Spotlight: Erica Feldmann
Photo credit: Ally Schmaling
ERICA FELDMANN is the founder and owner of Hauswitch Home + Healing, a modern metaphysical lifestyle brand and shop in Salem, Massachusetts.
She is a graduate of Feminist Business School and a founding member of The Sisterhood. She caught up with Amelia Hruby in the midst of COVID-19 shutdowns to discuss witches in business, the myth of the meritocracy, and how the 12 Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business changed her business and her life. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Can you tell us about yourself and your business?
My name's Erica Feldmann, and I own Hauswitch Home + Healing in Salem, Massachusetts, which is a brick and mortar store and an online store and community. We sell things made for and by witches and things to make your house feel good. I like think of the shop as a portal to a different way of showing people how to live in the world through witchy lifestyle goods.
I also own a magical all-natural cleaning product business with a good friend of mine. The goal of that company is to help you make anything in your life a ceremony—even cleaning your bathroom—by putting some intention behind it. I really believe we can all empower ourselves by doing things at home, because I think that if your home feels good, then that's going to help you feel good, and that’s going to make it easier for you to get out in your community and do the work.
What inspired you to open Hauswitch and why in Salem?
Salem gets millions of tourists every year coming to hear about witches. Of course, there were not really any witches in Salem, but here we are with this whole economy around them.
In grad school, I studied gender and cultural studies with the lens of what does the archetype of the witch contain in terms of radical feminism and rejection of traditional masculine values? And so I really look at my shop as an extension of what I studied in grad school. I always joke that the store is my PhD, because it gives me this opportunity to illustrate this new paradigm. I get to go back and say: What if we venerated witches instead of persecuting them? What could our world look like if witches were heroes instead of villains?
And so to have all these people coming to Salem to find out more about witches and then presenting my view of witches—a radical intersectional feminist view of witches—at Hauswitch right alongside the coffee mugs, souvenirs and tote bags they’re looking for is such a great opportunity. It’s really fun watching people engage with some of the more radical things that we have in the store. A lot of them are coming in for a witchy, Salem coffee mug, and then they’re finding things like the Sister books and postcards, Virgie Tovar’s book You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and a simple spell against the cis, hetero, white supremacist patriarchy.
Overall, I just think that my work in this world is to use this archetype of the witch to really talk about a different kind of world, a different way of knowing, and different understandings of the framework of our world that puts masculine capitalist oppression on its back foot. At Hauswitch I’m trying to build a new paradigm around community, care, empathy, lifting up marginalized people, paying people for their labor, redistribution of wealth, and being critically engaged in government and politics.
This new paradigm sounds so powerful. How has Feminist Business School helped you bring feminist principles into your work at Hauswitch?
I managed small businesses for 10 years before I opened my store, and the thing about most small business owners, in my experience, is that they aren't enlightened to the ways of feminist business. Thank goodness my friend Rachel (from Small Spells) gave me one of the 12 Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business cards a year into running my shop, because that little card gave me all the permission I needed to do business differently.
I owe so much to Sister, and I think that Sister’s work resonates with so many small business owners like me, because we've all been trying to conform and contort ourselves into the masculine economy. And then Sister shows us another way—a more feminine and feminist way—and it's like, Oh my God, yes, that validates my intuition, and it validates how I want to exist and run a business in this world.
So if I'm ever feeling lost or like I don't know what to do, I look back to the 12 Principles and the Feminine Economy prints, and I make sure that I'm aligning myself with those concepts, because I think they're so important. Thanks to Sister, I feel like my grad school background and my rejection of corporate mentality all comes together on these lovely postcards, infographics and books. My copy of Proposals for the Feminine Economy has notes all over every page, because I found it so inspiring.
Another thing I’ve learned from Sister is that one way to be an anticapitalist business owner is to shift your mindset away from profit as the end-all be-all of business. Now, of course, my business has to make a profit. I’m not running a non-profit or a commune. But at the same time, I can really look at my business’ financial situation and say profit’s not the most important thing. Especially throughout the pandemic, I think me being taken care of and, more importantly, my staff being taken care are the most important things. First and foremost, paying my staff a living wage—which is not easy in this area because Boston is nuts in terms of cost of living!—is an important effort. And then not only that, but also really investing in people. When it comes to my staff, I really like to think about what lights them up. I like to give people a place to grow at Hauswitch, and an outlet for their own creativity and passion projects here.
Probably the best example of this right now is my shop manager Paige who runs our political wing Witch the Vote. She's getting a lot more creative projects right now and stepping back from a lot of the day to day work, and not only am I going to pay her well to do that, but also she gets that part of her creative and intellectual life validated too. I really like to figure out ways that people can bring their own creativity and their own passions into Hauswitch so that it's not just my ideas, and instead it’s a collaborative effort. Again, I think that business as usual is like: I'm the boss. I am the ideas. You execute them. I pay you what I think you're worth. And good luck finding somewhere better. Whereas for me, I just really want to make sure that my people feel taken care of—financially and creatively. I want them to feel fulfilled and like they're contributing to something.
Another thing I’ve learned engaging with Sister and Feminist Business School has been this idea of the myth of the meritocracy (Principle #8 of the 12 Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business). That concept has truly shifted my entire life. As someone who grew up working class, I still have to grapple everyday with the question of have I earned this? I have to instill in myself and everyone around me the recognition that I'm not in the position that I'm in because I'm better than anybody else or worked harder than everybody else. I'm in the position that I'm in, because all of these factors aligned for me.
The abundance consciousness piece (Principle #10 of the 12 Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business) has been really huge for me with that, too. Because what is business if not constant risk, right? And again, growing up working class meant that I was very set in scarcity mentality because that was my reality. Being in business, which is inherently about risking money and spending money, after that was really difficult, because I spent the first 33 years of my life being ashamed about spending money and having to think about every single dollar I spent. Sister really helped me learn about abundance consciousness and how to bring it into my business.
So I guess I’ll wrap up by saying that I had already gone through a cultural studies program that was specifically about unpacking these issues of race, gender, class hegemony, and oppression. And yet this little yellow card just blew my mind to pieces, you know? And I think that's so important. I think that this 12 point graphic really has the power to change businesses and lives. So I love whipping that little card out. If anybody asks me about being a business owner, I'm always like, let me tell you about the 12 Principles because I’m so set on spreading the word about Sister.
And we so appreciate it! We love supporting entrepreneurs in all stages of business here at Sister, and we want more of them to find us.
One final question for you: If you were talking to someone considering taking a Feminist Business School course, what would you say to help them decide?
You know, I would just say to prepare to be liberated from all sorts of ideas that are so entrenched in how we live our lives, how we see business, and how we see our role in our businesses. Feminist Business School will show you that you can just let that facade of “business as usual” go, that you can release the idea that there's a “right” way of doing things in business and reject the false belief that businesses aren't creative. Sister will teach you that your business doesn't have to look like anybody else's. It can look like exactly what you want it to, and no matter what wacky thing you want to do you can probably find a way to work it into a very legitimate business.
My staff and I are always saying who is letting us do this? Like when we like have our window painter come in and paint a magical vagina portal onto the front of the shop or we set up a mystery crystal machine or whatever. In those moments, I can't believe this is my job. I can't believe I'm allowed to like work like this. But I can because I learned to take the reins and to say that what I've learned about resisting systemic oppression and hegemony has a place in my business and how I run it. Sister taught me that reading Audre Lorde is just as important a part of my business visioning as writing a business plan.
So definitely do it! That’s what I would say to anyone interested in Feminist Business School. And prepare to be liberated!
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