Evolution-One of my favorite stores in NYC!!

by Kelly Edwards | October 13th, 2009

Every time I visit New York City I always stop into one of my favorite stores in SoHo, Evolution. This store is unlike any other.  As a valuable resource for museums, educators, nature enthusiasts, interior designers, photographers and collectors, they carry natural history collectables.  From replica skulls, skeletons, beetles and butterflies, this place is a natural wonder.  Next time you are in NYC you must check it out or at the very least, click on their site www.evolutionstore.com.  Currently, I had the pleasure of interviewing with Mason from Evolution.  See our interview below.  I can’t thank them enough for their time!!!

What was the vision behind your store?
The basic vision comes from a fascination with the natural world: its strangeness and its beauty, coupled with a collector’s eye. I like to describe the store as a natural history museum you can take home and display in your living room.

What or who inspires you?
Natural history museums, certainly. Science classrooms and old textbooks. The aesthetics of Natural History have an evolution as well, from the curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance to an exhibition today that might have interactive media booths sprinkled in. Our own aesthetic tends (perhaps) more towards the former than the latter, but we also love the bizarre.

How did you get started?
Bill Stevens opened The Evolution Store in 1993. He had been in advertising for years, but had always had a passion for collecting the type of material we sell: natural and scientific items not often seen outside museums. At some point, he realized that perhaps he could start a business selling the type of items he loved. It worked. It seems that many people have a fascination with the beauty of odd items from the natural world. There have been a number of currents in the culture that have helped us achieve the kind of popularity we enjoy, from theJurassic Park movies (we sell dinosaur teeth and insects in amber), to the strange ubiquity of the skull motif in every imaginable aspect of design (we sell skulls and skeletons, both human and animal, both real and replica) to the controversy over the teaching of evolution in schools.

Where do your pieces come from? They are all so unique and amazing!
We deal with hundreds of different suppliers – so many, in fact, that it can be daunting to keep track of them all. We work with taxidermists, fossil preparators, mineral dealers, seashell importers, people all over the world who find or grow or raise or cast nice specimens of all kinds of assorted things. We buy antique pieces. Furthermore we strive to be certain that the items we offer are of the best quality we can sell.

What museums can we find some of your pieces in?
We have sold to several museums, but I am particularly proud to have sold a nice piece to the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York. They needed a fossil dragonfly for a traveling exhibition. They looked at their own collection and realized that most of their examples were type specimens: far too significant to go on the road. So they bought ours.

Do you have any adjectives that best describe your store or your inventory?
Our inventory is constantly changing, and constantly surprising, even to ourselves. I think our store is different things to different people. Some people come in the store and are fascinated. Some people see us as a storehouse of the spooky or bizarre. In either case, I think it is fair to say that we offer very unusual merchandise.

Whats the most unique piece you have in your store right now?
Each one is unique, so it is often extremely hard to pick a winner. We have a very crazy and bizarrely spherical two-faced calf skull, a form of conjoined twins in which one basic skull is divided at the front into two snouts. We have a very large and lovely woolly mammoth tusk in the front window right now. We have some very unusual insects. One of the /rarest/ things we have is lunar and martian meteorite, actual pieces of the surface of Mars or the Moon which were blasted off the by a meteorite impact there, then made their way to earth. 

What is your best seller?
We sell a lot of hematite magnets. The hematite is quite attractive – a shiny graphite-gray color, and fun to play with. We sell a lot of nice insect keychains, beetle-wing earrings, and lollipops with bugs in them. Raccoon penis bones…freeze dried mice… People can’t seem to get enough of these things – perhaps because they are so odd. And inexpensive – we sell a lot more keychains than mammoth tusks, as you can imagine. I like to think that we have something for everyone, and every budget. We have sold items from five for a dollar to tens of thousands of dollars, and we get new things year-round.

What is the best gift for a guy/girl? (I only ask this because Id like to buy my boyfriend something, but I can never decide what!)
That totally depends on the guy/girl. We sell a lot of beautifully framed insects, which are one of our specialties, and we can do custom work and special orders, but then some people are just freaked out by bugs. A meteorite might make a great gift; it’s a piece of something which is probably older than the earth, and it comes from outer space. But then it is just a pretty piece of nickel-iron… It takes some imagination to really grasp its significance. Some people like big things for display and some people like tiny objects they can treasure. Talk to one of our salespeople. We love to help steer you towards the most incredible gift. And if it turns out that it isn’t exactly right, we can help you exchange it. We sell gift certificates, too. If you are looking for a gift for someone who seems to have everything, we probably have something fascinating that they have never heard of. 

Can anyone sell you what they own, or do you have a specific group you buy from?
We buy items from all over. We are very discriminating, but we love to find interesting and unusual objects…

Posted in Design | |