Rudy’s Roundup

It may seem like a risky venture to open a gift shop these days. But Brooke Timm discovered this was actually a great time to follow a dream that’s been percolating for eight years: owning her own store.

After shopping around for storefronts in several neighborhoods, the Chicago native found a perfect spot in Wicker Park, where foot traffic and casual shoppers are plentiful, recession be damned. One month ago, she opened Rudy’s Roundup, named after one of her two dogs. The economic downturn had actually worked to her advantage: “The space was so cheap,” Timm says. When she looked about four years ago, rents were “just ridiculous.”

Timm fills her inviting shop with everything from kitschy eye candy (wood prints modeled after paint-by-number kits) to actual candy (old-school throwbacks like Mary Janes toffees and Choward’s violet mints). Her wide-ranging goods also include a mix of vintage items and modern handmade wares, including stationery, clothes and baby items, with no merch more than $50.

Those price points, along with the bright and airy design, encourage shoppers like Fannie Hungerford to linger. “It looks beautiful,” says Hungerford, a Lincoln Square resident who teaches yoga to adults and theater to kids. “The light, and the color scheme! They obviously have good style.” She also appreciates some harder-to-quantify elements inside Ruby’s: “There’s a lot of humor, but not the kind of humor that’s annoying—stuff that’s clever.”

Hungerford says you could probably find “something for almost anybody” at Rudy’s, although she admittedly hangs out with an artistic crowd. Under the rubric Summer Is For Fireflies, Hungerford is devoting these sunny months to choreographing and directing a series of “spontaneous” small-group street dances, some accompanied by live musicians, that will pop up around Chicago.

As she approaches the checkout counter with her selections, Hungerford smiles. “There’s that one-of-a-kind feel to a lot of this stuff,” she says. “Even the stuff that’s not vintage.”

Rudy’s Roundup, 1410 W Milwaukee Ave, 773-486-6400; The Summer Is for Fireflies.

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