With the news the way it is these days, sometimes you just want to tell people to go kick rocks.

One Portland business owner is doing just that — and has punted his way into online fame.

Owen Gail, 23, is the owner of Shirtzenpantz, a Southwest Portland thrift store that opened this spring.

Gail had already been reselling used clothes while studying business at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. After seven years of selling online, he said he was ready to expand into a brick-and-mortar store.

“I wanted to keep growing the business and hire some employees,” he said. “But doing that out of a shed — that’s rotting and leaking and has racks that are dangerous and ready to fall over at any time — isn’t necessarily the best thing.”

The Hillsdale strip mall where he found space for his shop wasn’t in the most visible location, so Gail and his business partner, twin brother Ethan, knew drawing customers would be a sisyphean task.

So he came up with a sisyphean solution: kicking the same rock every day and posting it online.

“Today is Day 5 of kicking a rock until it turns into a sphere. Today we started at 728 grams,” he said in one early video.

His Day 5 video got picked up by the algorithm and hit 30 million views. Now, 243,000 followers tune in daily to watch.

The rock — named by fans as Christosphere Dwayne Shirtzenpantz — was originally a triangular rock Gail’s grandmother picked up in a Vancouver, Washington, gas station parking lot.

And yes, Gail did audition different rocks for the task.

“It had to be a big enough rock where theoretically it could be the right shape, where if you wore down the edges, then what you had left could maybe be a sphere. And so that’s what I was looking for really,” said Gail.

After 119 days of kicking for 20-30 minutes a day, Christosphere has worn into an oval.

“It looks more like an egg. From some angles it looks very spherical,” Gail said. “Getting more spherical every day.”

Like any fitness devotee, Christosphere the rock keeps track of its progress.

“We lost two grams. It’s not bad,” Gail said in one video. “It’s getting harder and harder to lose weight.”

Despite shrinking in size, Christosphere’s fame has grown. The rock has been kicked by a U.S. senator, the Portland Thorns and even garnered attention from agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Portland Bureau of Transportation.

Fans have traveled from as far away as the Netherlands to see the rock in person. On a recent day, a family from Seattle made a road trip detour just to meet Christosphere.

“Well, I saw him walk past here with Christosphere and I praised him,” said Henry, 10, who watches the videos regularly. His older brother has become a reluctant fan — and even started kicking his own rock named Mick Jagger.

There’s even an ornately-framed photo of Christosphere at nearby PDX Coffee Club. If you pick it up, there’s a secret menu item behind: a Christosphere-inspired coffee drink, a hazelnut latte with a candied rock on top.

There are hazards to rock-kicking. Gail has gone through multiple pairs of shoes. “Everyone was like, ‘Are your shoes turning into spheres?’” he said.

The videos have made Owen recognizable on the street. As he walks around on Day 119, local resident Fiona Coakley stops her car to ask if he’s “the rock guy.”

The videos made her stop into the shop. “I learned about Christosphere and then I had to go. It looked so quirky,” she said.

Gail believes the videos work because the act of kicking a rock is so universal.

“I think kicking a rock is an urge — it’s something a lot of people have done,” he said.

“You’ve been on the side of the road, you’ve seen a rock and you’ve picked it up. And so the idea that you could do something like that and actually turn it into something over a long period of time … people immediately think, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ But then they see it happening and then they want to follow.

“But I think a lot of it is the storytelling.”

In his voiceovers, Gail weaves sometimes fantastical stories involving the Princess of Hillsdale or other fictional characters.

But one of his favorite stories was more mundane: Christophere’s visit to the local orthodontist for an X-ray. In the video, the rock sits in the exam chair wearing sunglasses and a dental bib.

For now, Christosphere continues to lose grams and gain fans. Some followers keep charts and spreadsheets predicting when it will finally become a perfect sphere.

The rock’s success has been good for business for the new thrift shop. “It’s been much better than I expected,” Gail said. Business is good enough that Shirtzenpantz recently opened a second location in St. Johns. That store has its own quirky marketing hook: a display of the “world’s largest” pair of jeans, custom-made for Gail in Mississippi.

And, of course, there’s a new rock — a “twin” to Christosphere. The yet-unnamed stone made its debut with a street procession through St. Johns, carried on a stretcher by six enthusiastic customers.

The stone, which was determined by popular vote, is angular and the size of a volleyball. There’s a lot of kicking ahead before Christosphere’s twin has a matching spherical physique.

“I can’t be in both places every day, so probably we’ll have one of the employees kick the rock at St. Johns — I’ll have to pay someone to kick the rock,” Gail said.

Christosphere, however, will remain in Hillsdale.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/20/christosphere-rock-shirtzenpants-hillsdale-portland/