Bryan and Sara Green, the local makers behind The Miscreant & The Muse, already have a fitting tagline for their shop: “Bed, Bath and Beyond the Grave.”
The store, set to open in April or May at 4316 Pearl Road in Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood, will feature eclectic, locally made goods of the horror-fan variety.
Editor's note: The shop officially opened for business in July, and hosted a grand opening on Friday, Sept. 13.
A quick scan through the brand’s Etsy page shows a sampling of just some of what to expect in-house: Ted Bundy coffee mugs, scream queen plant stakes, bat-patterned Christmas stockings, satanic barbecue sets and skull-and-bones hair bands.
“It’s home decor, gifts, accessories for the people that wait every year for Halloween to come around to do their decor shopping,” explains Sara.
While the two will launch the shop’s first brick-and-mortar shop this year, it’s just the latest stage of the business that traces back to 2008, when Sara started her Etsy account. In the years to come, the couple took a DIY approach to projects. Initially, they screen-printed T-shirts with handmade dollar-store picture frame screens in their basement.
A few years in, they got a boost when they connected with the CW network and The Vampire Diaries.
“I was making some jewelry to support their online shop, which gave us some good exposure,” Sara says. “And then we just kind of let it run online, doing some print-on-demand stuff for a while.”
In recent years, under the name “The Miscreant & The Muse,” the Greens have mostly focused on vendor events — particularly, the annual Halloween Flea in Lakewood.
Then, opening a permanent home for the concept was a natural next step.
“After the pandemic shutdowns were all lifted, events just went insane. So the vendor event market is kind of saturated right now, and we've been seeing a lot of frustrations,” Bryan says. “We thought that we might be able to present a better opportunity for us and some of our vendor friends to sell in a different way, to start looking more towards brick and mortar, and potentially wholesaling, to small businesses and consigning with other small businesses. We just wanted to open up more opportunities for all of us, honestly.”
Beyond creating a space for fellow artists, the new space is large enough to house The Miscreant & The Muse’s production studio. It will allow the Greens and their maker friends to use equipment for laser-engraving, sublimation, sewing and mixed media creations.
“We always have way more ideas than we can fit into a 10-by-10 vendor space,” Sara says. “This gives us the opportunity to experiment with a lot of that, but also allow makers who are curious to come in and try to use the laser engraver to do some designs — to test some sublimation mugs if they're artists and they want to go down that path. So we're really looking forward to, after we open, expanding that maker space a little bit more.”
The store is located in a part of Old Brooklyn that’s become increasingly newer. It’s within a block or two from other fresh concepts like Sixth City Cycles, the Geek Peek and the upcoming Lekko Coffee.
RELATED: The Geek Peek Becomes Old Brooklyn’s New Nerdy Haven
“It’s changing, and we want to be a part of that,” Sara says. “It’s an exciting time to be in Old Brooklyn, we feel, and we've had our eye for a while but these spaces turn over so fast, so we finally got lucky enough.”
For Bryan, the neighborhood was part of the draw.
“I used to live in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood, right around the corner from St. Rocco’s. I’ve seen a lot of lack of opportunity,” he says. “I was I dead broke, I was super poor, and I found my own way — and now, I want to open up more opportunities for people that just happen to be in the same zip code I used to be in.”
RELATED: Lekko Coffee Has Big Expansion Plans, Starting in Old Brooklyn
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