From Briarwood to Main St. isn’t the usual trajectory for a gift shop. Nicki Wilson, an interior designer who worked as a lighting designer at Gross Electric for seventeen years, opened iT Boutique in the Von Maur wing of Briarwood in 2007, but, she explains, when you sign a yearlong lease, you’re low in the pecking order. “I was considered a temporary lease. Whenever the bigger stores wanted my space, they got them, and they’d put me in whatever space was left over.” In seven years, she was in five different locations.
Now she’s in one of the more picturesque buildings on Main Street, the former Chocolate House (or, if your tenure in Ann Arbor goes way back, the Lovin’ Spoonful). The building’s new landlord, Ilkim Erturk, understands gift shops–she is the former owner of Ionnia in Nickels Arcade. (A stack of brightly painted Turkish bowls for sale are from Erturk’s Ionnia stash.)
Nicki opened iT with her daughter Beth. “Beth told me that your business name has to be what you do, and I said, ‘But how do you say we design it, we light it, pack it, accessorize it, ship it?'” and suddenly she had the name (a designer of wedding invitations, she settled on the reverse capitalization when playing around with typography). Though iT looks like a cash-and-carry gift boutique, an extraordinary amount of customizing takes place on the premises, if you know what to ask for. The wooden tic-tac-toe sets made by a Belleville couple can be ordered with almost any two animals as playing pieces, not just the ones on display–squirrels, turtles, bumblebees, manatees, whatever your particular totem. Darren Brode’s stone coasters of iconic Detroit scenes are $10, but you can also get an image of your own printed on a coaster for just a few bucks more–when Wilson designs wedding invitations she suggests couples commemorate them this way, but it’s open to anyone. All you have to do is ask.
She’s picked up a few of the artists that used to show at Selo/Shevel, like Jan Gjaltema, a Dallas jeweler who works in leather and copper, and local Paul Hickman’s Urban Ashes furniture, made from downed trees. Though not all of her artists are from the area, a good number of them are, like Livonia’s Signe Lawson and her Victorian sea glass shards mounted in silver, and Saline’s Sue Wedemeyer and her raku ceramics.
Nicki’s husband, Frank, a retired IT administrator from WISD, is often behind the counter, and says his former occupation had absolutely nothing to do with naming the shop.
iT Boutique, 330 S. Main, 213-0212. Mon.-Wed. 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Thurs.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. noon-6 p.m.
