Kelsey Potts has always enjoyed the art of the party.
She made a career in event planning, organizing corporate events in Dallas and later working as an event director for the Shops of Prairie Village.
Outside of work, she said, she has long enjoyed hosting in her own life — and she also knew that lots of other people did too, despite the stress that could come with it.
Thus, an idea was born — a way to take some of the stress away from opening your home to loved ones. Potts opened Social Shop KC in 2021, offering tabletop rentals for dinner parties and special events.
Four years later, the shop now has its first in-person showroom in downtown Overland Park.
The Social Shop is at 7228 W. 79th St.
- The showroom occupies a space on the north side of downtown Overland Park, just off 79th and Marty streets.
- Sazzy’s Lingerie previously occupied that space.
- The Social Shop’s showroom operates on a by-appointment basis.
The Social Shop offers “boutique” tabletop rentals
Potts said the “bread and butter” of the Social Shop is anything you’d need to have on or around the table at a dinner party.
The shop offers rentable tablecloths in a variety of sizes, colors and patterns, in addition to tables and chairs.
Potts said the Social Shop’s rental inventory generally caters to events with 30 or fewer seated guests — though the shop can accommodate larger parties if every guest won’t necessarily need a seat.
In addition to tablecloths and furniture, the Social Shop also offers other rentable items like beverage buckets, party cups, and tableware.
Customers can either make a rental request online if they already know what they’ll need, or they can make an appointment to visit the showroom to browse their options in person.
“(The idea) was basically showing that you can have a dinner party just about anywhere, whether that’s in your driveway, your backyard or inside,” Potts said.
The Social Shop has been in JoCo for four years
The Social Shop initially occupied a small storage space in Mission when it opened in 2021. Then Potts moved the shop’s inventory to her home in Prairie Village.
To date, the new Overland Park space is the most customer-facing space the shop has had so far.
“I put a lot of effort and hard work into growing it, so I ultimately decided that growing is what I wanted to happen to it, and so now I just had to grow with it,” she said. “I now have a place to show that we can do many, many things that official long-term rental companies have done — and in my opinion, do it with more color and more style and make it more unique.”
As the Social Shop’s first showroom, Potts said the new space allows for clients to get a better visual of what their parties might look like — and that’s something she said clients have already noticed.
“People don’t think about what they need until we start talking, so I think the showroom meetings are beneficial more than just picking a color,” she said. “With us being experts in the hosting world, (we’re) just bringing light to things that they might not have thought of.”
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