Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cody Meacham. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Cody thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My small business idea came from necessity, in 2020 when the pandemic hit, I needed to find some form of work that I could do from home since I was a freelance artist in an industry that shut down. I had been recently working on miniature work based on movies that I liked and creating dioramas centered around those ideas and environments. Because I worked in the theme park industry, and the majority of my social media audience was also involved with theme parks I decided to start creating miniature, nostalgia based theme park pieces of art that people could hang on the wall or put on the shelf and remind them of their favorite theme park memories. In the beginning, I was really struggling with putting out enough content to pay my bills and settle on prices that were reasonable and reflected the experience I had in the industry. I also found it difficult using the tools that I had at the time to produce work fast enough to keep up with the demand. I would say at the time my advantage was that I was creating merchandise fans of theme parks and horror films wanted but wasn’t finding anywhere else and that’s currently how I’ve grown into the successful small business that I have today.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a 35-year-old theme park wannabe-goth-kid who grew up in central Florida where I created my own haunted attraction for about eight years before I secured an opportunity to move to Orlando and fulfill my lifelong dream of working for theme parks and helping to create themed experiences. My roots have always been in haunted attractions and remain my passion, and while I was in Orlando I gained plenty of professional experience and skills that would eventually help me with my small business, Radley Relics. The name Radley comes from the haunted house that I started doing when I was 19 in St. Petersburg Florida, which was also called the Radley haunted house. It had a large following at the time and I wanted to try to bring that audience into my new endeavors in the world of creating miniature environments. My time in Orlando consisted of working on haunted houses at Halloween horror nights and theme park attractions at both the Universal and Disney theme parks, which really helped spark the idea for a Radley Relics. I knew that I wanted to create merchandise that you couldn’t find anywhere else that reminded you of the great experiences you’ve had in classic theme park attractions. I think the thing that sets me apart from others in my line of work is my level of detail and realism. Radley Relics consists of various sized custom collectibles. The largest of my pieces are shelf sized dioramas that can encompass full scenes from a theme park attraction or scenes from a popular genre film. The goal with these items is to bring you down to their level and feel as tho you’re looking into a real life sized scene. Every aspect of the diorama is custom made. Each piece of scenery is either cut from real wood or 3D modeled, resin printed, hand textured and painted by hand. I even utilize miniature LED lighting that can be specially programmed to fit the mood of the scene. For my moderately sized pieces I create a variety hangable shadow boxes as well as framed doors and objects from popular films and theme park nostalgia. My smaller items consist of custom designed miniature characters or props from your favorite attractions and genre films. I often am able to create things that I would want as a fanboy and thankfully I’ve built an audience with similar tastes. But I also offer custom commission on request and work with customers to make their unique nostalgic piece of art. At the moment I sell and book commissions through social media and I really have no need for an online shop because I’m able to keep so busy.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I started a Radley Relics Instagram account in 2020, it took 3 years to gain 15k followers but I learned a lot along the way. The first thing was to find other creators like myself who had a good amount of followers, 5k or more and follow, share and reach out to them. Let them know you appreciate their work and that you’re on your own journey in the field, it may pay off with them sharing your work and helping to grow your network. The second thing was don’t stick to just one social media outlet, try them all. Tiktok is needy, it requires a lot of work and a lot of tricks. With Instagram you should be posting at least 3 days a week and use their tools to show you what times of those days are best for posting and Reels work so much better than photo posts. My third lesson was find a style. Your social media page should be cohesive and eye catching. I eventually found an app called Prequel that helped me develop a visual style and language that best represented my product and kept them bright and colorful even tho my content can often involve dark, macabre content.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

I manufacture all my products and I’m getting to the point of popularity where I might have to start passing along part of the manufacturing process in order for me to focus on the final, most important steps of my product which is the texture and paint. In the beginning of my business I found the greatest struggle was coming up with a quick way to produce the content I wanted to create. Although I work in miniature scale simple things such as a wooden door could take 4 hours to create from scratch and that just wasn’t going to bring in any profit. It wasn’t long before I realized I had to face my fears and learn a 3D program that I could use to render things like doors and props one time and print them with a 3D printer as many times as I want saving myself huge amounts of time. This was the game changer, without 3D modeling and printing I simply could not run my small business. I can’t say the process was easy, resin printers have lots of quirks and it takes many hours to get the process down in order to produce a quality product. There are so many resin printers out there and so many kinds of resins and machine settings… it can be so confusing and hard to find all the answers online. I eventually landed on Elegoo as my favorite brand of printer and Siraya tech as my preferred most reliability brand of resin.

Contact Info:

• Website: RadleyRelics.com
• Instagram: @RadleyRelics
• Facebook: Radley Relics
• Twitter: @RadleyRelics