“I was 21 when I bought my first piece of taxidermy. I was looking for something to furnish my strange bedroom at the time. I think I just typed “animal heads” into craigslist and found an entire wormhole. I loved the idea of walking into a room and having something on the wall stare back at me.
There is something special about how lifelike taxidermy can be, but also how dead it is at the same time. It occupies this weird space between life and death in my head."
"When I turned 26, I had a little freakout moment and it sorta kicked me in the butt to start collecting more strange stuff with the hopes of having a shop one day. I had a credit card, a little cash saved up, and the hunger to do something for myself.
Eventually my partner and I collected enough stuff and opened the shop as an experiment to see if it was something that could be sustainable. I was working in a restaurant and my partner was working in a photo lab. We signed a six month lease and didn’t have much to lose.
It seemed like it was a low enough risk that in the worst case scenario, I’d have about $6,000 of credit card debt. Luckily we were able to pay everything off pretty quickly. Within a year, my partner and I were doing this full-time."
"When you walk into our store, there’s nothing subtle here. I mean, once you walk in, there are about 30 dead faces staring at you. It takes a lot of people about 30 seconds to get used to it, but once they are acclimated, it’s fine. Mostly everyone who sticks it out and hangs in there ends up buying something.
From the beginning, we listened to customers' feedback about what they were looking for. That helped us choose our inventory and allowed us to develop a loyal client base."
"What motivates me the most is seeing a customer find the item that excites them. They decide they can’t live without it. That’s a magical moment. These are not pieces that you can find at Walmart or Amazon."
"Staying engaged and passionate in this business is pretty easy for me because ridiculous situations arise that only happen due to our inventory selection. For example, someone randomly calls. Their pet just died and they want their pet preserved. Or someone calls and tells me that they just opened a box with a ton of old syringes or unknown medical supplies. One guy actually emailed us and said he had saved a whole bunch of his scabs. He asked if we wanted to buy them? Basically, every day is an adventure.
Whenever strange moments happen, I realize how blessed I am. These events only take place because I’m living this life with my own small business…and it’s great.”
