We were lucky to catch up with Morgan Alynn recently and have shared our conversation below.
Morgan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career
If I could change the educational system, I would ask them to promote trade-style careers as viable. The school system, from early grades through college, seemed to send me on a journey towards working for a corporate entity. Even art school, it felt, was merely grooming me to be a gallery worker or a professor of art. It wasn’t until I branched out into tattoo, a trade skill, that I finally felt a freedom to create my own work and brand. My husband is also a tradesman, and works in carpentry. We were both able to get steady jobs right out of school, with lots of options to move up and expand. I think that trades are something that the educational system is not focused on, though trade work is still some of the best employment out there. Not that I have any issue with following the traditional path, I just think that children should have more opportunities to find employment without crippling student debt, or being forced into a career path before they have settled on what they want to do.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started out as a tattoo artist working at a solo shop. It was my first breakaway from working for other tattoo employers, and I was excited to branch into doing things my way. I quickly learned that a tattoo shop alone was not something I was interested in owning. I saw extra space in my shop, space that could be used for a more community-minded purpose. I have always been a maker, and I enjoy a wide variety of processes. Tattoo has always had my heart in a big way, but recently I’ve felt the toll that tattoo inevitably takes on the maker’s body. Additionally, I had been researching the origins of tattoo, and the ritualistic aspects of it, feeling that I wanted to be part of something more spiritual and less capitalistic. It spawned the idea to open, at first, a very small gift shop in one room of my tattoo shop. We called it Cactus Coven – the name we now associate with our expanded gift shop downstairs. I wanted The Coven to be different from something you’d typically see. I wanted to carefully curate a mood or experience that matched with the current season. We as gift shop owners are always doing this: predicting the upcoming season, the feelings it brings, and matching our decorations and inventory to the specific time of year. It got me thinking, as a practicing pagan and observer of the seasons. What if the shop was meant to celebrate the seasons in a more magical, ritualistic way. And so, the basis for the Cactus Coven was born. A place where one could find magical items that helped them get in touch with the current season.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Social media is, hands down, the most useful and helpful tool that we as business owners have at our disposal. I am a particular fan of Instagram – a free, no nonsense and user-friendly app which lends itself so easily to creatives and small business owners. The best part of this system is that it is almost entirely image-based. This gives a new business the ability to quickly and effectively build themselves a visual brand, which then becomes easily recognizable to its viewers. From small things like the profile picture, which becomes a logo tag, to the infinite possibilities and ways to share content, I have found Instagram to be extremely helpful. We find that when we post new inventory in shop, the response is almost always very high. We can share what we have made, in an advertisement-style way, but without the bullying feel that most advertisement has. No one is forced to view our content – you must find us, follow us, or search for us. While some might say that this limits your audience, I find that it creates an audience that is very engaged, if not downright excited about us. It gives the human touch to what we do, and allows people who are genuinely interested in being informed of new items or events the choice to engage with us. I think giving people the choice, rather than attacking them with constant advertisements, is one of the best things about the social media platform. We are simply sharing our own excitement for what we do, visually, and it is catching on with those interested. It feels a lot less coercive than traditional marketing techniques.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Our business never took out any loans or had any secondary help. This business, I am proud to say, was funded solely on my artmaking and tattooing. Once I built a small tattoo shop upstairs, I was able to use the extra revenue to expand to the space directly below us, finally giving our gift shop the much-needed room to breathe. At the time, I was in the market for a studio space, somewhere I could do messy art like painting and screen printing. Things that don’t particularly suit the tattoo space, which intrinsically needs to be as clean and clear as possible. We were lucky to be able to rent the space directly below, which offers us several workshop rooms, a wood shop area, and a screen printing room. Because of this expanse of space, we are now able to create more than half of our inventory (a number we would like to eventually see at one hundred percent) in-house. That is the thing, I think, that I am most proud of in this endeavor. I was never interested in simply purchasing goods and reselling them, as I find there are so many shops doing that, and with customers getting more and more into price comparison, the small boutiques of the world have fallen on difficult times. But, I figured, if we made things in-house, all handmade and often one-of-a-kind, we would be creating something much more human. This shop has been, from the first day, a labor of love. It has not been easy, and there have been many times that I wanted to throw in the towel or go back to a smaller space. But, as we progress forward, I see this space blossoming into something much bigger and more lovely than what I thought we could accomplish. We are starting to get more serious this year about hosting classes and community events, as well as branching out to even more inventory types that we can make ourselves. I’m happy and extremely grateful to be on this journey of discovery with The Coven.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @the_cactus.coven
Image Credits
All image credits to Morgan Alynn