Chaos & Kindness store moving downtown to The CAKE

LAKEPORT — When Justin Spencer opened the Chaos & Kindness store five years ago, it was to serve two purposes. He wanted to provide a brick-and-mortar headquarters for his clothing and experience brand, and he wanted to establish a footprint in Laconia, the city where he was born.

Since then, he explained in an interview about the decision to close the Lakeport store, he and his band Recycled Percussion purchased a former church building and renovated it into a performance venue called The CAKE. This evolution of the Chaos & Kindness brand made it difficult to operate additionally within the Lakeport space, at 777 Union Ave.

The Chaos & Kindness store in Laconia will close sometime in mid-May in preparation for a re-opening of the brand store at The CAKE, which stands for The Chaos and Kindness Experience. The retail store in Keene will close May 1.

Spencer said the closing of the standalone storefronts and consolidation into The CAKE will allow for the Chaos & Kindness brand to reintroduce the experiential element of the brand, which was at the core of the initial business concept.

“The store’s done incredible,” Spencer said, “We outgrew it two years ago.”

He said when the store first opened, most of the sales were to people who visited in person, with a slim minority of transactions occurring online. That ratio has since flipped, with the intensity of the internet sales demanding more and more of the 3,000-square-foot space on Union Avenue.

That demand for space, needed for shipping and warehousing of merchandise, crowded out the experiential installations. “I always appreciated, coming from an entertainment background, having an experience for customers,” Spencer said. Although Chaos & Kindness is “bigger than it’s ever been” from a sales perspective, it has drifted away from the practice of providing customers with an experience they couldn’t get outside the Chaos & Kindness brand.

Spencer plans to correct that by bringing Chaos & Kindness into The CAKE, which is currently undergoing a second renovation since it transformed into a performance venue in 2020.

“I want to have experiences in there, places for people to do things. We have major plans and we’re investing a lot of money into The CAKE. We are tripling down on Laconia,” Spencer said.

The venue brings in more than 20,000 people each year, Spencer said, people who come to see one of many Recycled Percussion shows at the only venue designed specifically for their performances.

The CAKE, which is set to re-open Saturday, June 1, will feature retail on the first floor. The second floor, where the performance space is located, will have free experiential offerings when no shows are booked. Spencer said the space will also be open to group meetings, such as fitness classes, community events, mental health meetings, and camps for young musicians.

“Of course Recycled Percussion will kick off the venue, we’ll do 35 shows there this summer,” Spencer said. The interior of the space will be covered with artwork by Jason Naylor, the same artist who created the mural on the side of the building at 777 Union Ave., as well as several other unique elements, such as the ability for fans to watch a show from a hot tub.

“I guarantee 100% it’s the greatest show Recycled Percussion has ever made, even above anything we did in Las Vegas,” Spencer said, adding he also plans to offer a guarantee for the performances — if anyone is underwhelmed by the show, he’ll refund the price of the tickets.

As for the space on Union, Spencer said he isn’t sure what will happen next. He is in talks with some local nonprofits to allow them to use the building in the medium term, but said he will list it for sale at some point.

Spencer said Chaos & Kindness has grown into a global company, with only about 12% of their online sales shipping to addresses inside of New Hampshire.

“It wouldn’t really matter where we put our store” from a business perspective, he said, but he said it was important to him to keep it close to home.

“I like knowing that our brand is bringing people to Laconia,” he said. “When you have arts, and performance places there, and people willing to invest in [the city], I think downtown Laconia is thriving, and I think it’s getting better all the time.”