Today we’d like to introduce you to Aislynn, Ace Mossman.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My (Ace) skating background comes from the roller derby scene. I’m a part of North Texas Roller Derby here in Denton, where I skate under the name Purple People Eater. I started putting together the skate shop after the old skate shop I worked at – Resurrection Skates, a roller derby pro shop – had to close down around March, right before Covid hit. My old boss helped me buy Resurrection’s stock so that I could take it with me to my new business and fill a need in the local roller derby community, helping sell or repair or put together people’s skates and offering protective gear. But pretty soon, skating, in general, blew up thanks to a need to stay active and healthy during quarantine, along within, so I changed my business plan to make the shop a more generalized quad skate store where I could help the most people. Pretty quickly, we realized we’d have to wait and see what would happen before we could open the store, but we finally opened on July 11th and have been helping people get their skate on ever since.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Covid19 in general, made a lot of issues, but in a lot of unexpected ways. Of course, there were safety concerns and guidelines to follow as a business owner, but as we all know, Covid impacted sports in a major way. Roller derby is actually being praised as one of the sports with the most comprehensive return-to-play guidelines because of how contact-heavy it is. Most leagues in the US still aren’t practicing or playing, so sadly I haven’t been able to make anyone’s derby skate dreams come true in awhile. We’re all waiting and missing our teams and just trying to keep in contact. But by far, my biggest issue after finally opening was able to actually purchase skates from manufacturers to sell! Once recreational skating blew up again, everybody wanted to get their hands on quads and companies quickly ran out of stock on skates, wheels, parts, etc – and are still playing catch-up with orders. Pretty soon, I had to think outside the box to help find skates for people. My supply comes and goes depending on the company and the timing, but I’ve started making my own skates with sturdy street shoes, or purchasing skate boots and plates secondhand to make sure I have enough to go around. It’s getting better these days, thankfully!
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Ace of Skates?
So the business actually does a lot of different things. I sell the obvious like skates and protective gear as well as things like wheels, hardware, etc. And then I do maintenance, repairs, consults, skate-building. But I also sell a lot of skate-themed apparel, smaller items like stickers, trinkets, and other odds and ends made by and for skaters. One of my first jobs was actually working in an art studio that sold other artists’ work and reached out to the local art community a lot. That inspired a lot of my business model. So aside from selling skates, my biggest focus going in was to help support other creators in the community. I have a lot of smaller businesses from all over the state and country (and a few outside the country!) that sell through the shop and it’s really cool to be able to help them out and showcase their creativeness.
In addition to that, I sell a lot of my own work in the store! I make stickers and t-shirts and custom-paint helmets, skates, denim jackets- just about anything. Because one of the coolest things I discovered in the skating community was how you could carve out space and really express yourself. In derby, we did it with our derby names/personas – I had a ton of fun becoming Purple People Eater, for instance. Doing makeup for games, painting my own helmet and jackets to put pins and stickers on… and now I see that same kind of thing with people customizing color palettes for their skate setups, adding charms and flair to their skates, coming up with cool outfits to skate in… there’s a lot of freedom and creativity in skating and I love enabling it however I can.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
These days, I think success can be a lot of different things and take a lot of different shapes. There’s the sort of success you’d expect from a retail store, obviously- financial stability, steady sales, traffic and customers. Things like that that mostly take time and hard work, and even just plain old luck when you’re starting a business. People say it can take three or four years before you can see that kind of result, though, and looking at that timeline is terrifying when you’re just starting out.
So right now I’ve learned to find success in other smaller areas, wherever I can. Like. Sometimes I feel successful when I have really great sales in one month. Or sometimes I feel successful just when I get a customer on a new pair of skates and help them get in touch with their body and their growth as a skater. I see success when a piece of art I make does really well or when someone wants to commission me. I see success when I make someone feel comfortable and welcome and seen by being an openly LGBT+ business. I’ll see success just when I get a nice google review. This is definitely cheesy, but 2020 taught me a lot of lessons, especially as discouraging as it got this year. So all the nonsense it brought helped drive home the idea of finding joy or contentment in the small things. I’ll take success where I can.
Contact Info:
- Email: ace@aceofskatestx.com
- Website: aceofskatestx.com
- Instagram: @ace.of.skates
- Facebook: @aceofskates
- Twitter: @aceofskatestx
