Meet Mick Krieg owner/operator of one purple frescoed building on Frome Street that has saved many people from buying ordinary things.

Why did you call it Urban Cow?
(Laughs) There wasn’t actually any reason behind it whatsoever.

Why Purple?
Sue Chapman, who started Urban Cow with me, she had studied interior design previously. During the early 90s there was a lot of the trend towards primary colours, especially used in that Spanish Fresco style. That’s what started with Urban Cow and we’ve just continued that theme

Describe the store in a sentence.
It gives young local designers an opportunity to display their work.

What was here before?
The last time anyone had the whole building before was when the Hare Krisnas had it from 1970-85 and they used Rhino Room as the temple and kitchen and the Urban Cow space was the living quarters.

How’d it all start?
It was actually the brainchild of Suzie’s. She did a year of ceramic design, made some friends there who decided that they’d like to open it as a bit of an artist collective. We had the ceramic workshop out the back and the shop at the front. I just sort of helped them out for the first six months or so setting up the place and running the retail side of things. With the intention of letting them take over. But as you can imagine four artists trying to produce and then run a retail space at the same time, it didn’t quite work. Things were going to fall apart and so we gave them the opportunity to either buy us out and in the end we ended up buying them out and taking it over.
We always intended to maintain the ethos of promoting South Australian art and I guess I used two principles from that point on to try and turn the shop into a success and that was:1 – get more artwork in, you needed the artwork to sell. And 2 – as we built up more artwork the next one was to get more people into the shop. So we did some quirky different ideas to drag people in off the street. And basically we went backwards and forwards with that, get more artwork, get more people.

What’d you do before?
I actually started studying Civil Engineering for a few years at university, at Adelaide Uni before I decided I wanted to go down a more environmental tact. So I did a bachelor of applied science in conservation. I was actually working for Greenpeace at the time we opened Urban Cow.

What’s your favourite thing in the store right now?
I’m very fond of Peta’s paintings.
As new pieces come in that we’ve never had before, they always
spark your interest. There’s a girl who’s started making knitted sculptures and they’re really quirky, they’re fantastic.

What do the punters go for?
Slowly and surely jewellery has taken over from ceramics and now jewellery comprises a third of our market.

Check out what Mick and Sue have created over at Urban Cow