Failure is painful, but very educational

Hi all. It’s been quite a while since my last post on here. Sorry.

There are good reasons for that, involving coffee, overextension, and grief. Ultimately, it’s about failure.

You may remember over a year ago that Emma and I took on a new place for our business. After dealing with pop-up shops, we thought we could open a place of our own that was more permanent.

A place that would sell Emma’s art, and would have enough space for me to do photography in. And to help make ends meet, we’d sell coffee too, which would attract people to us!

That was an astoundingly dumb idea.

Don’t get me wrong, the whole coffee thing was something we had considered before. Emma and I both liked properly made coffee, and had discussed making our own shop or coffee van at some point.

It seemed like a good idea to include it into the shop. Except it really wasn’t.

We signed for a three-year lease of a place in Swansea. We had to give up after one.

It was down to a catalogue of errors, starting with the whole coffee thing.

We spent thousands on preparing a cafe section, getting all the equipment, signing up with a coffee distributor (Coaltown, a local one that is awesome both for the coffee and the support) and training to make decent drinks.

We ended up making pretty good drinks, but we barely had any customers to come in. If we didn’t spend as much money on the coffee shop, we would’ve had funds to properly market ourselves, which we couldn’t.

The location wasn’t exactly great either, as it wasn’t a street with as much foot traffic as you really needed. Didn’t help that it was opposite a building that previously had an infamous “reputation” for “massages.”

Certainly didn’t help that two places opened up opposite us to serve coffee and food.

The building was also not exactly equipped for photography. Sure, I had the basement rooms to myself, but they were small and you couldn’t really do much portraiture down there.

Product photography was a possibility, though. But even then I couldn’t escape the feeling of being cramped in that space when I had previously enjoyed a thousand square foot of studio in a pop-up location.

The biggest problem, and probably our downfall, was the time needed for it.

We basically lost all of our days off from our usual jobs, so we could open the place. There was a semblance of regularity to opening, but no days off at all, except for Christmas.

The lack of free time was worsened by my lack of being able to do that much while I was there.

Due to having a coffee shop in it, someone had to be there all the time while it was open. That meant I had to be there when Emma was doing her art thing or if I was alone.

Without any real coverage, and with Emma working on her job more towards the end, I was stuck in a coffee shop, unable to play around and be creative in the small studio space. I couldn’t really work on the photography business because I was stuck trying to promote and keep the coffee business running.

It was depressing. By the final months, it was a death march to the one-year mark.

In March, we closed the shop, emptied it, and returned it to the landlord to pass on to someone else.

It’s now months later, and I’m still trying to get over the whole thing.

You feel a sense of grief on closing. A feeling of absolute failure, that you could’ve done more or something different. It could’ve worked, you say to yourself.

It led to some dark thoughts, I admit. Depression is a hell of a drug.

Now, we live in a house that has a living room still full of stuff from the shop. The grinder is sat in the “coffee bar” we’ve set up at home, as it’s still one of the best purchases we made.

I’m still angry at myself, though not as much as before. Indeed, I do count myself lucky that we actually tried to make it work, no matter how deluded we were.

Getting out after a year stemmed the losses of the enterprise, and meant we weren’t committed to two more years of rent payments and hoping for a miracle to happen.

I’m still living with some continued costs of the thing, like the business broadband’s two-year minimum term and bank loan repayments.

It’ll take time to recover those costs, which will eventually happen.

While it was ultimately a multi-stage failure on our part, it was still very much a learning experience for Emma and myself. There are some things that I believe any wannabe shop-owner should know.

First, consider that this is an exercise that can suck all of your time, your money, your credit, and sanity. This isn’t me being flippant. I have the bank statements, the invoices, and the feeling of dread as evidence.

We also should have done a lot more research before jumping in on the rental and coffee shop idea. We found somewhere cheap and thought “That’ll do” instead of actually working it out.

That studio space wasn’t really a “Studio.” It was a lifeless room that was too tiny to actually be of use for anything beyond table-based stuff.

It didn’t help the photography business. It severely hindered it.

Having tons of money is also useful, and far more than you think. We did it all on a tight budget, and I’m amazed at what we had created, but it was all for nought.

Lastly, consider whether you should be doing all of the things you’re setting out to accomplish with the place. You may not necessarily need to do all of the things you feel you need to do.

If we didn’t serve coffee, I would’ve saved more than just thousands of pounds. I would have had more time to focus on the photography business itself, without the extra mental overhead of the coffee and the weight of putting every spare penny we had into the whole thing.

It basically halted any real development on Paper Dragons for me, for us, for an entire year.

At least now, we have the opportunity to move forward and to actually focus on Paper Dragons itself.

Yes, the shop is closed, but Paper Dragons is still alive.

I do still plan to return to having a proper studio space, and I’ve even looked into potential locations. That’s all for the future, though, after we’ve properly recovered and managed to make Paper Dragons more of a real going concern.

Next time, we will stick to what our passions are, what we know, and do it right. First, we need to be more of an actual business.