Why a porta-potty is a permanent fixture in this workwear brand’s flagship

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When customers enter Brunt Workwear’s flagship store in North Reading, Massachusetts, which opened last weekend, they may wonder if the contractor is still scrambling to finish the job. After all, it would be hard to miss the porta-potty perched against a wall. Or that the wall itself is made of unfinished plywood, its mill stamps still visible. Or that several empty oil barrels are sitting on the concrete floors.

But for the 6-year-old workwear brand, there’s a method to the…drabness. The store, the DTC brand’s first, which is very much complete, is meant to evoke the jobsites where the brand’s core consumers—trade workers—spend their working life.

“What we wanted to do was bring in materials that were familiar to our customer base,” Eric Girouard, founder and CEO of Brunt, told Retail Brew. “So that they felt at home and like [the store design] really recognized and represented where they’re spending their time on the jobsite.”

The brand—which has eschewed crossing over into fashion or expanding into the pet and kids categories like workwear standard-bearer Carhartt—tapped design firm Bergmeyer, whose retail work includes Wilson’s experiential flagship in New York, to bring its showroom-cum-jobsite to life.

As for that porta-potty, which is emblazoned with the Brunt logo and “Think Tank,” it’s the real article, but its floor, commode, urinal, and back wall have been removed. Open the door, and it leads to a room where the brand invites some customers to check out products that are under development. (For sustenance, the room includes a refrigerator filled with Monster energy drinks and a hot dog roller.)

The room is “specifically for customer insights and product feedback,” Girouard said. “We’ll bring customers back to be able to weigh in with thoughts and feedback and changes and tweaks.”

More than a poop joke, he noted that since they’re strictly required and regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for worksites, the arrival of porta-potties is a signifier that a job is about to get underway.

“When you do a job, even if it’s at a building that has plumbing or even a home, the first thing that the GC”—that’s general contractor, C-suite nerds—“does is have a porta-potty delivered for the crews and for the teams,” Girouard said.

Originally a DTC brand that started with a line of boots in 2020 before adding clothing, Brunt expanded into wholesale with physical retail partners in 2024. That wholesale business grew 345% in 2025, Girouard said.

But “while our wholesale partners are doing incredible and selling great,” Girouard said that a “multibranded retailer…can’t always tell a full Brunt story, head-to-toe, like this flagship can.”

One wall does that storytelling explicitly, with a timeline dedicated to the origin and milestones of the brand, which was inspired by childhood friends of Girouard’s who are in the trades and for whom many of the products are named.

And wherever they turn, shoppers will see jobsite essentials that have been repurposed for retail. The base of one display table, for example, consists of 120 cinder blocks; other display tables are heavy-duty welding tables made by the Badass brand.

When shoppers try on boots, they’re sitting on the sides of a utility truck bed that weighs about 6,000 pounds and rests directly on the floor.

Even the changing rooms are on-theme, designed to look like the shipping containers familiar to construction sites.

North Reading, a suburb north of Boston, is home to Brunt’s headquarters, which is just a mile from the store. Why the store makes more sense there than in nearby Beantown is because “our customer base lives out in the suburbs,” Girouard said.

“Even if they’re working in the city, they’re coming up [Route 95] in their trucks,” he said. And if they stop at the new Brunt store on their way home? They may step in and for a moment feel as if they’re still on the job.

“We know our customer base is going to really notice the details and the authenticity and really understand that we get their work life,” Girouard said.