We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shelby & Crystal Bell-rains a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Shelby & Crystal, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
What started as a recurring high thought turned into a pretty fast-growing business, since our start at the beginning of 2024! Our official launch was actually on 4/20, which we did intentionally because of our business being focused in elegant smoking experiences.
Prior to our launch, we didn’t fully know where to start since we upcycle existing materials (specifically vintage glass & decor), so we ended up sourcing at antique malls instead of building up our stash in strategic ways. Because we hadn’t figured out the best places to source, and the best places to get our supplies needed for creating our products, our profit margin was much smaller in the beginning, which made it harder to build up our inventory of product. Once we secured a wholesaling company to get our materials needed to fill our stash tins and to build our water pipes (bongs – not sure what we can say in here), and also were able to source our glass in places that would allow us to spend less money, it increased our margins and our ability to build up our inventory. In addition to that, Shelby’s background is in marketing. She helped build our website to be strategic with SEO that created organic traffic to our site, in addition to working creative strategy in our social media with different series and connection to our community.
We love to make people laugh and smile, and any way that we can do that, we love to play into. We have a series called “Is It Bongable?” where we have 3 questions that we ask for each piece to evaluate whether we can actually make it when we’re out sourcing or with other finds. It’s allowed people to have the same line of thinking when they’re out thrifting and see items, and they ask themselves “hm, is this bongable?” and then tell us about it later!
Outside of that, we had a pretty jam packed market season in 2024 from May through December. We had some that were really successful and some that we didn’t make hardly any money, but regardless, each and every one was an opportunity to build our community and and make connections with other small businesses and consumers. This helped us scale up then, until we moved into a storefront location in the business district of Cincinnati, Oro Beauty Collective. This allowed us to have a physical location that we have our products in for people to come see, and created connections for other people from Dayton to Asheville to Kentucky, that have asked to have our products in their stores (which we’re still working on and pursuing).
Using Oro Beauty Collective’s space, we started planning events! Both for the shop, and specific to Retro Smoke Co. Our first Retro Smoke Co. specific event was “Build-a-Bong”. Even though the first one was in December of 2024, this is truly what made us scale up into that next space even quicker! We had so much interest in the event, and it was incredibly successful, to where we plan on doing one every 2-3 months. We didn’t come close to selling out our first event, which was a blessing in disguise because we didn’t have all the space that we would have needed in order to do that. We have another one planned for 2/15, and planned the event in a way that created more organization with time slots to avoid overcrowding. Within the first 24 hours after sharing about the event, we sold 1/3 of our total tickets that we have available, which amounted to more tickets that we sold for the first event!
The Build-a-Bong event itself is a really fun experience because it allows people to make pieces that are customized to them. We had vintage Playboys and National Geographics that people could use to make collage elements, we partnered with a local business who creates stickers, Paynterly, to create small stickers that would fit in the grooves of the pieces, and also used dried flowers, gold/silver/copper flecks, glitter, and more that allowed for people’s creativity to really come out and play.
Lessons learned from our business growth so far is that we enjoy doing markets, but prefer to focus on selecting the markets that we want to genuinely do this upcoming year, rather than doing any and every one as a chance to get ourselves out there and make money. Because of our products and business, our stuff isn’t for everyone and we recognize that!
We have our website, a storefront that our product is available in, and our planned events that we plan on doing consistently as a way to continue to build up our business, and will use the markets as a supplement when we can!
Shelby & Crystal, 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?
Retro Smoke Co. is ran by us, Shelby & Crystal Bell-Rains, and we’re a small, women-owned, LGBTQ+-owned business! We have a lot of friends around us who are small business owners (vintage clothing, vintage decor, etc.) who have been running their businesses for awhile, and one specifically who had a store front called Petal Vintage (now Forager Antiques). While walking around Petal Vintage and hanging out with our creative friends, Crystal was looking at the vintage decor and vases, thinking “hmmm…. we could do something fun with these. Like make them into something that people can smoke out of!” And after conversations together, Retro Smoke Co. was born. We did some research, and at the time of ideation, there were a couple of other people that we knew of who did the same thing, but none were local. We started going to look at more glass, and other ideas of what we could offer that would set us apart from the other businesses who had similar offerings. Not only do we make these upcycled vintage glass water pipes (bongs), but we offer stash tins made out of vintage tins / lunch boxes / cigar boxes, etc. that have accessories included in them (rolling papers, grinders, smell-proof bags, vintage match boxes, ash trays, etc.) and make epoxied collage ash trays, using vintage magazines.
We think what sets us apart from other businesses that have similar offerings, other than the fact that they are far and few between, is that we try to personalize our pieces, and find things that are rare, unique, and fun. Our social media isn’t just full of product listings, but includes funny reels, unique series, event information, and more. Another thing is that we really put our personality into what we do, which shows in our customer base and the conversations that we have where they tell us about how much they love their pieces / purchases! We’re huge on community, and having an avenue to connect to like-minded people really brings a lot of joy to us.
We don’t think we necessarily “solve” any problems exactly, but we do bring a lot of fun and elegance to people’s smoking experience. You can walk into a smoke shop and buy the same old copy and paste style bongs (some are still really creative, don’t get us wrong), but we really wanted people to be able to have truly unique pieces that spark a conversation and are truly meant to be left out for everyone to see (or turn them around so that people can’t tell what they are!).
We honestly are so proud of how far we’ve come in a short amount of time. This started as something that was just a passion of ours, but it turned into something more amazing than we could have anticipated! The people, the opportunity, and the fun have been truly wonderful.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
We have a few components to this in our opinion. I think a big part of it has been our presence with people in-person, but also online. Our in-person events have allowed us to make connections and talk to a lot of people who we wouldn’t have been able to connect with otherwise, but also allows us to create brand awareness. The biggest part of our first year has truly been people just learning about who we are and that we exist, as well as staying top of mind.
Passing out business cards even to people who are just looking at our product has been a game changer and allowed people to be directed to our social media accounts and our website. Our online presence has also helped in growing our clientele. We started with exploring fun and engaging ways to interact with our audience and have them looking forward to when we post and what we have to say. Adding a personality to your brand and social media is SO important so people feel like they have an entity / people to connect to instead of just someone who’s trying to take their money.
We obviously think that people view small businesses differently than they do big corporations, but at the end of the day, we have a business to make money and work towards being able to fully support our life with that business! The way we do that is with the people who are interested in what we do. As previously mentioned, we have our “Is It Bongable?” series, which is engaging and fun, but we also started doing regular product drops on Fridays so people know what to expect. In addition to that, we’ve utilized paid media a few times to expose our posts to a wider audience, and it’s been successful each time!
At the end of the day, our most effective strategies for growing our customer base has been in person events (both markets and ones that we put on) and our social media / online presence.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
So we do manufacture part of our products! Since upcycling is a huge part of what we do and not just creating from scratch, part of the product is already made. For our water pipes (bongs), we transition the vases / decanters / etc. into the pipes with our tools, downstems, and bowls. For the stash tins, we source the tin / lunch boxes and upcycle it with epoxy on the bottoms, and find different items to go in the tins that are either repurposed (mini ash trays, vintage match books, etc.) and/or adding in additional products to make it more well rounded like a grinder, rolling papers, smell proof bags, etc. For our ash trays, again, we are repurposing them, so we’re taking the existing product and giving it a new life with creating collages on them with vintage magazine cutouts and epoxy.
How we got into the game was with a lot of research. We watched endless videos and practiced on an endless amount of pickle jars until we got it just right. Each of us have our skills that we excel at in giving our finds new lives, and we mesh together and have a well-rounded product offering! We did have to find a wholesaler that could supply some of the products that we use to repurpose our finds, like the downstems, bowls, papers, grinders, etc., that just allowed for our profit margin to be larger and still offer a good price point for our products that isn’t too high.
Because the creation of our pipes is so physical, one of the biggest lessons learned is that mistakes are going to happen. We’re human and pieces are going to break. And while it REALLY sucks, it is part of having very breakable product! We’ve broken some pieces that would be really cool, and it is really hard in the moment, but then we have even cooler pieces that fall into our lap that make it okay and motivate us to try and be more efficient and particular moving forward.
At the end of the day, it’s a lot of fun :)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.retrosmokeco.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrosmokeco?igsh=MTh1aXcxaDhwZXBlaA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561757638563&mibextid=LQQJ4d
Image Credits
GG Gabennesch (IG: @ggabennesch_photography) + Caitlin Dunkley (IG: @caitlinchiseneephoto)