Out of the Loft

#1 Supporters

For the past year, Everlore Hollow has been ran out of my parents' house.

Not a converted garage. Not a backyard studio. A 400 square foot loft and a basement so short you can’t stand up in it.

The basement has a 5 foot high ceiling (Cheyenne is about an inch from being able to stand up straight 🤣 ) . We have to drag chairs under the engraving machine and crouch while screen printing boxes.

The loft upstairs was everything else. It’s where we packed boxes, poured resin, made candles, and assembled bookmarks. All of it rotating through the same room. That sounds organized. It wasn't. Neither Cheyenne nor I have ever been accused of being organized.

When it got to be too much, packing would often spill into the dining room. (sorry mom)

We Had to Turn Off Ordering

Three months ago, we stopped taking orders.

We physically ran out of room. No more shelves could fit in the loft. Our storage unit was overflowing. We were driving back and forth between the loft and a storage unit constantly, and there was no version of the math where we could keep growing.

We also couldn't hire anyone. I wasn't going to ask a stranger to come pack boxes in my parents' house.

So it was just us.

We needed a real space since day one. We just couldn't afford one.

The Old ‘Daily News’ Building

We just moved into a warehouse.

It's inside the old Daily News building. The newspaper that ran the city I grew up in. From the street, it still looks like 1975. The big faded sign is still up there.

Our space is nothing fancy. Two small offices, a tiny conference room, a warehouse with beat-up walls and a floor that's seen things. It is very much a "new small business in an old building" kind of space.

But it has a freight elevator. Which I will never get tired of telling people.

Some Ghosts Come With It

Before Everlore Hollow, I was a photojournalist in the Navy.

I know what a busy newsroom feels like. I know what it's like to be in a place where stories are being made on a deadline, where something has to go out the door tonight, no exceptions.

This building used to be exactly that.

Newspaper chutes still run through the walls. Some floors are completely empty, not renovated, just quiet. You walk through it and you can almost hear what it used to be. Conveyors. Presses. Thousands of papers a day going out to this city every morning.

A dark fantasy book company setting up shop inside a dead newspaper… I don't really know how to describe what that feels like, except to say it feels kismet.

What Changes Now

Ordering is back on.

We're looking for our first employee. Someone who can help Cheyenne and me actually run this thing at the scale it needs to run at.

There are product lines I've been sitting on for months because we physically couldn't make them happen in that basement. Those are coming.

I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what six months from now looks like. I don't. But we have room now, and we've never had that before.

If You Stayed

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've been through some version of the chaos with us.

Shipping delays. Website bugs. Products that didn't quite land.

You stayed anyway.

Without you, this warehouse doesn't exist. Without you, there's nothing to hire for, nothing to launch, no reason any of this keeps going.

Thank you for sticking around long enough to see us get out of the basement.