Burn Rubber A Hot Spot For Cool Kicks

This is an article on Burn Rubber from the May 13, 2009 issue of the Detroit News. The article can be read in full in this post or on the Detroit News website.

Burn Rubber A Hot Spot For Cool Kicks
Royal Oak boutique aims to put the freshest sneaks on your feet
Adam Graham / The Detroit News

The story of Burn Rubber begins like the set-up to a joke — a rapper and a tap dancer walk into a shoe store… — but there’s no punchline to this tale.
Instead, Burn Rubber, the hip downtown Royal Oak sneaker boutique — the words “shoe store” don’t really do it justice — is making a name for itself as one of the trendiest spots in Metro Detroit, and its proprietors Roland Coit (the rapper) and Rick Williams (the tap dancer) are fast becoming two of the area’s hottest tastemakers.

Go to any hip-hop concert in Detroit and you’re bound to see at least a dozen kids wearing Burn Rubber attire, from fitted hats bearing the Burn Rubber logo, to the store’s custom-made T-shirts. And if you see someone sporting the latest limited-edition kicks on their feet, the ones you thought they only carried in New York or Chicago, they probably got those at Burn Rubber, too.

Meanwhile, the store itself, a cozy, 680-square-foot shoebox one block east of the Royal Oak Music Theatre, has become a meeting place for hip-hop heads, skater kids and professional athletes. Its atmosphere is a mix of the neighborhood barbershop and funky record store, with people congregating inside to talk about whatever’s on their minds first and shop second.

“It’s almost like a bar,” says Coit, the older of the two partners, dressed in a crisp white T-shirt and a clean pair of blue jeans, a necklace bearing the Burn Rubber character — a bionic chef by the name of CSI (short for Chef So Ill) — dangling from around his neck.

“After you deal with your wife, your kids, your job, sometimes you just want to come up here and let go,” says Coit, who raps under the name Octane. “Sometimes it’s like we’re putting on a show, we’re in here joking and laughing, and everyone’s bent over from laughing so hard. We can be talking about anything from religion to politics to this dude’s bike outside. It can be anything.”

Frequenter Lawrence Lamont Jenkins of Detroit says he visits Burn Rubber twice a week. “It’s like I’m walking into a room in my house, and family is there,” the 20-year-old says.

A business proposal
The relaxed, inviting air of the store leads some to believe its all fun and games, all the time, for Burn Rubber’s two owners. But Coit and Williams, who are both married fathers living in Auburn Hills, have been grinding over the past two years to build their brand and make the store what it is today.
Coit, 30, and Williams, 28, took over Burn Rubber in February 2007. Williams was maintaining the Web site for original owner Kenny Carroll when the opportunity arose to buy the store from his boss. Williams, who was born in Milwaukee and moved to Clarkston while in high school when his father got a job with General Motors, called his friend Coit with a business proposal.

At the time, Coit was working in customer service at Chrysler Financial after dropping out of Eastern Michigan University, and was ready for a change from cubicle life, to the point where he says he would “rather do something illegal” than work in a cubicle.

Once their finances were in order and they purchased the store, they gave the space a top-to-bottom makeover. Up came the red carpet in favor of a clean hardwood finish, and they had the walls painted and new shelves installed. The only fixtures remaining from the original store are several hanging lamps. They worked on developing their brand, liberally borrowing ideas from other boutiques they admired.

“We looked at them like Kobe Bryant looked at Michael Jordan,” Coit says. “We looked at the top stores that do what we do and said, ‘OK, now what can we do?’ ”

They applied for merchandise accounts, and waited for six months before Nike granted the store its golden seal of approval. Then Coit and Williams started selling custom-made T-shirts, with slogans such as “Got Kicks?” and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Rock Fake Kicks.”

Part of what made the brand successful is the fact that, simply put, Coit and Williams have good taste, says Detroit rapper Big Sean, a longtime customer and Burn Rubber loyalist.

“Their original brand is very in tune with fashion and today’s youth,” says Sean, who owns around 20 Burn Rubber hats and wears a Burn Rubber varsity coat in a soon-to-drop music video. “It seems like all the young people who are trendy and who are fashion forward, at least in Detroit, are wearing their stuff.”

Beyond that, he says Coit and Williams are good people, and the store has a cool atmosphere.

“It has a very comfortable vibe,” Sean says. “I know a lot of people that go up there to just hang out and politic, and it’s not a bad place to do that,” he says.

Shoes are the first step
As the store and the brand have grown, the two owners haven’t slowed.

“We never stop,” says Williams, who studied business at Oakland University, and earned money on the side by cutting hair for friends.

“We’ve had times when we’re supposed to be with our families and we’re on the phone doing orders. For hours. Or I’ll call Ro and ask him, ‘What do you think about this idea?’ and we’re supposed to be sitting there watching TV with our wives and children.”

And it’s far from just shoes they’re selling. Burn Rubber also carries T-shirts, watches and hats, and the store owners have used their connections to host in-store appearances for hip-hop artists coming through Detroit (see Thursday’s Wale event) and to wrestle a couple of regional exclusives.

When late Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla’s Los Angeles-based record label was set to release a limited-edition Dilla box set last year, Coit tracked down the label’s sales manager and got him to send some to the store. Similarly, when the label released a limited-edition T-shirt for Dilla’s mother earlier this year, Burn Rubber was the only retail outlet in Michigan that carried the shirt.

Burn Rubber has also become one of only two outlets in Michigan to carry Kanye West’s limited edition Nike sneakers, the highly sought-after Air Yeezys. There was a two-day lineup outside the store when the most recent style was unveiled earlier this month, and the store received about a dozen pairs to sell, one of every size between size 8 and 13.

Coit says prior to Burn Rubber, such exclusives skipped Michigan; but now people are starting to pay attention. “We’re talking to our reps and they’re telling their bosses, ‘We have a scene like that here in Detroit.’ When stuff like that happens, it’s good for us. It used to be when we wanted something that was limited edition, we’d have to go out to New York, or send someone to Tokyo and hope they came back with the right shoe. Now it’s to the point where we’re starting to make that happen here.”

And that “here” may soon become more than just Royal Oak. Coit and Williams say they’d like to extend the Burn Rubber brand by opening more locations, but not quite yet.

“We probably could do another store right now, but it’s not the right time,” says Williams.”We want to master this, and I don’t want to open up another store and overextend ourselves, because then we’re killing the business, and the business is the most important thing.”

As the business grows, however, it’s hard not to notice one effect it’s had on the two young owners: Both have a few gray hairs sprouting from their closely cropped heads. But Coit shrugs it off.

“Man,” he says, laughing, “I’d rather have a whole head of gray hair than work in a cubicle.”

agraham@detnews.com (313) 222-2284

Tags: Burn Rubber

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.