Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Gruben.
Hi Michelle, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
Okay, I’ll try to keep this interesting! I’m Michelle, I’m 37 years old, and I grew up in Mesquite and East Dallas. I’m a lifelong Dallasite and a small business owner—some might say micro-business owner because it’s just me.
I attended UT Dallas on a National Merit Scholarship and graduated in 2006. My degree is in Gender Studies and Literary Studies. I thought I wanted to be a scholar and professor. But after one semester of grad school, I decided that academia wasn’t the right path for me. I wanted to do something more practical and hands-on. I enrolled as a culinary student (at El Centro College) and began working in hotels and restaurants.
It was in 2014 that I hit a wall, career-wise. I had—and still do have—a passion for service, ingredients, menu design, and for food as one of the best and truest expressions of culture. But the long hours and low pay were getting old. Moving up the ladder meant spending less time in the kitchen and more time in a cramped, humid kitchen office. Cooking professionally was great fun—I still miss it sometimes—but I just didn’t see a way forward.
I put my boss on notice that summer, and I started thinking…well, what else do I know how to do? What else moves me? And I started sketching out the plans for Grove and Grotto, the metaphysical shop. I’ve always had this persistent and urgent spiritual side. I’m a Pagan and polytheist and fascinated with the unexplained and unknown. As a young person, I had a bunch of paranormal experiences, and they got under my skin and stayed there. It’s funny because I also love science, data, and numbers. My occult temperament and my analytical mind–it’s all part of being a whole person. It’s all part of a broader curiosity about the world we’re in.
So anyway, ten years ago, I started Grove and Grotto. People sometimes ask me about the name: A grove is a small forest, and a grotto is a small cave. And teaching covens are sometimes called groves, and grottos are where hermits silently contemplate. So, the idea was that whether you’re practicing with a group or are a solitary Witch, this is a place for you. Fairies play in groves, and mermaids swim in grottos—I’m a little bit of both, I guess. Also, it’s alliterative with Gruben, my family name.
At first, Grove and Grotto HQ was a bedroom office. I took a small loan from savings to buy a printer and some opening inventory. I set up a basic website and listed items on eBay. It felt important to grow slowly and sustainably. I was determined to make it work without taking on debt and with a long-term focus–because I didn’t have a plan “C”! I appeared at lots of Texas events with my booth: Psychic fairs, Pagan festivals, paranormal and Halloween events—anywhere I thought my customers might be.
Online orders began to trickle in; then the trickle became a stream. After a couple of years, we (“we” means me and the Grove) outgrew the office and got our first off-site warehouse space. Then a larger warehouse. Then a larger one. After a year or two, the reality had set in that Grove and Grotto was my new full-time job.
And it is full-time. I keep Monday to Friday business hours. (And some Saturdays, if I’m honest.) I wake up, grab my laptop, answer emails and messages. I make a pick list—that’s the list of everything that sold overnight. It’s a form (legal size paper, front and back) that has all my item types and where they’re located in the warehouse.
Then I drive about a quarter mile to our North Dallas warehouse and pick the orders. I do fulfillment for two or three hours in my home office. Packing the boxes, printing the labels. I eat lunch with my wife. I drop 50-100 packages off at the post office. FedEx and UPS make stops here on most weekday afternoons.
Afternoons are for restocking. If I’m receiving shipments that day, I inspect the merchandise and add it to inventory. I’m on my laptop again and re-order product and shipping supplies. If there’s any time left over, I’ll take some photos of new products. I update the sales channels: Etsy stores, eBay stores, websites. Last task for the day, I check messages again and respond to any issues that might have come up during the workday.
Now, in 2024, we have millions of online visitors and tens of thousands of clients all over the US and Canada. We get charming, sweet emails from customers in remote places, as well as within DFW. They tell us they absolutely love being able to shop online or to get that one special incense that their first high priestess used and that they’ve never been able to find anywhere again. They tell us they found the shop through a dear friend or that they felt divinely or intuitively guided to our (virtual) front door. That type of message always makes me smile.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh, there have been struggles. Not as many as some small businesses go through—I’m lucky to have had abundant opportunities and a supportive partner. (Shoutout here to Sarah Moore, who has put up with every single one of my career changes and especially helps me with tech stuff when I’m in over my head.)
Starting off, I didn’t have a lot of resources or a lot of knowledge. Worse, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, you know? I was in my 20s—no offense to people in their 20s, of course. But in hindsight, I had *no* idea how to start a retail business.
Sure, I’d worked retail in high school and college. I had a good general education and some natural artistic sense. But I never took a single business or marketing class. I needed to learn about product photography, web design, purchasing, accounting, inventory management, shipping, marketing…and fast. There was a lot of trial and error in the first few years, a lot of mistakes that I made.
Scaling up has been challenging, too. In the beginning, I was making a big chunk of the inventory myself by hand. I did woodworking and jewelry and leather. As the business grew, the volume made that impractical. I have the utmost respect for artisan-led businesses, but I did the math and started to realize I couldn’t make everything myself and also make a living. My limited skills weren’t meeting the demand of the marketplace, and there just weren’t enough hours in the day.
So, as we pivoted to items made by other people, the challenge was preserving the vibe and ethic of a hyper-local, handmade business. That’s important because we sell spiritual items, items for meditation, things people put in the most sacred and private part of their home. People want to feel that they’re buying from a human being, not an impersonal big-box store.
Sourcing products is still the hardest part of my job. Some people go, “Oh, you’re a middleman; you don’t make anything; it must be easy.” I wish it was that easy! You can’t just order from a wholesale catalog and have a healthy shop. A lot of factors need to converge—price, quality, availability, relevance, uniqueness. We work with dozens and dozens of vendors, both locally and around the globe. I travel to meet makers and authors to see what’s current and what’s classically appealing. I train my eye toward things that are both beautiful and affordable, that I think other people will cherish and be inspired by.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us a bit more about your business.
At Grove and Grotto, our mission is to provide tools and resources for Pagan and Earth-based spiritual practice. What that means, exactly, depends on the client. There is no “right” way to do Paganism. Some people like a huge elaborate altar, with deity statues and herbs and crystals and bells and clouds of incense…and we stock all those things! For others, it might be as simple as a book or journal to guide their practice, and we have those, too.
I mentioned variety earlier. Indeed, our large-ish catalog is one of our special strengths. We tend to have about 3000 unique inventory items at a time, which is a lot. We are now a 100% online store. Because we can store product densely, scale our storage as needed, and keep highly specialized items that perhaps don’t sell as quickly, we’re able to offer a wider selection than all but the largest physical stores. I think that’s one reason we get so many repeat visitors. Our product mix is always changing, and every time they visit, they’re going to be surprised with something new. At the same time, it’s not like browsing on Amazon, where you’re scrolling through 100,000 items and half of it is junk, and you’re quickly getting overwhelmed. It’s curated; it’s tailored to guests’ interests because we are still essentially a niche shop.
One more thing that customers have told us, and that we’ve come to embrace as part of the brand is that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. In the shop’s early days, I wrote a lot of blog posts that detailed my experiences learning about divination and ritual craft, trying to find my way in the Pagan community, and so forth. I used to wear fairy cosplay wings at my booth. The wings were a gimmick, of course, but also a way to signal, “Hi, come on in; this is a fun and unpretentious place to shop. Skepticism and silliness are welcomed here.”
My favorite witchy teachers and authors are always the ones who display curiosity, humility, and a heaping spoonful of irreverence. Because, when it comes to occult experience–the gods and goddesses, faeries, dreams, and visions, it’s all uncharted territory. We can share ideas and theories, we can share stories–but the truth is, nobody really knows for certain, and anyone who says they do is probably trying to manipulate you or sell you something. It’s a mystery, and it should be a fun and joyful mystery.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Pagan, Earth-based, and alternative spiritualities are more appealing and accessible than they have ever been in recorded history. That’s thanks in part to globalization and the internet, but it’s also connected to the decline of organized, hierarchical religion. If you look at the polls, more people than ever are identified as non-churchgoing, not religious, or “nothing in particular.” And yet, if you believe—as I do—that humans are ensouled creatures who crave spiritual connection and understanding, then religion (broadly defined) is never going away entirely.
There is far more familiarity with and acceptance of Pagan and non-traditional religions. When I was a teen in Mesquite, there was usually one book on Wicca at the local library (which got stolen or vandalized all the time) and maybe an Earthbound store at the mall with some crystals. Metaphysical shops were seen as fringe, kooky, or disreputable–they had trouble getting commercial leases or loans. I think I really internalized that. A couple of years ago, UTD sent me an email calling me one of their “distinguished alumni” and inviting me to be on an entrepreneurship panel. I was like, “Are you kidding? I flunked out of grad school, and now I sell witchy stuff!” They’re like, “We know, please come anyway!” It was surprising and a happy sign of how much things have changed.
This is all good news for the mind/body/spirit industry. There are new opportunities for specialization, differentiation, creating niches within niches, and so forth. Locally, we’re seeing explosive growth in the Pagan community, lots of shops and organizations offering classes and events because there is a larger customer base to support them. I’m proud to be part of a broader spiritual movement that is life-affirming, compassionate about sex and gender, and conscious of our connection to the Earth. It’s exciting, and Grove and Grotto is doing our best to get involved through sponsorship and collaboration with local creators.
On a related note, we’re also seeing customers become better informed and more conscientious about what they consume. Buyers are not asking as much about what rose quartz is good for or what an athame is. They can google that. They care about where the rose quartz is mined, who made the athame, and whether the box it ships in can be recycled. The questions are more personal, more specific—and often harder to answer. Over time, we’ve made small changes to the product mix, packing materials, and the language on our website in response to feedback from younger buyers, in particular. We’re asking more of ourselves and of our suppliers. We try to evolve with our customers and be accountable to them.
So that’s the Pagan/metaphysical side of the biz. As for the e-commerce side, it’s tougher to say what the future holds. Ten years is eons in the tech and business world–I don’t think anyone knows what e-commerce is going to be like in 10 years. Maybe I’m still working from home in my pajamas. (Only with nicer pajamas and with a printer that doesn’t guzzle so much ink, I hope!) Or maybe the retail landscape will have totally changed. But I’m not terribly worried about the future. I know I can stay flexible and keep learning new skills while also staying focused on my core values, trying to facilitate beauty and connection in the world.
Here’s another odd thing about Grove and Grotto: Despite being an e-commerce brand, we’re really an old-fashioned company in disguise. What I mean is, in a lot of ways, the store has more in common with the family-run gift shop of a century ago than the influencer-driven online businesses of today. I prioritize the core of my business—merchandise and buyer experience. It saves a lot of time and worry. I don’t advertise (except for community sponsorships). I don’t chase trends; I’m not on TikTok or Instagram or whatever platform is next. We don’t need mainstream attention or a gazillion followers—just a few thousand loyal customers who think of us when it’s time to refresh their altars and shop for gifts for friends.
Instead, I’m busy sourcing products, getting them to buyers, providing the information and service to make the transaction as smooth as possible. That’s my job. I stay focused on that; anything else is just optional. Hopefully, that consistency leads to longevity—I guess we’ll see.
Well, that’s about as comprehensive of a business history as I’ve ever had the occasion to share. It boggles my mind that it’s already been 10 years, and I’m so grateful to still be doing something I love. Thank you for reading, and cheers!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.groveandgrotto.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groveandgrotto
- Other: www.michellegruben.com
