LIFESTYLE - Sneakers

Remember when you were a kid and you just wished you had your own store that had only your favorite things, where you and all your friends could hang out there all day and everything would be the coolest? For some kids that was a pizza and ninja turtles store, for others a Pokemon and WWE store, and for Dave Ortiz, it is a skateboards and sneakers store, and this wonderland of cool stuff is actually real.


After spending years working in the meatpacking district with popular Zoo York graffiti-inspired skate brand, Ortiz opened his own store, taking the name of the neighborhood as literally as an actual meat packer. Dave's Quality Meat is a sneaker and skate boutique clenching tightly to the concept of the corner butcher, to the point where items hang from meat hooks, purchased are wrapped and boxed like beef shank, and clothes are kept in a refrigerated meat locker, which is presumably how Dave keeps all his threads so funky fresh.

And freshness is key to DQM's commercial success and status of cornerstone of sneaker culture. Dave knows sneakers, and everyone who's in the know knows that. Not unlike a staff at a craft brewery or a California vineyard, Dave and his cohorts are sneaker connoisseurs catering to lifestyle junkies, and DQM has approached the business the way they would nurture their personal collection (were that collection displayed for customers in a Manhattan boutique, that is). Ortiz even co-designed his own Nike shoe. The Bacon Air Max 90, a sneaker which takes the meatpacking decor to a new level and new meaning to the phrase "when pigs fly." All the cool kids line up around the block for sneaker premieres, and go to one of the only places in the city that carries a dizzying variety of unique sneakers, including Nike's SB skateboard line, and so many other things you'd hope to find in such a store but so rarely can. The kids wouldn't be cool if they didn't.

We all have to face that for now we probably won't have our own pizza and ninja turtles store, but in the meantime, Dave's Quality Meat has the everything-cool-in-one-awesome-store market cornered, and doing a fine job of it. After all, bacon shoes is something only a kid shoe store would come up with.

DCM [dcmnewyork.com]; 7 East 3rd Street btw Bowery and 2nd Ave; Lower East Side; 212.505.7551

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