‘If you can’t find something, you’re probably not looking’

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

June 8, 2026

BOULDER JUNCTION – Business partners and lifelong best friends Jim Becker and Ed Osep said despite their rugged appearance, they “each have a soft side,” which is showcased in their Northwoods gift shop, The Joyful Loon.

“Being two guys owning a gift shop, our stuff is a little different, because I guess we just look at the world differently,” he said.

Becker said he and Osep – chief “loonatic” and director of “loonacy,” respectively – were on a fishing trip a few summers ago when they had the idea to open a business.

“Before I did this, I ran a fairly large advertising agency in West Bend called EPIC Creative for 32 years,” he said. “Ed’s been a fishing guide for many years up here – a very good, established fishing guide.”

Shortly after he retired from EPIC Creative, Becker said he quickly became bored with the slow life, prompting a conversation with Osep.

“I didn’t have anything to do,” he said. “I was used to solving unsolvable problems every day for my entire life – I had 100 employees at one point. I thought fishing and playing golf were going to be great, [but] I got bored and… [Ed] didn’t want to guide as much. So, we started chatting, and said, ‘All right, let’s do something.’”

Though the pair initially envisioned opening a bait shop, the long hours required to operate one sent them down a different track.

“I said to Ed, ‘Do we really want a bait shop?’” he said. “I don’t want to get up at six in the morning every morning and then have to be there ‘til six or seven at night… I want [to work] 20 hours a week to get out of the house, have some social interaction with people and have something to do.”

Becker said he and Osep opted for a gift shop instead – opening The Joyful Loon last summer at 10355 Main St. in Boulder Junction.

“We were looking at all our options, and then we stumbled across this little building,” he said. “We both love the building [because] it’s right downtown, [and] it’s in the middle of a lot of good things… So, I bought the building, and then we decided we were going to be a gift shop.”

‘Something a little different’

Located on the same street as Boulder Jct. Brewing Co. – featured by The Business News in its March 2 issue – Moondeer & Friends Gallery and Boulder Junction Coffee Company, Becker said The Joyful Loon aims to offer both traditional gift shop selections as well as products that are relatively inaccessible in the Northwoods.

“We have candles and some jewelry and things other shops have, but mostly, we try to have stuff that’s different,” he said. “Smithey cookware and custom-made kaleidoscopes are two good examples of things we have that really nobody else up here has.”

Becker said the shop also features the artwork of his wife, Sandy Cashman – an artist known locally for her landscape oil paintings.

“She’s a pretty well-known artist up here,” he said.

After purchasing the building late last year, Becker said his friend Sara Muender, the owner of Moondeer, inquired about what he and Osep planned to sell – to which he replied, “I don’t know.”

“Sara… looked around my house and said, ‘You should sell all this stuff you have, because it’s cool,’” he said.

When he and Cashman travel, Becker said his go-to activity is shopping at local stores.

“We go to tons of gift shops, antique shops and antique malls, resale shops, pawn shops – that type of stuff,” he said. “I’ve been to enough gift shops up here, and I feel they’re pretty predictable, so I thought it would be fun to do something a little different.”

Following their motto of “fine and fun goods,” Becker said patrons can shop a wide variety of items, from “high-end cookware to fart putty.”

“We have partnered with probably 15 local artisans, one being my wife, Sandy,” he said. “Ed’s wife Rachel [also makes] beautiful stained glass. Then, we have a couple folks doing cutting boards for us and a guy who makes custom-made, hand-forged, beautiful knives. That helps us have stuff that’s nowhere else.”

Becker said The Joyful Loon also has a selection of vinyl albums available for purchase.

“I collect vinyl albums, so I put in an old-school (from the 1970s) amp, turntable and speakers, and I brought maybe 40 albums in – not expecting to sell any, just there for me to listen to,” he said. “We ended up selling [roughly] $7,000 worth of vintage vinyl albums, which was a huge surprise to me, so we’re expanding that.”

As “an old Grateful Dead hippie,” Becker said The Joyful Loon also sells a “crazy amount of” vintage merch from that band and others.

“I’m a Deadhead,” he laughed. 

From a “revenue-generating perspective,” Becker said The Joyful Loon’s No. 1 selling item in its first year was its Smithey cookware.

“That was a gamble,” he said. “We’re talking pots and pans that cost between $200 and $400 each, [made from] very high-end carbon steel. It’s what my wife uses, and I wasn’t even sure they’d let us be a retail seller for them, [but] they have no other outlets anywhere near here, so they were excited.”

With a selection curated by their interests, Becker said the shop’s name was also collectively decided on by The Joyful Loon’s partners – himself, Cashman and the Oseps.

“Like I said, I ran an advertising agency for 30 years, and Sandy worked there with me for quite a few of those years, so… we did a brainstorming session like we would do for one of our clients,” he said. “We all got together, sat around our dining room table for four or five hours, threw out hundreds and hundreds of ideas, and we eventually landed on The Joyful Loon.”

Becker said the project offers both couples – the shop’s sole employees, in addition to his 99-year-old mother – an opportunity to joyfully engage with their passions after retirement.

“It’s my retirement hobby, and Ed looks at it as his retirement…, [but also] his livelihood for however long he wants to do it,” he said. “My wife has a studio and gallery, so she knows how to do retail, and Rachel has been doing retail forever – so, if we’re in a pinch, either one of them could step in.”

Lessons in seasonality

In The Joyful Loon’s first year – having recently celebrated its anniversary May 7 – Becker said he and Osep learned a lot about operating a retail storefront.

“One thing I learned for sure is that having a gift shop is a lot more work than it looks like,” he said. “I forget we have maybe 12,000 items in the store right now. Every one of those had to be touched two or three times.”

The Northwoods tourism season, Becker said, also presented a steep learning curve for himself and Osep.

“[There’s an] unbelievably drastic difference between what our business looks like in February and what it looks like in July,” he said. “Just about everybody talked to me about it, but I didn’t really believe it until I saw it.”

Though a lighter workload is expected this year, Becker said operating The Joyful Loon was a full-time job last summer – doing “five or six times more” monthly sales as compared to its first winter in business.

“I probably worked 40 hours a week through the busy season,” he said. “Since then, I’ve only been working a couple of days a week, and this summer, it’s not going to be as labor-intensive.”

Despite identifying summer tourism as a main revenue stream, Becker said he expects The Joyful Loon to also enjoy business from wintertime recreators.

“We did okay in the winter, especially on the weekends, because we have snowmobilers and they have a really nice winter park here in town that a lot of families come to,” he said. “But it’s a dramatic change.”

Establishing product supply chains without overspending in their first year, Becker said, was the most difficult aspect of opening the store.

“But now, we’re set up with our biggest provider, who provides probably 80% of what we have in the shop,” he said. “We work through a company called Faire, and they’re essentially Amazon for gift shop owners.”

Featuring products from artisans across the globe, Becker said The Joyful Loon has found and stocked some special items thanks to its involvement with Faire – which offers 60-day payment delays on all products they purchase from the platform.

“So, now I can start ordering [items for the summer], because [I] don’t have to pay until June,” he said. “Then we’ll have really good cash flow again, so that’s been a learning experience.”

Gifting smiles

Prior to their permanent Northwoods relocation, Becker said he and Cashman owned a cabin on the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage for nearly a decade.

“I’ve been living here for almost nine years – it’ll be nine years through this fall,” he said. “Before that, I still came up here all the time… [as] a kid.”

Despite being familiar with how to live in the Northwoods, Becker said operating a business presented an entirely new set of challenges for himself and Osep.

“Even though I’ve lived in it for that long, the changing of the seasons and how it affects businesses was a little more severe than I expected,” he said. “[But] Ed and I are both pretty comfortable shooting from the hip or figuring things out as we go.”

Though customers and neighbors have asked if The Joyful Loon will close shop this coming winter, Becker said that remains to be seen.

“We’re not sure,” he said. “We’re going to see how it goes.”

Regardless of when they’re open – with the most up-to-date schedule available on The Joyful Loon’s Facebook page – Becker said he and Osep are excited to continue selling goods and gifting smiles.

“What makes me happy is there’s a ton of laughter in our store,” he said. “One of the reviews we got said, ‘If you can’t find something for anybody in there, you’re not really looking.’”