When you stroll into Wingman Gifts & Supply in downtown Delafield, Wisconsin, for the first time, you will feel like you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole to a different era.
It’s not really the products – the unique gifts for men – that connote the bygone, although some do (like the stainless steel silvertip shave brushes). It’s the ethos. You will be greeted promptly by Steve Nelson, the owner, or Duaine Jackson, a retired firefighter from California who stopped in as a customer and loved it so much he decided to work there. They will tell you about the carefully curated products and actually show you how to use them, and if you have a son, they will do the same for him. Maybe they will talk you out of buying something you don’t really need. You will notice that each product is carefully chosen and built to last. And that all of them are geared toward men (hence: Wingman).
In a Temu-online-shopping-throwaway-impersonal-impractical society, Wingman is a throwback to the era when grandfathers routinely shared their wisdom with grandsons, and fathers taught their sons how to shave, pick a watch, choose a wallet, and use a pocketknife. And if you don’t have a grandfather or father who did those things for you, Steve and Duaine will help. You might call Wingman a men’s boutique store, until you realize that many of the words associated with stores like this one (boutique, closet, etc.) have a female connotation, and then you realize that you haven’t really seen a store like this before. And that makes you wonder why.
Why are men so poorly served in today’s society? There are sporting goods stores, sure. Bait, hunting, gun, and clothing stores. But there really aren’t many stores around like Wingman.
“I really do have a passion for raising young men along the traditional, like our grandfathers approached life to be,” Nelson says. He came up with the idea for the store after running around Madison one day looking for a replacement for a broken shoelace and not being able to find one, at least that wasn’t a piece of junk.
“That sense of masculinity. From a conservative standpoint, you understand what happened with the woke crowd coming after masculinity. I don’t see that in my world. What I want to get is men stepping up,” he says.
The store carries “things to re-engage dads and sons, and grandfathers and grandsons, just to bring out some of those old-school grandpa kind of qualities,” he says.
“There’s a sense in which some of these items are just looked at as forgotten about, and we do everything on our phones and with technology,” he says. “I see it differently. A lot of the products and how we even interact with people, is just to bring out some of those masculine traits of being prepared, of being ready to serve, of putting others first.”
Gear for Men on a Mission.
Whatever that Mission May Be.
The small men’s store is tucked along a side street in downtown Delafield next to Blue Collar Coffee Co. (the latter is owned by a Diane Hendricks’ company), and above (yes, literally above), someone else’s hidden independent bookstore. The walls are painted a soothing blue, and there are boat and WWII-era airplane propellers hanging on the walls, painted wooden American flags for sale, and pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution on the counter. When you learn that Nelson knows former conservative Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, that makes perfect sense. Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming sometimes stops in to shop when he’s at Blue Collar next door, working over a cup of brew.
The store sells a mixture of carefully chosen items with a wide price range and a lot of variety, including waterproof flag-festooned small notebooks that police officers and firefighters like to buy; books about men’s cooking, prayers for men, boys being boys, courage, and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” (which was selling for $5); an assortment of very high-end Swiss watches and knives (but, boy do they last); cologne, soap, socks, and so much more. These are not items made to break.
“His concept of Wingman is coming alongside guys and their time of need, whatever that time of need is. Special dinner, special occasion, whatever that is. I appreciated the quality of the products they carried,” Jackson says.
But really, Steve Nelson is selling a different way of life, one that is less transitory and that is slower paced.
“I get a lot of young men walking into the store, and I think, ‘You have no idea what to do with any of this stuff do you?'” Nelson says. “They are kind of lost. You see their girlfriends take the lead. I do have a passion for that. I have a son, and I really want him to be a man. What does that mean? What does that look like these days?”
With a start, you realize: There’s a lot more attention on the question, “What is a woman?” these days, but no one is pondering the question, “What is a man?”
‘What Is a Man?’
For an answer, Nelson turned to his father-in-law. They were at a charity event outside when the older man saw a woman struggling to put a sign in the ground. He went to his car, retrieved a pocketknife, and simply helped her, saying little, and then returned to the event without another word. It was just who he was, it was just what men do, and Nelson wanted to create a store that emphasizes this trait.
“I watched that scene, and it spoke to me,” Nelson says. “He saw a need, took initiative, had tools to get the job done, and then faded into the background. Being a man means really just serving and stepping up, but not needing the attention. It’s a mindset. Have some skills. You have to engage with another man to learn those skills and not just get that from YouTube.”
Wingman Gifts and Supply “is a unique Men’s retail store,” its Facebook page says. “We specialize in high-quality daily-use items to ensure our customers are prepared and useful for their daily journey. Traditional shaving items, watches, pens, flashlights, and more.” The only things they really don’t sell are clothing items and alcohol (they do have hats.)
“We carry daily use items,” says Nelson. “Very nice quality. I wouldn’t say luxury, but you buy it once, and it will serve you for a long time.”
They sell a lot of Secrid leather wallets, crafted in Holland. The credit cards fan out. They have a high-end fingernail clipper set made in Japan. There’s a grill brush and utility knives.
Jackson says that customers say, “There’s no place like this. There are all these stores that have things for women but nothing for men.”
Nelson said he doesn’t know of any other stores like his in the area, but noted that there are “a few around the country, and they usually add the apparel. The ones around the country are usually owned by someone like me, not a chain. Just someone who had a vision. These are a few of Steve’s favorite things. I don’t carry products I don’t know how to use or can’t coach people on. I spend a lot of time with customers.”
Nelson notes how long the return line is at UPS from online shoppers, whereas “we don’t really have many returns at all. Sometimes, I have to talk people out of stuff. That’s not a good sales model, but I come at this from being a customer.”
Wingman opened four years ago. Steve was a video editor for 25 years. He worked for a company that produced the show, Discover Wisconsin, and then started his own video production business. He came down with Lyme disease, and that’s when he broke the pair of shoelaces.
“I felt someone should have a men’s store with nice quality basics. The store is actually a comeback story from Lyme disease, heart disease, and severe depression and anxiety. I was really suffering,” he says.
His wife supported his quest to start the store. The Milwaukee-born Nelson grew up in Brown Deer. “I started this business as a new business owner in my 50s,” he says, noting that, “In the retail world, women have strong communities and help each other. Everyone in Delafield has been great, and I am not saying they didn’t help me.”
But Wingman is a different thing altogether.
Wingman is a Wisconsin Right Now recommended business.
Table of Contents
