(Photo courtesy of The Outrage)

Nearly two years after it opened its retail pop-up in Adams Morgan, feminist/activist apparel company The Outrage is moving to the 14th Street corridor in Northwest. The new location will include a brand new members-only “community space,” where activists and organizers can hold meetups and events.

“People kept coming back to our store and asking to use our space for things, and we ended up clearing the [clothing] racks in the back and holding a ton of events back there,” says Rebecca Lee Funk, founder and CEO of The Outrage. “And at the same time we developed all these partnerships with organizations like the Women’s March and She Should Run, so there was this very organic and natural demand for a community space.”

Washingtonian was the first to report on the new location.

The Outrage sells feminist and social justice-oriented apparel—think T-shirts with “Nasty Woman” and “OMG GOP WTF” emblazoned on the front. Funk launched the brand as an online business back in October of 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential election seemed to her (and many other people) a foregone conclusion. (“It was still going to be like this really celebratory thing for the first woman president,” she says.)

The Outrage’s first big seller was a “Nasty Women United” T-shirt that went online shortly after the debate when Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman,” Funk says. But after he won the election, online sales blew up—she had racks of clothing snaking down the hallways of her one-bedroom in Adams Morgan. “My husband was like, ‘obviously I support this cause, but I don’t want to live in a warehouse,'” she says.

Ahead of the Women’s March, she got in touch with organizers and became an official partner. Funk originally acquired the pop-up location in Adams Morgan in January 2017 to promote the march, and leased it for just six weeks. But even in the first few days, the store was flooded with customers, and they didn’t let up once the rush of the original event was over.

Funk extended the Adams Morgan lease, and has been there until this week. She’s become a partner with other large marches and organizations, including the March for Our Lives against gun violence earlier this year.

“Within the first 48 to 72 hours, I realized, oh wow. It turns out retail is going to be a really big part of this business,” says Funk. She says that she didn’t have to make a marketing plan because people just kept streaming into the store.

This week, The Outrage’s new apparel store had its soft opening at its new location on 14th Street NW. Its official opening is next week. As with the store’s old iteration in Adams Morgan, the company will donate a part of every sale to “progressive organizations fighting for social change,” as it is described on the website. Funk says that at the end of the month, after rent and employees are paid, all remaining money gets donated to organizations like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the National Organization for Women.

But what’s different about the new iteration is that, come late December or early January (in time for the next Women’s March), it’ll include a community space in the back that members will have to pay to use.

Funk says they haven’t decided on pricing yet, but that it’s going to be “affordable and accessible,” with pricing on a graduated scale.

“We’re going to be really transparent about our pricing, in telling people ‘at this level, you’ll be helping us pay rent.’ And ‘at this level, you’re helping subsidize a member who can’t afford [a more expensive price],'” Funk says. The new location is 3,200 square feet total, with 2,000 reserved for the community space.

The apparel store is open to anyone, but the community space isn’t—something Funk says she and her employees have spoken at length about with their regular patrons. She says they decided that making it a membership would help create an intentional community. “There’s more buy-in when people feel like they’re selected to be a part of this. We want to provide an oasis…we want to identify everyone as a group of people with similar values and interests,” Funk says. She says non-members will also likely be able to attend certain events in the space.

Funk imagines that people from partnership organizations, like the Women’s March, will use the space to host talks or workshops, that they’ll hold community conversations around topics like white feminism and racial justice, and host more lighthearted events like feminist movie nights. Feminist artist Georgia Saxelby is helping design the space, and it will also serve beer and wine.

Most important to Funk, she says, is that people can use the space the way they were informally using her pop-up in Adams-Morgan: as a safe place to gather.

“We’re just riding the wave of what our customers want from us. Like with the Kavanaugh confirmation, dozens of people came in and sometimes they just want to sit on the couch and cry,” she says. “And they feel like The Outrage is the place they want to be in.”

The Outreach is located at 1722 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009. It’s open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The retail portion had its soft opening this week, and the membership space is slated to open in January.