When the founders of Boulder’s popular Rayback Collective decided to make the investment in opening a Denver location of their food-truck court/beer garden/co-working space, they had one major concern in mind — how to ensure it was not known also as “Rayback Collective.”
The similarities between that original business, opened in July 2015, and Improper City, which hosts its grand opening on Friday, go beyond just a reproduction of the concept. Version 2.0 is located in an old warehouse, has a large (12,000-square-foot) patio space and is in close proximity to Movement Climbing + Fitness, the Boulder gym whose owner, Mike Moelter, asked Rayback founders Justin Riley and Hank Grant to share part of the building in Denver’s River North neighborhood that he bought to open his third location.
But Riley knew that Boulder and Denver are not the same scenes, and so he didn’t want to make it feel like he just was exporting a concept from the unusual city up north. And so he came up with a new name — stealing a description of Denver from a 19th-century poet — laid out new options for Denver’s extensive co-working crowd and even drilled down to the level of putting walking paths onto the patio, figuring many more people would come straight from work than they do in Boulder and wouldn’t want to navigate gravel in high heels.
“The community here in Denver is different than Boulder, for better or for worse,” Riley said Monday at the soft opening of the space at 3201 Walnut Street. “Denver does have its own heartbeat. So we literally cleaned the slate.”
Read more at the Denver Business Journal: https://bit.ly/2usunEC
