Mobile Head Shop The Glassmith Puts Down Roots In Austin TX
The Glassmith graduates to brick-and-mortar
The trailer is the cradle of big-city business dreams. We’ve seen it again and again in Austin with dinky little food trucks that become polished restaurant franchises. But what if your dream is a pipe trailer? Wait … do pipe trailers exist?
They do. And Billy Marsden has turned a mobile head shop into three mobile head shops and just added a 24/7 brick-and-mortar version of his business. All of this sounds like I’m describing some crazy game of stoner Monopoly – and if it is, then Marsden is playing that game with balls.
Because the concept of the Glassmith is a pipe trailer with glassblowing … which seems kind of insane: you know, working with molten glass goo in some park where people are eating gyros. But the shop’s been open for a decade and no one’s ever gotten their face burned off, so, I concede.
Marsden, a New Mexican with an inquisitive, stoney way of speaking, takes me back to the Glassmith’s origins:
“I’d been blowing glass for five years and I was struggling – just trying to get by and thinking, ‘What can I do in Austin?’” he says. “I was like ‘Well shit, let’s boost up this food trailer shit and bring in glassblowing.’ I looked all through the city [code] to see what kind of rules there were against it and, at the time, there was no mobile permit, except if you were a food truck. I also looked into the glassblowing thing pretty heavily and the answer wasn’t there. There wasn’t a yes, but there wasn’t a no.”
So in 2014, Marsden opened the first Glassmith location in an undeveloped lot with food trucks at 26th and Rio Grande in the heart of West Campus. It was humble, a big homemade box with sheet-metal walls and a large window full of bongs and pipes and smoke shop fare, but there was an ethos – to champion American glass – and a vibe that attracted people. The flagship store has evolved physically – it now has a second trailer and a deck with an awning – and also in terms of what it sells. The stylish disposable nicotine vapes that Gen Zers like have been huge, as have the trends of legal cannabis options, particularly THCA, which has come to represent the largest share of the Glassmith’s sales.
But the lane that Marsden saw promise in was not necessarily related to product, but placement. He realized that the key to the Glassmith’s success was walking traffic.
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