C28 Evangelists

World Magazine: At first glance, the narrow store near the merry-go-round at Parkway Plaza could be any of a dozen Southern California mall-chain clones, the kind that hawk stud-belts and double-entendre T-shirts to skater-punks and posers: Back-alley brick walls, exposed-pipe ceilings, cutting-edge clothing lines, rock music throbbing from the rafters.
But the only double-entendres shoppers will find here are based on Scripture. The store is C28—short for Colossians 2:8—an overtly evangelical mall-based retail chain founded by Aurelio F. Barreto III, a California entrepreneur who made millions, found wealth bankrupt, considered suicide, got saved, then found he wanted to do something with his money besides lounge on exotic beaches sipping umbrella drinks.
Launched in 2001, C28 opens its sixth store this month in Palm Desert, Calif. Each store is aimed at fans of California board-sport couture: long shorts with legs like drainpipes, distressed outerwear, year-round logo-laden ski-caps, flip-flops, and jeans that might have been run over by trucks before being delivered by them.
But customers will not find at C28 any prototypical SoCal sales-dudes, tanned and ironic, biding shift time until they can hit the beach. Instead, they will find people like store manager Robert Villegas, 27, an Oceanside, Calif., youth pastor who may be the Energizer Bunny of a new kind of retail evangelism.
Retail evangelism [World Magazine]