In a strip mall on the corner of 49th Street N and Park Boulevard, Michael Bickel and Jaise Rizzo are putting Pinellas Park on the map—or at least forcing the fashion world to try to find it on one.
The duo’s latest project—a collaboration with Sperry Top-Sider that updates the iconic American brand’s A/O 2 Eye Boat shoe—started becoming real during a Fashion Week party in Paris, but it puts Florida front and center in the storytelling and design of a collection that drops this weekend.
“This is where we’re from. This is who we are. We’re not a New York or a California,” Bickel, 39, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “But we have the same possibilities and pride.”
At Gibbs High School, Bickel, fell in love with clothes and shoes. First it was stuff from Hot Topic, but his tastes changed, and soon he was head-to-toe covered in Akademiks, Girbaud, Iceberg and Ecko.
Bickel dropped out of school, worked jobs at J.C. Penney and NY Flava. He blew money on clothes, and saved just enough to eventually link up with a store owner who helped him open Fresh Rags boutique. Now his shop lives just two streets from where he grew up.
While Bickel was getting Fresh Rags off the ground 17 years ago, Rizzo was a middle schooler starting to take notice of clothes; not just how they fit the human form, but how certain people wore them and influenced others. He ended up at Pinellas Park High School, noticing the details in brands like Tomoaki Nagao’s Bape; he started to design his own stuff during a screen printing class and even sold a few pieces under the “Anthony Bayshore” moniker.
“Then my buddy was shopping at Fresh Rags and came in wearing one of the shirts,” Rizzo, 34, told CL. It was pale yellow, with one of Rizzo’s “Creative” designs (the same icons tattooed on his knuckles). Bickel knew they had to meet.
“From that day on, we just kind of connected,” Rizzo, who worked at LRG before becoming Fresh Rags’ Creative Director, added.
In 2021, the duo dropped their first big collaboration, a conservation-minded Florida Springs Manatee Saucony Grid Web—and now they’re preparing to launch the Sperry Topsider x Fresh Rags “Pirates in Paradise” collection.
At the heart of the project two years in the making are two shoes: There’s a nighttime “Gulfstar” with an off-black mix of synthetic stingray leather and soft suede upper. It has cross-stitched panels, a mudguard, tortoiseshell eyelets, “gold doubloon” heel trim, serape inner lining, and a torn Jolly Roger tag covering a debossed Fresh Rags x Sperry lockup. It’s finished with an aggressive Vibram sawtooth sole.
“Harbor Ray,” a foil to the off-black Sperry, features tan synthetic stingray leather with three patterns and colors representing the sun’s bleaching of the hide; there’s white contrast stitching, seersucker inner lining, gold trim throughout, and a “lug” Vibram sole.
Each of the 1,200 pairs comes packaged with a limited edition gold doubloon and tortoiseshell shoe horn. A total of eight new SKUs make up the collection which includes trousers, mesh shorts, a button up, rugby tees, hats and more.
To document it all, the duo took a team—including photographer Ivana Cajina, who keeps the Wtr Cooler studio in downtown Tampa—to Key West and the Dry Tortugas. The story of a pirate who loots the Gulf of Mexico before finding a new side of himself in the Keys is baked into the folklore behind the collection, which, at its core, is really a love letter to Florida. All told “Pirates in Paradise” is an imaginative, extremely detailed, and stunning reinterpretation of Sperry’s iconic boat shoe. An even more limited hardbound book immortalizes the collection.
In a lot of ways, too, the shoes are a reflection of Bickel and Rizzo themselves. Rizzo, founder of Greenslate Studio, said there aren’t very many better feelings than seeing people—whether they’re from around here or call Japan home—wearing his designs, but seeing Bickel in the shoe is definitely one of them.
“Mike was a part of my wedding; I look at Mike like a brother,” Rizzo said. When he wears it, and he’s proud of wearing it, just seeing him stoked on what I came up with for him, that’s an indescribable feeling.”
Early this week, the duo was busy transforming Fresh Rags—located at 7620 49th St.—into a slice of the beach, complete with a tiki bar, music, food, raffles and the entire collection taking over the entire shop. For five hours on Saturday, a launch will celebrate Rizzo, Bickel, and the entire Sperry team’s hard work.
But more than that, the launch is a toast to Tampa Bay, and the relationships it took for brands like Sperry to see our part of the world as a place it wants to plant a flag. After launch, the clothes and shoes will proliferate globally, and it will all originate out of a shop inside a Pinellas Park strip mall.
Success, Bickel said, is Fresh Rags being able to tell the story.
“We’re showing the world and putting our beautiful state and city on a pedestal,” he added. “That’s the win.”
