Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Emily Underwood. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Emily, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
My husband and I moved to Jefferson because we fell in love with the small-town, Victorian charm of the city and were interested in opening a cocktail lounge here. We had already befriended folk in town and had been visiting off and on for four years. When there was only one spot left for rent on the downtown brick streets, we jumped on the opportunity. However, upon arriving and applying for our state liquor license, we discovered that Jefferson was one of the cities in our state that was under the umbrella of the “300 law”; meaning in order to get our license we needed to be located 300 feet or more from a church. Our rental was, unfortunately, located 280 feet from the Catholic church. Therefore, we could not get a license to open a bar.
Our plan was foiled? Perhaps our original plan, yes. However, we are not the kind to give up on our lease or our plan to open a business in the city for which we had fallen madly. As creatives, people in the film industry and “theater kids”, we have learned to take the punches and turn them into something just as cool if not cooler. So, we went to work brainstorming what we loved as much as mixology, and looking at the ways in which we could fill any empty niches in Jefferson with a good business idea.
Jefferson, with it’s primarily tourist-driven downtown economy, had recently seen the closure of a small tourist train, two in-town bayou cruise boats, and the loss of the horse and carriage rides, all three of which were big draws for kids and families. The addition of a tourist trolley was a help, but without the train and boats and carriages, there remained mostly museums and antique stores, making Jefferson mostly appealing for adults and elders. We saw this as an opportunity to open something unique that is trending for kids and teenagers, but would lend itself to also be a general event space within the area we had available.
Thus, we turned to our second love: escape rooms. We realized this was a perfect opportunity to have a fairly self-sufficient business with only my husband and myself employed until we gained enough traction and made enough to hire an employee or two. We kept with the name we had come up with for the cocktail lounge, The Midnight House, and decided the house was big enough for more than one activity. There, we would make breakfast tacos on Saturdays (because clearly a place like Jefferson needed proper breakfast tacos from San Antonio!), have one escape room to begin with room for more, host movie nights, have games for people to play and a BYOB lounge, and house our interactive murder/mystery once a month using local talent. An ambitious, yet exciting concept to add activity and youth to the flavor of Jefferson.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My husband Rocky and I (Emily) have always been creatives. We met in our mid 30s while I was finishing up two degrees at UT Austin. Rocky was working for a small commercial film studio in San Antonio at the time and upon finishing school I moved to San Antonio to be with him and began work as a line producer on commercial sets. I had lived in Los Angeles in my early twenties and worked as an ad agency producer there before moving back to Austin to finish my education. Rocky had owned and operated a few small theaters with his mother and commercial production just went hand in hand. I had a lot of theatrical experience both in and outside of school in the community in high school, so, again, was no stranger to producing stories.
I suppose the two of us were destined to entertain. When we lived together at his family home in San Antonio, we would host these themed New Year’s parties that grew over the course of ten years from 7 guests to 150. Over the pandemic, we built a very large cover for the big back patio that was attached to the home and added a large vintage wood stove we found on Facebook marketplace, a bar made out of things we found on the side of the road, and stenciled the concrete pad patio with 255 ornate stencils, creating a getaway space that became the “Cheers” of our neighborhood in San Antonio. Friends would come on the weekends, and it was there that Rocky perfected his drink recipes, became interested in pre-prohibition-era cocktails, followed by his deep interest in Don the Beachcomber, tiki subculture, and tropical drinks. Meanwhile I designed the spaces where he would create his flavors. I would scour the online marketplace for used furniture and art. As a producer, I even scored a giant three-faced tiki carved from a 6.5 foot piece of palm tree that the host of a crew AirBnb in California sold to me for $50, so we schlocked it onto the top of our van and drove it across the desert and right back to Texas.
The story of our lives and creations is all this way. We love turning one man’s trash into our treasures and creating spaces and experiences on a shoestring that look like they were designed for and by the upper crust, but catering these spaces and experiences to the average Joe who just wants to escape reality and relax for a bit.
The other piece of this is history. Research and history are a big part of what we do, and we take pride in the fact that we would never open a business in a tourist area without respecting and teaching the history of the area to visitors. While we lived in San Antonio, we started a, sort of, side-hustle doing an interactive murder/mystery with a cast of six local talent based on an unsolved murder in San Antonio in 1853. We are proud to be continuing this concept at The Midnight House here in Jefferson, and the event has quickly become a hit in town, featuring local talent being interrogated by the audience as suspects from an unsolved murder in 1868 after the Civil War. Likewise, our escape room infuses history from Jefferson, as it is a replica of the Jay Gould family railcar, the “Atalanta”, the real railcar of which sits on a lot only a block and a half away from The Midnight House. Rocky and I are proud to say that we built the replica train car by hand, and although it wasn’t an easy process, we are elated with the result and the immersive historical experience it brings to our guests.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Rocky and I are, basically, the mascots for the word “pivot”. Our initial plan for marriage involved living together in Austin for a year until we figured out where we wanted to be in the future. That was in 2015, when Rocky’s parents sat me down and told me that they were not ready for Rocky to leave the home and perhaps I could use a few years post- college without paying that high Austin rent before we headed off on our own. Rocky being the youngest of a Hispanic family, this was not unusual, and I decided perhaps they were right and we pivoted our plans to live in San Antonio. In 2018, Rocky’s amazing and powerhouse mother was diagnosed with cancer, and we pivoted our lives to accommodate weekly chemo and radiation therapies and the emotional wear of her unfortunate steady decline. When we lost her in 2019, we pivoted to being the primary caregivers for a husband who had been married to his wife for 60 years before he lost her. She had cooked daily, cleaned, and take care of his every household need as he was the breadwinner.
Then came the pandemic and the effort to keep him with the family remaining despite his overwhelming heartache. We did what we could, sent him twice to Spain to visit his daughter so that he could see the world and brighten his spirits. It worked for a time, but having lost his career and wife, he lost inspiration and his health declined. We lost Popsy to heart problems in 2023. With a declining film industry post-pandemic and a small inheritance, we decided to buy a home in Jefferson. Twice we experienced trouble buying property and lost on deals losing out earnest money, leaving us living still with friends while our business gains roots.
We have invested all we have into this dream and are always ready to continue pivoting. But, despite our pivoting vertigo, we wouldn’t trade The Midnight House for the world. We are determined to give back to the community that has so far brought us so much peace and we are determined to make our business work. We are grateful every day for the little we have and the business we continue to build.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Believe it or not, two people who have made commercials and social media content for a living for the past 10+ years knew and still know very little about how to put that content to action. Because Jefferson is primarily a tourist town for older people and most people who live in East Texas are connected through Facebook, we have chosen to begin with Facebook marketing. We have amassed nearly 1,700 Facebook followers in only about 8 months, which, for this area is quite a few. We do this by consistently posting and tagging words that have more than 200K and less than 2mil posts. We hashtag multiple tag-words each post, and try to remain as consistent as possible with the tags. Additionally, we have joined the local and regional groups that post events and have a wide audience reach, and on each post we feature we share the post on each of those groups. as well. We try always to have images within our posts or videos to gain interest.
We know we need to grow our Instagram next and work a bit on TikTok. Those are our next goals. In the meantime, we keep plugging on Facebook, which we know is working as we get a lot of customers from online ads.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.midnightjefferson.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themidnighthousejefferson/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/midnightjefferson/
Image Credits
Rockcliffe Montez & Emily Underwood