How It All Started
Part 1: West Virginia
I didn’t go to West Virginia looking to start a business.
I went because my dad had died.
He was killed in a car accident in Saudi Arabia, and suddenly my brother and I were faced with the task no one is ever ready for: cleaning out his storage units. We knew he collected things. We knew music mattered to him. What we didn’t know was the volume of what we were about to walk into.
Thousands of vinyl records. Boxes of collectibles. Pieces of a life carefully saved and tucked away.
At first, the feeling was pure surprise. Then responsibility set in. This wasn’t just stuff — this was an inheritance, and not just in the financial sense. It felt like a final assignment from my dad: do something meaningful with this.
At the time, my life already felt upside down. I was newly divorced. I was a single mom. I was trying to figure out how to rebuild a life for myself and my kids. Standing in those storage units, surrounded by my dad’s records, I felt something unexpected alongside the grief — purpose. I had grown up in West Virginia, traveled the world as a student, taken risks that brought me to Texas A&M, and reinvented myself more than once. Still, nothing had prepared me for the clarity I felt in that moment.
I didn’t want his collection to be broken up, resold quietly, or forgotten. I wanted to turn a tragedy into something awesome. Something living. Something that mattered.
So we loaded it all up and made the long trip from Charleston, West Virginia to Bryan, Texas.
When I unloaded those records into a small 900-square-foot space on Texas Ave — tucked behind Barnes & Noble, near Tutor John — I didn’t have a business plan. I didn’t know how to run a store. I definitely didn’t know how to run a record store.
What I did know was that I had something special, and I had two boys depending on me. Curious Collections opened its doors in October 2016, built almost entirely from my dad’s collection and a lot of hope. At the time, the nearest brick-and-mortar record store was nearly 100 miles away, something I didn’t fully grasp until customers started finding us — and asking why there hadn’t been a place like this here before.
In the beginning, the store was exactly what the name implied: a little bit of everything. Records sat sideways on shelves. Antiques and glassware filled the space. It was cluttered, imperfect, and hard to find — people told me that all the time.
Some days were painfully slow. There were days we struggled to make $100 in sales. I sold my dad’s collectible coins just to keep the lights on, pay the bills, and feed my kids.
But something kept happening.
Customers didn’t want the antiques.
They wanted the vinyl.
They asked about it constantly. Some even paid $25 just for early access to dig through the collection. Then the calls started — people asking if we were participating in Record Store Day. I didn’t even know what that meant yet, but I paid attention. I started researching, learning about independent record stores, wholesale suppliers, and what it took to be approved — a process that would take months, not weeks. At the time, I didn’t even know what that meant.
When I started researching Record Store Day, I realized two things very quickly: it would take months to be approved, and there were no other record stores anywhere close to Aggieland.
That’s when it clicked.
Curious Collections wasn’t just a place to sell my dad’s things. It was becoming something the community actually needed.
Letting go of the antique-store idea was easy. The name Curious Collections gave me room to pivot, and soon we added the words that changed everything: Vinyl Records & More.
Looking back now, that moment — standing in West Virginia, overwhelmed and grieving — was the true beginning. I didn’t have experience, funding, or a roadmap. What I had was responsibility, resilience, and a belief that this collection — and this community — deserved something real. I just didn’t know it yet.
To be continued…
