KEEN GARAGE – is located in the Pearl District, Portland, Oregon.
The Pearl District
The Pearl District is one of the “must-see” Portland neighborhoods.
The District was previously a derelict collection of warehouses, railway yards and tenement buildings. It has gone through a renaissance and is today a hip, commercial and residential neighborhood with unique stores, galleries, design studios, coffee shops and artisan breweries, yes, lots of breweries!!
This is Keen
The Keen Garage.
Many places to see and be seen in the Pearl District. Strolling through the neighborhood, I came across this enormous warehouse and sauntered in. My immediate visceral reaction was that I was looking at something that was extraordinary and unique.
Keen Garage was not on my radar. I never heard of and knew nothing about it until that moment. I was mesmerized by what I saw. Apparently, an exceptionally talented and creative person put the showroom together with fun, originality, imagination and creativity.
This is the location of the Keen Garage Flagship Store and World Corporate Headquarters which is now an integral part of the Pearl District neighborhood. It is both a crowd pleaser and a crowd magnet, earning accolades and winning several design and sustainability awards. It shows off as a prime example of a building that has been re-purposed and recycled using sustainable materials to build a new space.
How to describe Keen Garage? Its uniqueness defies most descriptions as it compares to nothing else. Simply, it can be described as sustainability on steroids with many surprises!!
After my initial spike of excitement had returned to a normal level, I began to take notice of the inventory and ask a few questions.
Who is Keen?
“Keen creates innovative and comfortable products that transition seamlessly from work to play and enables people to pursue a hybrid lifestyle, create, play and care.”
This is a casual, outdoor, lifestyle brand, practical, durable and mostly waterproof. It is unique, playful, fun, and above all, functional.
The Building.
Keen Garage is a privately-owned company that began business in 2003. The five-story warehouse where they are presently housed was bought by their Company in 2012 and re-purposed using the most sustainable principles.
The original building, 1/4 of a block-long, dates from 1907. It is an example of a utilitarian brick structure and has always been a warehouse of one sort or another. It has a total of 50,000 square feet over five floors, the top four floors being used for administration and warehousing.
Even the signage has been designed using re-purposed wood. Nothing went to waste and whatever was no longer required was donated to needy causes rather than throwing it out.
All told, the renovation produced less than one dumpster of trash by the time it was completed.
The Showroom Floor.
The 4,000 square feet first floor is the Showroom.
The Showroom floor has 19’ ceilings, huge windows, and wooden floors. Original to the old warehouse, the floor has been patched with locally harvested re-used wood.
The Showroom Layout.
There are numerous different seating areas, including:
- Wooden “couches” are constructed using wood from a disassembled grain silo in South Oregon.
- At one of the paying stations, there is a counter with swing-out seats taken from an early 20th Century electric streetcar in Milwaukee.
- A Mid Century Style chair has been fashioned out of two round metal barrels with re-used car upholstery on the seats.
- Chandelier fixtures fashioned from recycled old telegraph insulators and wire spools
- Monkey bars re-purposed from the recess station in the old building.
- Hemlock shelves with rotisserie wheels were crafted from a warehouse floor in Seattle creating displays that can be rotated, enabling customers to touch and feel the shoes on all the shelves, at any level.
- At the cash wrap, lighting installation utilizes lights recovered from a munitions plant outside Los Angeles, against a backdrop of old street signs.
- A yellow 1950’s working refrigerator for beer storage (beer is served at events held in the Garage) with kegs from NW Breweries.
- Bench made from an old Chevrolet truck, including the truck springs.
Inside is a large open space with great lighting using state-of-the-art low power consumption light bulbs, with long life full spectrum LED technology.
To one side is an oversized roll-up glass-paned garage door – hence the name Keen Garage. Keen was the name of one of the founders of the Company.
The space is compelling in its originality as are the shop fixtures that were adapted from architectural salvage sourced from far and wide in the United States.
Of great interest and harking back to a bygone era is the polished metal gravity “chute” that was brought from back East and restored to working order. It is effectively a “slide” and shoeboxes can be “whooshed” with the help of gravity from the mezzanine storage area above the showroom to the sales counters and cash registers for waiting customers.
The Product Lines.
The entire Keen product line is featured in the Showroom. Keen is a lifestyle brand now comprising mostly shoes, socks, bags and pants.
Sandals.
The most iconic product in the Keen collection is the Newport Sandal designed with a strong toe cap using a patented toe technology that protects the big toe from injury.
The emphasis on the sandals is: “Fit, comfort and durability.” The sandals can be customized by changing the color of the lace, toggle, surface, insole or out sole, allowing the customers to be more engaged with the brand. Other shoes added to the collection include hiking shoes and boots.
Socks.
Next came a line of socks designed specifically for the left and right feet. They are woven from Merino wool with a “Wonder seam” on top of the sock rather than under the metatarsals. This offers more comfort because the socks do not bunch under the foot.
Bags.
To add to the Lifestyle brand a bag collection was created – not glamour bags but practical outdoorsy bags.
Pants.
Presently, Keen Garage also sells its own brand of pants designed for comfort and ease of movement. There are now 3,000 plus products in more than 5,000 retail locations in sixty countries.
The Mission.
Through its Hybrid Caregiving programs, Keen Garage supports social and environmental programs in the United States and overseas. They sponsor an active volunteer program doing amazing work where it is most needed.
Currently, they aid in disaster relief, collect millions of signatures presented to the President at the White House to protect monuments, and stop land development that will wipe out natural forests.
It comes as no surprise that Outdoor Magazine has named Keen Garage “One of America’s best places to work.”
Portland can justifiably be proud to have the Keen Garage World Headquarters housed in this award-winning Warehouse. This conversion is an example of what can be done to re-invigorate an old building that could just as easily have slipped into oblivion.
At this time, in addition to Portland, there are outposts of Keen Garage in Palo Alto, Toronto, and Tokyo. These are known as “Detached Garages” and are extensions of the Keen Brand.