In 2022, I (Juli) was laid off from my regular job (of almost 13 years) and decided to go all-in with Riddle's Tea Shoppe. We had been using my income to help supplement and buy for Riddle's Tea Shoppe, but it was a trade-off for things like paying an amazing fulfillment center to help us pack orders and other things that helped us manage our time. After I made the decision to do RTS full time, we transitioned back to fulfillment at home, and tried to create a plan to help our growth. We knew that it would be difficult, but we were positioned for really quick growth.
Our 2023 was great—we doubled our sales! It wasn't enough to cover the salary that was lost from a full time job, but we had some runway with savings, and everything was trending in the right direction.
2024 was better! We doubled our sales again! We took on more projects, we were seeing the growth we needed to keep everything moving in the right direction. There were growing pains—a business is tough, but a business that also revolves around art and creating can be difficult because there are now several ways to burn out. Physically, mentally, and also creatively. Joe and I design everything for the store, every product, every box, and with what we were committed to creating, it was a lot of art on top of marketing, social, customer service, and fulfillment.
By the end of 2024, we were running on fumes, but we'd also noticed a strange decline in sales that we weren't expecting. We'd also been experiencing shortages and issues that hadn't cropped up earlier. Prices for product were climbing, things were sold out, and we started to fall behind at the production stage.
We opened a little later in 2025, and I wish it was to say it was because we were taking a break, but we'd already started to fall behind on our boxes, so we delayed reopening the shoppe in favor of working on boxes. We worked on our Zelda box, our Dwarven box, and were pushing forward, but the sales never picked up, production issues were still happening, and prices for everything were skyrocketing. It was genuinely concerning, but every email I sent, every update I made was full of honest optimism—I never met a challenge I couldn't conquer.
2025 was a very tough year for us personally with a lot of setbacks and personal and financial losses, and the shoppe was our pride—we connected our worth with how well the shoppe was doing, so our mental health really took a hit. You spend years building a brand and making connections with people, and then one day you wake up and realize you're disappointing everyone: people are worried, some are angry, some people call you scammers, others are supportive but deeply sad. I've never been able to separate the shoppe (my art, my life) from my self-worth, and I was failing at it. With how poorly things were going, I knew recovery wasn't going to be quick which made social media and any kind of communication difficult and eventually impossible.
We've tried to close the store to catch up, but that means less sales to keep the shoppe going, but keeping it open means daring to fall even further behind. With regular orders to fulfill, boxes to assemble, and creative to work on, we're rotating everything to get anything caught up. We've stopped taking client work (a huge source of income for the shoppe) because it wasn't fair to them when we'd fall behind and to our customers who were already waiting, but that meant even less income to help offset rising costs and slow sales. It's been a very terrible ouroboros of trying to make the best decision in a slew of bad ones.
It's now 2026, and I want to say with all of the optimism and enthusiasm I have that it's getting better. But it's happening slowly and at the expense of your patience, money, and (what's left of) our reputation, and it's all riding on a WHOLE bunch of hope. We are not quitting. We are not giving up. We spend every day working on the shoppe.
We are so sorry. And we're not trying to make anyone feel bad or sorry for us—we know how disappointing we are, and we'll own it. It was really important for me to create a clearer picture for everyone, so at least the speculation was less, even if it didn't make anyone less upset. This shoppe is our life. It's our relationship. It's everything we are, and we aren't giving up. I know that doesn't mean a lot to some people, it's all well and good but maybe meaningless without clearer action and visibility, but what that means to me is that we will spend however long it takes to make things right for every single person.
If you made it this far, you are incredible—thank you for reading all of this, we appreciate you.
