After finally eating at Eskimo Joe’s for the first time, we walked next door to the part of the business I already knew by heart: the clothes.
That sounds backwards, but if you grew up in Oklahoma, it probably makes sense. Long before I had ever sat down in Stillwater for cheese fries, I knew the Eskimo Joe’s logo. I had seen the cups in kitchen cabinets, the shirts at ballgames, and that smiling Joe-and-Buffy artwork on people who may or may not have been able to point to Elm Street on a map.
Eskimo Joe’s Clothes in Stillwater is not a little rack of souvenirs by the restaurant door. It is a full retail store at 507 W. Elm, right next to the original Eskimo Joe’s restaurant and just east of Oklahoma State University. You can feel the OSU campus pull in the place, especially when you start thinking about alumni weekends, football Saturdays, family campus visits, and the steady Oklahoma habit of buying a shirt to prove you were there.
From 72 Shirts Behind the Bar
The part that still gets me is how early the clothing side started.
When Steve File and Stan Clark opened Eskimo Joe’s on July 21, 1975, they had 72 T-shirts for sale behind the bar. The Joe-and-Buffy logo was drawn by Oklahoma State freshman commercial art student Bill Thompson with a magic marker. Those first shirts sold out within a week.
That is a pretty good sign.
The demand kept building until selling shirts from behind the bar no longer made sense. In 1987, Joe’s Clothes opened next door to the restaurant. The Stillwater store later expanded again in 2011, which explains why walking into it feels less like a restaurant add-on and more like its own Oklahoma retail operation.
Inside, the store is big enough to make the point for you. There are classic logo shirts, OSU designs, seasonal designs, hats, sweatshirts, Route 66 items, drinkware, souvenirs, and enough Joe-and-Buffy variations to make you realize the company has been remixing the same two characters for decades without running out of bits.
I bought the gardening-themed Eskimo Joe’s shirt. Cindy went with the Bigfoot shirt.
Neither one was the plain souvenir tee I expected, and that is probably part of why the clothing has lasted. The classic logo still matters, but the rotating designs are what keep people looking through the racks instead of just grabbing the same shirt in a new color.
The Cup in the Oklahoma Cabinet
The other thing that stood out was the cups.
Eskimo Joe’s markets the reusable 22-ounce cups as “Oklahoma China,” which is funny because it is almost too accurate. If you have spent much time around Oklahoma kitchens, garages, lake houses, or college apartments, you have probably seen one of those plastic cups still hanging around years after the original trip to Stillwater.
That is the strange power of this place. A college-town restaurant created merchandise that became nearly as recognizable as the restaurant itself. The company says its shirts have shipped to more than 50 countries, and the Stillwater store keeps a Wall of Fame showing customers wearing Joe’s Clothes around the world.
The brand has also had criticism over the years tied to its name and logo, and that context is part of the larger story now. Still, walking through the store, you can see why the merchandise side became such a visible piece of Oklahoma pop culture. It is nostalgia, OSU proximity, road-trip souvenir logic, and smart design all stacked on top of each other.
Eskimo Joe’s celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025, and naturally the clothing side was part of it. That feels right. The shirts were not a late add-on after the restaurant got famous. They were there from the beginning, 72 of them behind the bar, gone within a week.
Fifty years later, I walked into the original Stillwater store and left with Joe and Buffy on a gardening shirt.
Cindy found Bigfoot.
Apparently the old smile still has some room to roam.
