a store like ours, it’s a lot about foot traffic.”

The Clintons knew what they wanted in their store, too, although at first they didn’t know if they could fill the space, because they’d never had so much room to display their wares. It turned out they had more than enough stuff to display, and they have plans for more.

“We were going for sort of a surf shop kind of cool,” Erika said “You know, a cool downtown spot where people were excited to bring their friends and their families and people who come to visit them, but also have that Colorado feel. We wanted it to be kind of a combination, because, I mean, we’re not in California, but we love when we traveled to go to surf shops and see what other people are doing, and it’s fun to bring a souvenir home from your travels and remember your trip. 

“So, we kind of wanted to capture that. And then we just wanted it to look nice, and we put a little effort into making it look nice and not like your standard souvenir store.”

They’re happy with the results so far, which were aided by the timing of the opening.

“It’s surpassed our expectations, for sure, in a really good way,” Erika said. “Having JUCO in town, the Junior College Baseball World Series, that drew in so much traffic for us. It was awesome. We had all these guys from Tennessee and Alabama and Texas, all the teams, and that was awesome. 

“And then Junction just has so much going on in the summer, so we’ve had a lot of foot traffic downtown, and it’s great to see. Downtown seems to be growing in a really positive way, and it’s fun to be a part of that change.”

Erika is a Grand Junction native whose time at Colorado State University overlapped a few years with John, and they both graduated with degrees in graphic design. Yet they didn’t meet in college.

“We had the same degree, a lot of the same professors. We actually knew some of the same people from our classes, but as far as we know, we never crossed paths, so that’s kind of funny,” she said.

Instead, they met and started dating as employees at hat-maker Zephyr Headwear in Loveland.

Erika makes it a point to say John started ColoradoCool on his own.

“This was his thing,” she said. “And then I got more and more involved as we started dating.”

Now, John remains the primary designer, and his flair for incorporating colors and signature Colorado and Grand Junction items is evidenced on every display rack and shelf in the store.

Meanwhile, Erika handles duties such as social media, marketing and web design.

ColoradoCool uses some other designers, and at the Grand Junction store they have seven employees, including their first full-time employee.

“Most of them are from Colorado Mesa University, and that’s been working out really great for us,” Erika said.