Michael Davis
The admission price for Peepa’s is petting chihuahuas, Madeline and Millie. Do not refuse them.
One of Jeff Witthuhn’s earliest, most fond memories is a game he used to play with the other neighborhood kids. “I don’t know what we called it, but one friend would have a make-believe restaurant, and another kid would have a library, and I would run a fake toy store. And then we made fake money and shopped at each other’s stores.”
Like a million other teenage millennials, Witthuhn’s first job was folding shirts for The Gap. And like a million other millenials, the Appleton, Wisconsin native’s feelings for that first gig haven’t been tempered by time. “I hated it,” he says flatly.
Witthuhn gave it another shot with clothing retail giant Express and stayed with them for 12 years, eventually relocating to Milwaukee. He was with Express when they merged the men and women’s brands and says, “they kind of became this edgy clothing store for the first three years. And then they did an about-face and went high-end to compete with Banana Republic. And it just fell flat. It taught me a lot as a person in my twenties. It helped me be a really good merchant and not afraid of taking risks. When the risks work, you get high reward instead of just playing the middle ground all the time.”
In 2016, Witthuhn decided to take one of the bigger risks in his life: He moved to Palm Springs. He’d been to California as a child when he and his brother came out with his grandparents for a two-week vacation and “did all the touristy stuff like Knotts Berry Farm. I remember being like, ‘This is where I want to live. I want to look at palm trees.’” Though he stayed close to home for the next couple decades, he never gave up the dream. And he never got used to Wisconsin winters. “It’s rough, man. It’s not even so much the snow. It’s the gray skies. Endless gray. It’s sad.”
Witthuhn also felt repressed in conservative Wisconsin and endured the slurs and taunts of homophobic Midwesterners. He left all that behind when he moved to Palm Springs.
Indeed, the risk has brought reward. He opened Peepa’s (named after his beloved grandmother) in 2018 and then moved to his present location in La Plaza in the heart of Palm Springs. It would be a grave injustice to call what Witthuhn has created a gift store. What’s a better phrase for it? Store of cool, eclectic stuff? Clunky, but better.
Witthuhn is a wunderkind of merchandising and display. If anyone else had merchandise that ranged from old Palm Springs Life Magazine cover posters, women’s caftans, men’s bathing suits, art books on Pucci, Tom of Finland and drag queens, and sunglasses, I would quickly develop a terrible case of ADD trying to process it all. But Witthuhn has very cleverly laid out his space so that when one moves through the shop, it feels like there’s a distinct division, almost like sections in a huge department store…except for the fact that Peepa’s is a fraction the size. The difference is that Witthuhn does not display his eclectic assortment of art, clothing, and books as much as he curates each little section. The result is that shoppers can focus on each little mise-en-scéne without being overwhelmed by the entire production.
Witthuhn is, in fact, quite proud of the fact that Peepa’s is not easily defined or categorized. “We do sell a unique assortment of products. There’s not many stores you can visit and walk out with a $250 silk caftan and a big penis book.”
