This post is adapted from [Im]Possible Business, a zine exploring radical business alternatives. Learn more and download the publication here. Read the second post in this series: Business as Queer Failure
Utopias have always entailed disappointments and failures.
— Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Étaín was an “underthings” store in Portland, Maine, that offered an inclusive mix of femme-forward lingerie, nonbinary undergarments and binders, and other forms of under-apparel. They created some of the most gorgeous and inclusive photoshoots I’ve ever seen. Innovated Q.U.A.D, the Queer Underwear Accessibility Department, a community-funded program distributing free gender affirming undergarments.
There was a span of a few years where I found myself visiting friends in Maine every summer, which always included a trip to Étaín and a cocktail at Étaín’s queer sibling and one of my favorite bars, The Bearded Lady’s Jewel Box**, next door.
In 2020, the owner Mack, after dedicating more time to activist endeavors during the pandemic, closed the business, posting a manifesto-like letter on their website with the announcement. An excerpt:
Amidst this months-long tidal wave of monumental human action, the news I’m here to deliver feels easy: Étaín will close permanently by the end of September. Why? Because I’m mad as hell. Our city and our society consistently prioritize business and property over the safety and dignity of our most vulnerable community members—people who know what they need and are continually gaslit, patronized, and ignored—and I’m tired of straddling the line between business owner and activist. I opened the shop with a set of values that have evolved and shifted over the years, but the past few months have confirmed that the shop cannot survive with these values intact. And that is absolutely fine. Because guess what? It’s just a business. We need so much more than that right now—we have always needed so much more.
I’ve read this letter many times, and I often think about all that I have not and do not have time and energy for because of my business. I half “burned” Wanderwell down in early in 2022: re-homing 2/3 of our clients (nearly $200K a year in committed recurring revenue), which resulted in both managing a smaller team and fewer clients, and then much more space and better mental health for myself. After choosing to fail at scale, I have never felt so liberated in over a decade of business!
One of the benefits of running a tinier business is that I’ve been able to once again find my way back to presence: with friendship, with community, with meaningful activism. I currently find deep, meaningful, satisfying work within the container of Wanderwell. And I’m not sure if I’ll do it forever.
Failure invites us to consider that our attention and what we choose to devote ourselves to can change (should change!). Failure can be a quiet refusal of dominance we have no wish to take part in. Failure revels in the finite, in the emergent idea that we do indeed live in a cyclical universe.
Consider that to get somewhere else and imagine and change systems, inevitably we must side with failure. Experiments that only succeed are not experiments at all, they are acts of domination.
Who has agency for imagination and the economic and energetic space to engage creatively with new economies? Often those of us who have failed at reaching those “specific forms of reproductive maturity”, which Jack Halberstam writes about in The Queer Art of Failure.
Runway’s Universal Basic Income pilot launched in 2020 as a response to the racialized component of failure and to create communities of friends and family that, while rooting for success, will open up entrepreneurial risk taking to those that have been structurally barred because financial failure is too large a risk to take.
One of the tricky posits of even looking at businesses as spaces for imagining a different future, is that we inhabit a dual existence in doing so: we must support and sustain ourselves and our families, while at the same time pushing for a radical, abundant and equitable future.
There’s tension in that split existence. When do you make a choice that is about your own survival and livelihood, and when do you make a choice that is about the abundant future? We will, perhaps inevitably, come to junctures where these two selves are irreconcilable.
Not having money is a fucking problem, and that’s why people need to work. But having money is not a solution, especially when you don’t have enough.
— Tunde Wey
These irreconcilable paths are where we meet the limits of what an individual business can see or do. The impossible choices and compromises that we will face point to the necessity of building economic and financial infrastructure, the plumbing of the abundant economies we envision. (Failure as a thought experiment is one thing; failure as an actual circumstance that leads to consequences such as losing basic rights and needs like housing and healthcare, in a society that does not provide them, is another.) Part of building the plumbing and the infrastructure is to create the circumstances where a failure need not be so dire: our precarity is largely a result of the lack of care we take with each other as a society.
When I facilitated two cohorts of business owners exploring radical business practices and thinking, I was struck by the limits of the answers to the question of what these owners would do with abundant surplus if they had it. Mostly the answers amounted to shoring up individual survival: funding a retirement account, taking care of parents and elders, paying off a mortgage. Were our health care not tied to employment, our housing not tied to banks and landlords, and our childcare not tied to a third of our monthly pay, what would we be able to imagine differently?
It shouldn’t be news that there’s no eight step program to build a better possible world. By knitting together failure alongside hope for change, I mean instead simply to provoke the imaginary and inspire thinking along pathways that exist outside of the success ladders we’ve come to know. My hope is that examples of businesses that exist outside of the usual, success oriented and individualist norms inspire us to notice the margins and edges and that these ideas implant a nagging feeling somewhere in the back of our consciousnesses that to succeed in our current economy may mean that we’ve failed at the collective one, and that loosens us up to accept and invite generative forms of failure.
**It’s now called, simply, The Jewel Box. Similar in ethos to Fox Market, owner Nathaniel Meiklejohn says: “I don’t want to go on record saying I want a place that’s welcoming to everyone. I want a space that’s more welcoming to marginalized people.”