In Business of Home’s series Shop Talk, we chat with owners of home furnishings stores across the country to hear about their hard-won lessons and challenges, big and small. This week, we spoke with designer Megan Molten, who runs an eponymous shoppable warehouse in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
While working in medical sales for over a decade, Molten purchased a home and began sharing her design process on social media. The ensuing enthusiasm—and endless sourcing and styling questions from family and friends—encouraged her to pivot to opening her own design firm in 2018. With an innate love for smaller home pieces, “I had storage units full of accessories, and I decided to put them on a Shopify site to see if anyone bought anything,” she says. Overnight, the shop was born, but customers asked again and again to see things in person. “I’d say, ‘It’s in a storage unit,’ and they didn’t care. They loved the idea of digging through a designer’s warehouse to find something cool.”
As more people clamored to see her accessories, she set two days a week for customers to rummage in boxes. “It wasn’t glamorous, but it took off,” she says, and in 2021, it led her to open Megan Molten Shop, a “very pretty” airy, white space on the outskirts of Charleston filled with art, rugs, lamps, vases and other objects to grab and go.
Ahead, Molten discusses her idolatry of Studio McGee, making time for social media, and realizing (and responding to) her customers’ need for one more stage of help.
Did you ever think that retail would be an aspect of your interior design business?
100 percent, no. My mom had five gift-and-home stores. We actually lived above one of them, so it was her life. Watching that growing up, and all that went into it and how hard it was, I said, “I’ll never have a brick-and-mortar.” But then I saw this opportunity in front of me for my business. Not only did it make a lot of sense for our customers, and what they wanted and were almost demanding, but in this business, you almost have to have brick-and-mortar to get the best pricing. It’s old-school. For so long, I was like, “That’s so stupid. Why can’t we all get the best pricing?” But now I get it. It costs a lot more money to get the best pricing as a designer, so [vendors] want to honor that. Not only designing homes but also managing retail stores, it’s two huge businesses. No, I never wanted a retail store, but I’m so thankful we have one. I almost can’t imagine doing our business without it.
Social media sounds like such a huge part of this story. Do you have a sense of how and why you were able to create such a huge audience?
This is a great question, and very fitting in this moment. In 2017, I listened to a podcast with Shea McGee, and she was giving tips and tricks. One of them was posting on social media every day, making that commitment to do it consistently. I took that advice, and every single day I would post pictures from my iPhone. The quality was terrible, [but] I think it resonated with people and helped me connect. I would get on my stories and show my face, talk about what I was doing—my home or homes that I was working on—and it was just me, raw and real and authentic. I really did not know what I was doing at all. The person on the other side knew that, and loved following along my journey with me.
So many people say to me now: “I have loved watching you grow!” Because everyone knew I had just quit my corporate job, and I’m a brand-new designer figuring it out as I go. Our social media took off, and we got busier, and we hired someone to manage [it]. It completely changed—it’s beautiful and very professional and looks amazing, but [the audience] lost that connection to me. Now we’re kind of getting back to that, because we realized at the end of the day, people want to see what I’m doing and hear my voice. I just took over our social media again, as of two weeks ago. I forgot how much work it is! But it’s fun. I love getting the feedback from followers; their questions or comments fuel and motivate me.
How did you get the warehouse ready for regular customers?
In our old office, we had this tiny little warehouse in the back with some shelving, and all of our accessories were in boxes. It was not pretty at all, but people didn’t care. They came. In keeping with that theme of the “shoppable warehouse,” I really had this vision in my head of a beautiful all-white warehouse. It just so happened that right when we signed our lease, the Office Depot close to us was going out of business and they were getting rid of their white racking. My husband basically bought all of it. I didn’t want the ugly brown ceilings, and we had a painter come in and spray all the ceilings white. The paint got all over the concrete floor—which he wasn’t supposed to do—but I was like, “Wait, yes, this is so the vision. Just spray everything in here white.”
So it’s a pretty warehouse, and we take everything out of the boxes so you’re not seeing all the brown. We keep our boxed stuff in our shipping warehouse, so anything that sells online goes out of the shipping warehouse. Anything retail, you’re going to see it out of the box, on the shelf, by category. You walk down the aisles just like you would at Office Depot, so you have your big aisle of vases. People love it.
But one thing that we have noticed recently is that most people who come through our doors may love that vase, but they have no clue what to do with it or how to style it. So we are incorporating more vignettes, so that people can see what to do with them. We see the struggle where people come in, walk through, and leave without buying anything. We started asking, “Did you not find what you’re looking for?” And they say, “No, I love everything. I just need to go home and take pictures and see what I have and come back.” We’ve realized people need help. So that’s how our virtual design service was born. It supports that end user who just built a house and has beautiful built-ins on either side of their fireplace but no clue how to fill them. They can reach out to our shop, hire our virtual designer, put together a plan for their bookshelves, and then buy all of it from our shop. That service has completely taken off because people love our staff.
Do you anticipate the retail business expanding to other offerings, like events?
We’ve been pretty heavy on events since we opened our retail space. We kept our hours Monday through Friday, and then the second Saturday of each month, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I really wanted, for our employees’ sake, not to have to be open every Saturday. We are a destination—we’re not in a walkable area of Charleston, so when you come to our store, you are coming out to the warehouses by the port. We’re not a downtown or King Street shopping experience, so we don’t have to have these regular hours. But when we’re open on Saturdays, we have these fun events—like this Saturday, we have a plant bus coming, and they’re going to have plants out in our parking lot, and we’re bringing all of our pots out there to pair them with the real plants. For Mother’s Day, we had a local artist do little prints to put in our acrylic frames. They’re almost like pop-ups to get people to come out. I love supporting other local businesses.
I would love to keep the shoppable warehouse experience, but I also believe we need a retail location that is walkable within the Charleston area, more for marketing purposes and to get our name in front of people. That’s something I envision not only in Charleston, but probably in other cities where our design services would be really popular, like Nashville or Rosemary Beach, Florida. I could definitely see having little retail locations there to get our name out, not only for our shop but for our design services. I think that’s a possibility down the road.
As of now, we are getting back to our roots a bit, which is people seeing our Instagram and saying, “Where’s that from? I want that look.” We’ve realized our customer is not our design client at all. They have totally different budgets. They’re not able to buy custom chairs, but let’s give them the look. It’s exactly what Studio McGee is doing with their Target collection.
Would you like your own product line?
Yes. I have been doing some licensing collections: My first was with Mitzi Lighting, and we launched a second collection this summer. They asked me for sketches of lights, and I’d never sketched anything in my life, even as a designer, but I knew exactly what I wanted. They asked for 10 sketches, and I think I sent 50. It was amazing to watch my horrible sketches and how these product designers interpreted them and created something incredible. To see the end product and people buying it for their retail stores all over the country was the coolest thing ever. I love the whole process. We did it again with Cooper Classics: I designed a mirror collection and it’s launching in October at High Point. Will I have my own Megan Molten line? Yes, I hope so! I think the whole shop needs to [eventually] be my designs, because that’s what people want. They want something unique.
Until then, can you tell me a bit about your sourcing and merchandising process?
I do pretty much all of my buying for the shop online. I just started identifying vendors that were pretty heavily accessories-driven, and I go through their online catalogs and purchase that way. But from day one, I have also been really heavy on local art. I’ve partnered with a lot of local artists to create our own prints that you can only buy from our shop, on paper or printed on a canvas. Those are really successful for us, too, because they’re unique and different.
I went to Atlanta Market for the first time this year, solely focused on accessories, and it was mind-blowing—how much was there and how much I was able to get done in 24 hours. So that was pretty eye-opening for me, as the sole buyer for our shop, to go out and see this stuff and source it. Faire has become one of my favorite places to buy for the shop, and we’ve really been moving more that direction and away from mass production. We’ve even discovered local people we didn’t know about because of Faire, because you can filter by where you live. Anything made locally is going to sell over a mass-produced product any day.
Are locally made products labeled as such, or is the staff explaining that?
We have a Local Love section on our website, and in our physical shop, we have little acrylic-framed signs that tell who they are, what they make and their story. Those are sprinkled throughout the shop, and we have a local-art wall too. People gravitate toward that, especially when they are visiting [from out of town]. They want to take home a piece of Charleston.
Who is your typical customer?
Right now about 80 percent of our customers are people who either live in the area full-time or have a second home here. We do have a lot of designer customers as well, because it’s like a one-stop shop. For designers, it’s the best thing ever for a photo shoot or an install. Then about 20 percent are people visiting, and they make it known when they walk through the door: “I follow you on social media! We came to Charleston, and I told my husband we have to come to your store.” They’re usually staying downtown or out at one of the beaches, so it means a lot to know that they trekked out here to see us.
One thing I think is interesting is our business used to be 80 percent online and 20 percent retail, and the day we opened retail location doors, that changed to 50-50. Now we’re seeing more retail than online: We’re probably 75 percent brick-and-mortar and 25 percent online. I’ve been working on a new website design, probably going on three or four years. I can’t get this thing launched for the life of me. But it’ll allow the user to shop each of our design projects and get the look that they love with items from our shop.
Why do you think people really want to be in person?
I think it’s our industry and what they’re shopping for. When they come in, they will show us pictures of their space and say, “I need help styling my coffee table,” or “I saw this space online, but I wanted to come in and see it in person; I wanted to see the scale.” The feedback is: “I want to see it in person,” or “I need help.”
But I have seen a huge shift since the pandemic in what people want with their homes. We’ve done a lot more color, wallpaper, prints, patterns. I can’t tell you the last time we did a white kitchen. People came out and they’re just ready for something new. That’s been very refreshing and fun.
What’s your favorite day in the shop?
I’m not in the shop every single day. My main job is to get design clients and work on those projects. But whenever I’m having a bad day, or a hard time as a business owner—whenever I’m questioning, “Why am I doing this?”—I’ll go work in the shop, because I instantly remember why. All I have to do is help a customer find something for their home. I truly love helping people make their homes beautiful. It genuinely brings me joy.
