MERIDIAN TWP. - A little bit of the East Coast has been brought to the Lansing area.
ProtoCulture opened in July, bringing new fashions to Meridian Mall, 1982 W. Grand River Ave. in Okemos. What makes the boutique different is who they have selecting the fashions they sell.
Jyna Maxwell, 22, and her two sisters Brielle, 19, and Kalissa, 15, do all the buying for the store’s owner Karen Hunt - their mother.
The sisters go on buying trips together a few times each year and hand select each item the store will sell.
Hunt said working with her daughters has been a wonderful experience.
“If we didn’t work together, we would never really see each other,” she said.
ProtoCulture offers fashions targeted toward 15- to 25-year-olds wanting an unconventional look.
“They have stuff you usually don’t see unless you are in Chicago,” said Erik Thruman, a first-year media technology student at Lansing Community College, as he shopped in the store. “I was starting to run out of stores to find phat pants.”
ProtoCulture is the second store the family has opened, the first is in the Summit Place Mall in Pontiac.
“We wanted to move to a bigger volume mall,” Hunt said. “(Meridian Mall) offered us good space and very fair rent.”
Jyna said MSU students shopping at their first store suggested a move to Lansing.
“A lot of students love our clothes and come to our new store now,” she said.
Some of the more unusual items in the store include the men’s CD jacket that has pockets for a compact disc player and a channel to thread the cord to the head phones. For women, the store carries belts with buckles recycled from car and airplane seats.
“One of the fun parts of this business is to know what (fashions) are coming and seeing them blow up,” Jyna said.
Hunt agreed.
“Five years ago, when the three-quarter length shirts first came out, people used to ask if they were for children,” she said.
But not all trends are ready for the Midwest, Maxwell said.
“The East Coast is sometimes too far ahead in fashion for this area,” she said. “Sometimes people around here are not ready to accept (certain fashions).”
Azra Katetanovik, an engineering freshman, said she doesn’t wear flashier clothes - the cutting edge designs of ProtoCulture don’t appeal to her.
“Fashion is not extremely important to me,” she said. “I am a more conservative dresser.”
While the store sells unique items, Jyna may be the next one marketing her clothing to her sisters.
“I have designed a few T-shirts and I am getting ready to make them,” she said. “I want to go in to fashion eventually.”
