Retail and restaurant challenge winners announced

Red Wing Downtown Main Street has announced the winners of its 2025 Retail and Restaurant Challenge. This year, a total of $75,000 was awarded to six businesses.

Two of the winners are established local businesses that will expand their current offerings while the others recently opened or will be opening soon.

One business will be revealed later, but the other five are listed below. Downtown Main Street would also like to highlight another new business, Adourn, which was also supported by local philanthropic foundations but with separate grant funding.

Downtown Main Street said it is grateful for the generosity of the organizations who funded the Challenge: Wings Foundation, Red Wing Area Fund, Jones Family Foundation, and Albrecht-Poss Family Foundation.

The Retail & Restaurant Challenge would not be possible without its sponsors, which include First Farmers & Merchants, Merchants Bank, Red Wing Credit Union and Red Wing Port Authority.

Rivertown Games

Rivertown Games opened in 2016, and was bought by its current owner, Jake Gibbs, in 2021. The store was already the best place in town to buy board games, comics, and novelties, but, Gibbs says, they want their store “to be a hub for Red Wing gear.”

With their creative backgrounds, Gibbs and his partner Brian Nosan started designing their own Red Wing stickers. “They started selling,” he says, “so we started making more stickers, and they started selling.” 

They’ve expanded into other territories. They make silly designs, but they also make LGBTQ stickers. “We try to make it so everyone is represented,” he says. 

Printing the stickers required using outside companies that specialize in wholesale sticker printing. Now, thanks to the grant money, they are buying their own industrial sticker printer, so they’ll be printing their own stickers and printing stickers for other local businesses. 

They will also use some of the grant money to expand their 3D printing capabilities, so they’ll be able to get more creative with the novelty items they offer in the store.

North Star Stitching Studio

“All the ladies are retiring and closing up shop,” says Amy Thorland.

She’s talking about the women who own the quilt shops near Red Wing. When she realized this Thorland, a quilter since she was a senior in high school, thought, “This is crazy, I’m going to try open a quilt shop.” And now, thanks to help from Red Wing Ignite and the grant money she’s won, she can.

North Star Stitching Studio will open in the space that for decades was occupied by Wanshura Jewelers. Adapting the store from a jewelry store to a quilt shop will require some renovations, but she plans to open in a limited capacity sometime before the end of the year, and the fully open sometime in 2026.

Once North Star is up and running, Thorland plans to be open six days a week. She will sell fabric and quilting tools and provide quilt finishing services with her long arm quilting machine. She will also offer a wide variety of sewing classes for all experience levels. One day and multi-day classes will be offered regularly.

Ivory & Wing Bridal Boutique

A picturesque town in a picturesque region, Red Wing has become a popular wedding destination. There are multiple popular wedding venues, caterers, and florists, but the town currently lacks a bridal boutique of its own.

Emily Palka is opening Ivory & Wing Bridal Boutique, likely in early 2026, and says her store will complement the thriving wedding ecosystem Red Wing has established.

Palka is in the process of securing a location, but received funds from Downtown Main Street for renovations so she can “layout the store in the way that serves brides best.” 

She first dreamed of opening a bridal store of her own in 2022, and with five years of experience in the wedding dress business, she knows people in all parts of the industry, and will use her connections to make the store the best it can be.

For her, the most important part of the job is guiding the brides-to-be on what can be a stressful day. “To have someone put that much trust in my hands to help them find their gown when they’re so emotionally vulnerable, it’s a very good feeling.”

Achieve Collective

Back in May, after already operating in Apple Valley and Northfield, Achieve Health & Wellness added a location in Red Wing.

Now, thanks in part to their grant earnings, they will be moving downtown into the former Chief Theater location, and expanding their operations into two businesses.

Together they will be known as The Achieve Collective. The first half of the businesses is their continued presence as Achieve Health & Wellness, a clinic that offers therapy to children with neurological disorders. They are currently taking new patients.

The second half of the business, therapist Taylor Irwin says, will be “a place where we can learn about each other’s differences and celebrate them.”

It is called I Rise Café. It will be a play café where parents can enjoy a coffee (and they plan to eventually expand into pastries and pizza), while children can play in a space accessible to all abilities.

Additionally, Irwin says, the café will “serve as a place of meaningful employment for teens and adults with disabilities.”

They hope to open by the end of 2025.

Artisan Collective

The only Challenge winner this year outside of Red Wing’s downtown is Artisan Collective. Located in the West End District, Artisan Collective sells “basically anything from paintings to pottery to beadwork to jewelry,” says owner Katie Rausch.

Now, thanks to the grant money, customers can become artisans themselves. This winter, Artisan Collective will offer a make your own candle bar.

Starting in the fall, the shop is expected to be open Wednesday through Sunday, and on occasional evenings. During those hours, anyone will be able to walk in and make a candle. “You can come right in, and you can pick out your scents, you can pick out your container,” says Rausch.

Depending on how passionate the candlemaker is, they can take up to half an hour to choose the scents, but Rausch expects most customers will be done in just a few minutes. It then takes about an hour for the wax to settle before it can be brought home.

Candles will be made from soy wax and natural fragrances, which means they are free from the artificial chemicals and overpowering scents often found in factory made candles.

Adourn

Even though she isn’t a winner of the Retail & Restaurant Challenge, Melissa Klema has felt the support of the Red Wing community. From city staff, to fellow business owners, to the owner of her building, “I’ve gotten a lot of great help from anybody that I’ve talked to,” she says.

In July, Klema opened her second location of Adourn, a furniture store. Her first store is in Chatfield, Minnesota, and is still going strong after 13 years.

In addition to the “great reception” she’s felt from the community, she loves the physical space of her new store. “Red Wing has the historic feel that I really love, and the building is really what drew me,” she says.

Adourn is open seven days a week and located on Main Street in the Boxrud Building. The store focuses primarily on furniture, split equally between new lines and antique and vintage pieces refinished by Klema. Klema also makes and sells jewelry and candles that are available in the store.

This story originally appeared in the Red Wing Republican Eagle.