Czech Feather & Down returns to Cedar Rapids

A family-owned business, more than a century old, has made its way back to Cedar Rapids, after relocating in the wake of the 2008 flood.

Czech Feather & Down is back on 16th Avenue SW, but quite a distance from the 16th Avenue in Czech Village, where for years, it neighbored other shops that traced their origins to Czech immigrants.                                                       

The business, which specializes in handcrafted feather and down pillows and comforters, celebrated its new location Oct. 27 at 5907 16th Ave. SW, with an open house, including a surprise retirement party for previous owner, Cookie Vanous. 

“I remember being inside the factory,” Ms. Vanous said of the pillow-making business operated by her aunt, Vera Vanous, then called Griffith Feather & Mattress, Co., located along Ellis Boulevard NW.

Established in 1885, the business didn’t make the move to Czech Village until 1991, where it was located in a former shoe store. The name changed to Czech Feather & Down when it moved to another location within Czech Village.

At that point, Cookie Vanous was the owner, but it was her daughter, Dawn Schorg, who initially purchased the business from Vera Vanous.

Ms. Schorg had been working at Square D as it downsized its workforce, and was interested in the family’s roots in the pillow industry.

“I always loved my pillow,” she said of the gift given by her great-aunt when she was born. “As a young kid on the farm, when people think about what they’d save if their house was on fire, well, I’d save my pillow.” 

By that time, Vera Vanous had sold the factory and did most of the work out of her home.

When Ms. Schorg was laid off from Square D, she began buying the business. For a time, she and her husband, Rob, operated the company, along with her mother, but when Ms. Schorg got called back to work at Square D, Cookie Vanous took the reins.

She moved the business to a more spacious building in Czech Village, where it remained until the fateful 2008 flood that inundated the historic business district.

In the meantime, her grandchildren, Brittany and Trevor Schorg, spent their childhoods “down on the avenue” at her shop after school, just as Ms. Vanous had learned in her youth how to count change and other business skills from her uncle, Charles Kopecek, a co-owner of Polehna’s Meat Market in Czech Village.

The entire family came together to move all of the Czech Feather & Down inventory out of the shop just before Czech Village was inundated with unprecedented floodwaters from the Cedar River in June 2008.                                           

Ms. Vanous quickly found a new location in the historic downtown business district of Mount Vernon, where Czech Feather & Down found a new popularity among the parents of college students and others. 

A medium-weight, queen-sized down pillow is consistently their top seller, but custom orders, such as a handcrafted extra-long body pillow and heart-shaped breast cancer patient pillows “are what sets us apart,” Ms. Schorg said.

Orders are approximately split between in-person sales and online – at czechfeatherdownco.com – with a good percentage of business also coming from their cleaning operation.

Each pillow, whether or not it was purchased at Czech Feather & Down, is cleaned individually in a specialized sterilizing tumbling machine and then encased in a new soft cotton ticking casing, with more feathers and down added to “fluff it up,” Ms. Schorg said.  

A shadow box in the new shop showcases a large safety pin, bottle cap, cigarette butts, corn kernels and a stand-in for a gold wedding band – the original was returned to its owner – that have been found in pillows that have been cleaned, with corn and cigarette butts among the most common items discovered.

Older generations would host feather-stripping gatherings, a social tradition in which women would remove the hard quills from duck, chicken and goose feathers, with the remainder used in pillows, but the tedious task has gone by the wayside.

The down and feathers are now sourced from Europe and Canada, and the 100-percent cotton ticking, previously from a longtime company in New York, is sourced wherever they can find it.

Czech Feather & Down moved to their homes when the Mount Vernon shop was renovated, and then to a spot in Hiawatha. Their new Cedar Rapids site had a soft opening in September, preceding last month’s grand opening. The company still has a presence in a framing shop in Mount Vernon and in the Amana Colonies. 

Brittany Schorg is now on board as the next generation of pillow makers, also utilizing her social media skills in the business. She secured a partnership for Czech Feather & Down with the nationally syndicated Bob & Sheri radio show that has helped attract a wider customer base, and has other ideas in the works, particularly reaching out to younger customers, who are searching for eco-friendly products.                                     

The business has been gearing up for the holidays, its busiest season. Their pillows and comforters are also popular wedding and birthday gifts, the owners noted.

“We’ve always been fortunate to have good customers,” Dawn Schorg said.

“They come in and they know what they want and they want quality,” her mother added. “If you get one person, the generations follow.”