Nomad is that edgy boutique at 318 W. Walnut St. you may have seen on a First Friday Art Walk.

Mick Whitcomb, one of the shop’s two owners, was at home in his eclectic store when he sat down for this interview with The Scoop. Pandora music played among the countless T-shirts and accessories that give the store a multicultural feel while the quiet weekday traffic of downtown Springfield went by outside.

Whitcomb and his wife, Paige, graduated from Missouri State University in 2010. He had a degree in business, and she had a degree in art history and a minor in English literature.

After the couple graduated, their travels took them almost 10,000 miles away to Bali, Indonesia. Though island life was enjoyable and successful, both had family living in Missouri, and they wanted to get home. Travel has been a large part of their life (they have visited about 24 different countries) and is what inspires the clothing, jewelry, furniture and various other products sold in their shop on Walnut Street. The couple opened Nomad in January 2012.

He jokes that he majored in business and now sells T-shirts for a living, though his and Paige’s business is anything but just T-shirts. One of their lines, Artifacts by Nomad, is a line of furniture and lighting constructed out of architectural and industrial salvage. Currently, it is sold in Springfield and Kansas City but is growing to both St. Louis and Chicago. Additionally, Whitcomb is hoping that Nomad products will be available for purchase online by March.

Why did you go to Bali, Indonesia?

In the past, before Paige and I ever met, I worked for a private security company in East Timor, which nobody’s ever heard of. It’s one of the southernmost Indonesian islands, and it was a while back in the middle of a time of somewhat civil unrest. So I worked for a private security company and Bali was sort of the closest sanity break, so I had been to Bali a number of times. … One of the people I had met while working out there had a surf shop and they were expanding into board manufacturing. So when I graduated from Missouri State, Paige and I, which we were engaged at that point, went out to Bali to help him with the manufacturing. So originally we were making surfboards. … We started making clothing and then jewelry and leather products. … That’s what originally led to us making products in Indonesia.

You are a sponsor for First Friday Art Walk — can you tell me about that? What do you do special for it?

It’s a great even; it’s great for us because a good Art Walk will get one to 3,000 people through the door. It’s just great exposure. We have live music every Art Walk. We try to have some sort of live art going on in the window. So whatever artwork we are featuring, whether it’s painting on canvas or sculpture, we try to have them doing their artwork in the window. It’s kind of a visual, interactive kind of thing. It’s a lot of fun. We usually have some sort of sale or incentive going on too. We’ll also do different wine and beer tastings.

Do you see yourself continuing to do Art Walk in the future?

Yeah, we love doing it. Originally, when we were opening the store, Art Walk was a big contributing factor to why we decided to be downtown. In Springfield, more than probably anywhere else in the country, there’s a pretty big divide in northside and southside retailers. And we love the architecture downtown; we love the historic buildings. It fits our eclectic sort of style well. We’ve always gone to Art Walk and enjoyed Art Walk in the past long before we ever thought about opening a retail store, so, you know, we wanted to be a part of that.

I read online that your shop has six micro-brand labels. So what are “micro-brands”?

Those six brands are clothing lines that we design and manufacture ourselves, so they are kind of our “in-house” brands, but it’s a little more. A lot of people do their own printing, but we actually design and manufacture the basics and take everything from concept through prototype and actual production. … All of our in-house brands we design here; we oversee the manufacturing in Bali and then sell them in the store here.

So do you still go to Bali often?

Yes, we lived over there for two years … We get back and forth for the sourcing. We source a lot of our jewelry and clothing products from Thailand and Singapore and different Indonesian islands, so we kind of bounce back and forth.

Why is supporting local designers important?

In terms of designers we carry, we have a lot of local artists in terms of jewelry, all of our leather products are products we design and manufacture ourselves. … Our clothing lines are different small-scale clothing lines, mostly out of New York and L.A. We like that because it keeps it exclusive to the buyers. Nothing that you see in our stores is available in any kind of mall store. Most of it you don’t see in any other kind of boutiques in Springfield, but there’s always a little bit of overlap there. But supporting local businesses as well as local artists is nice because you get to interact with the person who are designing the products. … Having spent a lot of time overseas and having traveled constantly, we see a lot of world trends that, you know, don’t typically trickle down to Springfield for a couple years. It’s always kind of funny. Now a lot of stuff starts in Australia and Europe, and then it reaches the East and the West coasts, and about three years later it finds its way to Missouri. So we’re usually quite a bit ahead of a lot of trends, I suppose.

Are you happy with how the community has responded to Nomad?

Yeah. With the unique nature of what we do, it’s pretty polar; people either love it, or they hate it. Our style is pretty edgy; it’s very style-forward. A lot of people come in here and can’t stand it, but it’s definitely unique to Springfield and different than anything else you’d find around Springfield, so a lot of people really appreciate that and love it for that reason.