We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cassidy Roell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cassidy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I took a huge risk opening my business. Before furniture, I was remodeling houses. I invested young in my early 20s, purchased my first house and then sold it 2 years later for a profit. I then took that money, purchased a double wide trailer to flip and was planning to have it remodeled, flipped and sold in 6 months. Unfortunately I ended up catching covid and becoming completely disabled and unable to work for the next 18 months and spent every last dollar I had supporting myself and trying to get the remodel done. I’d like to say I was down to the last few hundred dollars in my savings when my home flooded and completely destroyed everything I had worked for. Fortunately, my home owners insurance paid out- although not enough to actually fix what was wrong and they totalled my home as a complete loss. I sold the trailer, took the money and opened my store front. Why you might ask ? Because I had a dream about showing my grandfather a storefront (who was still alive at the time but was terminal) and the look on his face in my dream made me want to make it a reality and show him before he passed. I had never owned a legitimate business before that size, nor had I ever worked for myself full time before and honestly had no idea what I was doing. But the feeling I got told me that this was what I was meant to do. I invested over $40,000 into my business – with nothing more to go off of other than a feeling.
Somewhere along the way, I came across some unique knobs that I absolutely loved and thought “I haven’t seen anyone make a business with knobs yet, I’ll give this a try”. Something spoke to me about it and it felt in alignment with the same feeling I had about opening the store.
I purchased the knobs, spent over $5,000 on them and by the time I made the choice to close down my store due to personal reasons, I had sold MAYBE 50 knobs in total, most of which were from my going out of business sale.
Not once after my store closed did I feel like I had failed, I just felt like it was exactly what needed to happen to get me where I was in that moment, and that little voice kept telling me to pursue the knob adventure.
I closed down my store in Feb/March of 2022, and took a few months off to regroup and get things ready to really launch the hardware side of things. In June of last year, I launched UNDEAD HARDWARE , and a year later we are now in over 20 locations all across the US, and are growing by about 50% every month. I just hired a bookkeeper, a Stockist program manager, a fufilment center and several people to help on the production side of things.
This has been the largest blessing I could have asked for.

The day of my grand opening to my store, I did a drawing to raffle off a dresser. I brought my grandma and grandpa in the day before opening because he was terminal and covid was still going around, and I handed each of them a single raffle ticket to put their names on. The day of the grand opening, we had the news come out, over 10 vendors in the parking lot, and probably over 300 tickets in the raffle jar.
Can you guess who’s ticket I pulled out of hundreds ?
My grandfather’s ticket has been framed and will forever stay within the family. I was never really close with my grandfather, nowhere near as close as I am with my grandma- but if that’s not fate and taking a complete leap of faith I’m not sure what is. His soul spoke to me and lead me down this path and I am forever grateful.

Cassidy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I ended up stumbling into the craft to be honest. I went from remodeling houses to being disabled and I was struggling to find fufilment while I was stuck at home. I have always been crafty but painting furniture had never really crossed my mind until I remembered I had some old wall paint left over and could probably make some end tables look a little more up to date. At this time I have 2 seperate sides to my business. I am a furniture artist and refinish furniture, and then I have the retail side of things which is selling my own branded products to small business owners as well as retail customers all over the US. I spend a lot of time crafting a creating products that I feel would add value to the industry. I am one of the only businesses currently that is a B2B hardware company , allowing for small business owners to give their client base the ability to buy hardware from their store fronts or vendor spaces. Within the furniture industry, there are tons of different paint lines, stencil lines, decoupage lines and several other types of materials set up in the same manner to sell B2B, however there is only one hardware line.

I try my hardest to be ethical, accommodating, honest, and helpful with my business practices. Honestly, being a “brand” was never really in the books- I really just wanted to create things that were not yet created in the industry and I felt like I could add value with the products I had in my mind to create. I am learning, adapting and growing every day in this industry , and taking things one day at a time. Ultimately the goal is to actually create a profitable enough business that I can eventually fund mental health clinics and help our society with the mental health crisis.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I think the most rewarding part of being an artist is the ability to create a life for myself where I typically wouldn’t fit in within the standard working atmosphere. I am Autistic, suffer from PTSD and have several other health conditions that the standard workforce was not built to support. I have had a really hard time feeling fulfilled, respected and appreciated in the workforce when working for other companies and I felt that throughout my adult working career, I’d never really been employed under someone that knew how to utilize the talents that I had to offer. I don’t act, speak or think as a “normal” person would and it’s created a lot of headache for myself and for those around me.
Being able to not only do what I love every day and have a creative outlet but also to make a living doing it, is a blessing. I’m finally feeling like I’m fitting in to the world where I was meant to fit in, and I hope through all of this I can help spread awareness and help make the difference in the world that pushes our society to start viewing things a little bit differently.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The last 3 years of my life has really been just one challenge after the next that I had to push through.

Before Covid, I was making about $6-8k a month only working about 10-20 hours a week and was remodeling my house on the side. My physical health was great, my life was going the best jt ever had.

When covid hit, my job diminished. I had to sell my house because I couldn’t afford it anymore, and then I ended up sick and disabled. The day I closed on my second investment project, I had someone go gut the house completely. He left the showers, and the toilets, otherwise there was nothing but the walls, subflooring and light fixtures. Not 48 hours later I tested positive for covid, and then spent the next year and a half fighting for doctors to listen to me and begging for help. I couldn’t take care of myself, I didn’t really have the essentials I needed in my home to take care of myself and I couldn’t work to provide for myself. During that time, my best friend had died as well in a tragic accident and I was struggling to cope with feeling like I was losing everything in my life.
Those 18 months I spent in the house to remodel it and try to gain back my health was eventually destroyed by the flood that happened which totalled the house and ruined everything I had done.

Talk about getting kicked while you’re down.
I kept pushing though, I kept praying, and eventually the clouds started to lift and I was able to see the bigger picture. I learned a lot through that time, and I made myself ask myself “what am I supposed to learn from this?” So that I didn’t fall victim to the circumstances (longer than need be because to be honest I was completely in a shut down, world hating attitude for a long time because of it).
And thank God I kept pushing through, because I’m here where I am today because of it.      

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.undeadfurnitureco.com
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