The Monster Affair
A series of questionable judgments here
Just after Jen and I got married, as soon as the wedding wrapped up, we got to work on Petroglyph, our retail startup. We opened our first studio in 1994, but we made a rookie mistake; to save money, we put the store in a questionable location, a bit off the beaten path.
By 1995 we wanted to do it right and open in a downtown location. But for that, we’d need more money, and the existing store was an operating loss.
It was going to be hard to get money when we hadn’t even proven the studio we already had was a good idea, but we were confident. It was new for me, but we decided to raise capital from investors, and I set about to figure out how to write a business plan.
Petroglyph Ceramic Lounge
Petroglyph isn’t a regular retail business — it’s both creative and very hands-on. Our advisors sent us a bunch of business plans to see how these things tended to look; the plans all were equally icky and corporate, xeroxed and bound at Kinkos in plastic. I felt the plan itself had to echo the unique flavor of the offering.
One afternoon shopping, we came across some hand-made journals, with tactile pages and the cover. The cover was incredible — a combination of pressed board and copper. “This is what our…
