I had been thinking about a witchy shop for a while, but like most people with ADHD I have more projects than time.
Then Covid hit, and I thought that maybe I’ll have more time. I started building the website. That’s my day job. Digital marketing. I started a marketing agency a little while ago, Datasign Marketing, and I start up websites many times a year, sometimes several times a month for our clients, so that part was pretty easy.
With the store website 80% done, I started looking for products. I quickly realized what a nightmare purchasing is, and abandoned the project right then and there. I didn’t delete the website, though. I mean, it was almost done. It seemed a shame to have it just vanish.
Two years later, as things started coming back out of the Covid period, I was looking for fun witchy pins, for no reason at all other than I have ADHD and get sidetracked a lot. I found exactly what I was looking for, but the pin was $12. For a simple pewter pin.
Sure enough I looked up the manufacturer and found out I could get 5 of them for 10 dollars. So I got 10 of each, figuring I’d give some to my girls, my friends in the pagan community, etc. Well the shipping cost as much as buying the products, but still, I saved quite a bit per unit, costing about 4$ per pin in all.
I thought “If I sold them for 5$, I’d still make a profit. If that pin was 5$ I would have just bought it, and not bothered with all this.” And that’s when I thought, all I have to do is do this again, once for every product, and the WitchStore will be real. And I can charge a reasonable price, because I know my pagan friends are frugal. They don’t like to waste money. Sure, I’m not going to make a million dollars, but that isn’t the point of having a business. The point is being useful while making money for your work, ideally a livelihood, even.
A few months ago, I was talking to my dear cousin about the store idea, and she was talking about her passion for aromatic candles, incense and meditation, and we started talking, and today we’re opening our store and, in addition to buying products to stock, we will be making a lot of our products ourselves, using the right ingredients, and not that cheap imitation stuff either. I’m hoping that some of our local pagan craftspeople will join us in supplying their artful witchy products to the community as well.
It took a strange road, but it’s finally running. Hopefully I can find interesting product to populate it with, include local witches and craftspeople, and make it into something that reflects my conception of what an open and inclusive pagan community can be. If you’re still reading this, I hope you’ll join us in building it together. Let me know what you need.
