Louis Karp’s 1982 opening on South Lamar and the partner who walked in.

Waterloo Records opened in Austin, Texas, on 1 April 1982, and its founder was Louis Karp. KUT 90.5, Austin’s public radio station, reported on 2 January 2025 that Karp opened the original store in a modest building on South Lamar Boulevard. Austin Monthly, in a 40th-anniversary history by Bryan C. Parker published on 30 March 2022, described the shop at the time as a startup on a shoestring budget, stocked with Karp’s own record collection and another large collection he had bought. Karp had previously run a Sound Warehouse store in the city, the magazine said.

The man who would own the shop for 42 years arrived by coincidence. Austin Monthly recounted that on the same day, 1 April 1982, John Kunz walked into his boss’s office and quit his job as store manager at Disc Records on Guadalupe Street to pursue his own plan for an independent record store, with no idea that Karp was opening Waterloo across the Colorado River. Kunz heard about the new shop from a friend and soon made a habit of stopping by to talk with Karp; the two discussed practical matters such as splitting a case of a record between them. By October 1982 they made it official and Kunz joined as a partner. “We shared the same vision for what a store could be,” Kunz told the magazine. He added bargain records from his Saturday garage-sale rounds to Karp’s stock.

The name belongs to the city. English Wikipedia says the store takes its name from Waterloo, the original name of Austin, briefly used in 1839 after the settlement was designated capital of the Republic of Texas. KUT reported that Kunz became the sole owner in 1987, and Austin Monthly said Karp left after five years of partnership to pursue a different business venture. Under Kunz the store settled at the corner of West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard in 1989, KUT said, and it stayed on that corner for more than three decades.

Used records, open listening and a stage for South by Southwest.

Two early decisions shaped the shop. Austin Monthly wrote that selling used records was central to the partners’ idea of a better store, something the big chain stores in town did not do. “The crate digger in both of us knew that that’s where you’d find things that had gone out of print, or that you could afford,” Kunz said. The second decision concerned listening. Kunz had brought listening stations with tapes into his previous store, the magazine said, but Karp went further and wanted any customer to be able to open and play anything in the shop on the spot. Kunz’s reasoning was that a customer who did not go home with a record they disliked was a good result, and one who went home with a record discovered in the store was a great one. English Wikipedia still lists the ability to listen to anything in the store among the things Waterloo is known for, alongside its support of Texas music.

The partners also promoted concerts. Austin Monthly said they booked shows under the banner “Waterloo Records Presents”, including Dwight Yoakam at Liberty Lunch and the pianist George Winston at Bass Concert Hall. Inside the shop, in-store performances became a fixture. KUT listed Willie Nelson, Nirvana, The Shins, Norah Jones and Jeff Buckley among the hundreds of artists who had played intimate sets there, and Austin Monthly recalled that Nelson expanded a scheduled in-store on 2 November 2000 into a whole concert after his show at the Backyard was rained out.

The busiest stretch comes in March, when South by Southwest fills the city. In 2010 the store announced that its annual in-store SXSW performances would move outdoors, free and open to the public, the music site mxdwn reported on 10 March 2010, with sets scheduled hour by hour across four afternoons. NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, in a piece published on 18 March 2010 that featured Kunz, described the traditional in-store moved outside to a large set-up in the parking lot, with outdoor sets from 1 p.m., a smaller in-store show at noon and the last band on stage at six.

A city’s old name, a listening rule and a stage.

A record shop’s identity is carried less by a logo on a screen than by the objects that pass across its counter. The carrier bag is the object many customers keep: a printed bag sized for a twelve-inch sleeve leaves the shop under an arm, travels on buses and ends up in wardrobes holding records for years, so the mark on it does the work that a billboard does for other retailers. Inside, the browser bins set the grammar of the room. Dividers and genre cards, often cut from card and lettered by hand or with a stencil, tell a visitor where reggae ends and soul begins, and their lettering becomes as familiar as the sign above the door. Price stickers work as small typography too, with their colours, codes and handwriting telling regulars how a shop sorts new and used stock.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from events. In-store gigs bring posters, flyers, wristbands and listings boards, and a shop that books bands into local halls and churches builds a printed calendar around its name. Some shops run their own record labels, so their name also appears on sleeves, centre labels and catalogue numbers, where it reaches listeners who have never been through the door. Record Store Day adds a yearly set of exclusive releases, queues and window displays, and shops often make their own posters and bags for the day. Taken together, the bag, the bin card, the sticker and the gig poster give a shop a recognisable look that is built from use rather than from a single brand book.

A sale, a new building five blocks north and a studio inside.

The Sixth and Lamar corner eventually had to be left. KUT reported that Waterloo and the other businesses in the small strip mall had known about a pending move or closure since 2019, when the Austin real estate firm Endeavor bought the building. On 2 January 2025, after 42 years of ownership, Kunz announced that he was selling the business to Caren Kelleher, founder of Gold Rush Vinyl, and Trey Watson, chief executive of the Austin label Armadillo Records, with Kunz taking the role of chair emeritus. KUT said the store would remain independent and locally owned, and that staff would be kept on and offered the option of part ownership. Tribeza, on 13 January 2025, quoted Kunz: “I always wanted the store to live on and have a life beyond me.”

The new home is five blocks north on North Lamar Boulevard, in a building KUT described as a former Louis Shanks furniture store and later a Whole Foods regional office. The Daily Texan reported on 28 August 2025 that the grand opening was set for 30 August 2025, with a production studio called Waterloo Sound inside the store, a café and seating area, and a stage built with a piece of the original Austin City Limits studio flooring. FOX 7 Austin covered the opening on 30 August 2025 and noted a rentable podcast studio and a bar serving coffee, beer and wine.

The identity rests on a city’s old name, an open listening rule and a stage that moves outdoors each March. Kunz framed the handover to KUT as change that would still “honor all the hallmarks, the traditions, the legacies that got us where we are.”

For a design guide, Waterloo Records shows how a record shop can take a place name, build habits such as open listening and free in-store sets into its character, and carry them into a new building under new owners. Compare SXSW, the Austin festival whose March crowds fill the shop’s parking lot, and Tower Records, the chain that grew from a Sacramento drugstore. For this guide we use Sixth Street red, limestone and live-oak green with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Waterloo Records’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.