Aquarium Shop Will Be Stocked to the Gills

When Scripps officials unfurled the original watercolor poster touting the new Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum, within seconds they realized that something was terribly wrong.

The Pacific Ocean fish were fine.

The lobster, however, was clearly from Maine--its claws were a dead giveaway.

Today, copies of the completely repainted poster await opening day in the aquarium’s bookshop, a facility designed by the same architect who created the chain of Imaginarium stores.

This new shop is almost 10 times larger than the old one. Yes, you can still get a copy of Joseph Nelson’s “Fishes of the World” for $65 or a $1,500 microscope. And the oceanography textbooks--from the obscure to the commonplace--are still there.

But all that might be a tad harder to find amid the blizzard of more worldly merchandise. The white wood shelves in this shop will be filled with more than 2,500 different items, from fish pot holders to mugs with frogs sitting inside, from sea otter puzzles to dolphin earrings. Look out Nature Company, Scripps is here.

“Imagine satellite shops just like this in malls,” said Edward Spicer, director of merchandising, surveying the spacious 12,500-square-foot shop. “There will be a time in the not too distant future when that might be feasible.”

But Spicer is quick to point out that the shop at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s new aquarium is basically oriented to an educational theme.

“When someone comes to the store, we’d like them to leave with a bigger sense of what it means to be an oceanographer--studying the ocean is really a global process,” Spicer said.

So Spicer has also stocked the shelves with gizmos, gadgets, tools, toys and books that are associated with seismic studies, biology, space science and back-yard science. It will be attractively displayed in the shop designed by the Los Angeles-based J.T. Nakaoka, who is currently remodeling the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s two book stores and who designed the Bergdorf Goodman’s Mens store in New York.

Spicer hopes the shop will bring in $1.4 million a year, or double the sales of the existing tiny store in the old aquarium. For every dollar spent in the new store, 23 cents will go to exhibits and education programs.

In opening its vastly expanded shop, Scripps is following a trend embraced by many museums, zoos and planetariums, said Reint Reinders, president of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau. Today, even theaters are jumping in, marketing T-shirts, sweat shirts, tapes and compact discs of their productions.

“Museums and public attractions are looking more and more at revenue generating areas, such as shops--they need to,” Reinders said.

“And it’s not as junky as it used to be. More and more items are the kinds of things you’d be proud to wear or put on your coffee table,” he said.