Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Soliz.
Hi Joe, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for sharing your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
My wife, Sarah Childs, and I started Childs’ Play: Games & Geekery LLC on March 14, 2014. The company’s name comes from Sarah’s last name, and our mascot Malia Mayhem is based on Sarah. For 2 years, we sold tabletop games and other geeky items at conventions and events. Then in 2016, we opened our first brick-and-mortar store in New Braunfels. The store allowed us to expand into selling tabletop games, comic books, and toys. Sarah was our Game Master, and I was The Comic Book Guy. Thanks to the community’s amazing support, we grew into a bigger store location in 2017. Unfortunately, the stress of working our day jobs and running the store after work finally caught up with me and put me in the hospital on Christmas Eve 2017. So we made the difficult decision to sell the retail spot in 2018. We did keep Childs’ Play: Games & Geekery LLC and turned it into a parent company for all our future projects. This included a YouTube show called Pop Culture Geekery which ran for over a year and had 104 episodes. In 2020, we became parents in the middle of the pandemic with the birth of our son. In 2021, we launched our next project, Childs’s Play Comics. And my longtime friend Roy Gonzales was able to self-publish our first comic, How to Hunt a Hero. Then in 2022, Sarah and I hired DC Comics artist Dave Beaty to work on a comic for our mascot, Malia Mayhem. That one and the sequel to How to Hunt a Hero are due in 2023.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It could have been a smoother road. We started the company with $1500 of leftover wedding money and had to figure it out from there. My wife had worked with a friend who had opened a shop in the Dallas area, so Sarah had some experience helping run that store. We had to learn about sales tax and how to manage inventory and keep track of sales to ensure profitability. We knew that opening a brick-and-mortar store was always the goal, but it took 2 years because we wanted to go into it without debt. I worked for a bank, and Sarah was a teacher. She commuted to San Antonio daily. We got to the point where we could hire help, but it was still a lot of work, and the struggle for me was balancing our day jobs and the store. Thankfully, the experiences built upon one another, and many people who supported us at our store, went on to support the YouTube show and now Childs’ Play Comics.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Anyone who knows Sarah and me knows that we love pop culture. We used our strengths as professionals to foster the store. Sarah is a teacher who naturally knew how to teach people to play games and connect with them. For me, as a banker, it was twofold. I was good at customer service, and I was good at finances. Sarah is also excellent at finances, so our personalities complement each other and make us a great team. Even now, doing the comic books, Sarah is my co-writer and editor, and thank God for it! Because I love to write stories, but grammar is not my strong suit.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I’ve always struggled with self-confidence, which is why Words of Affirmation are one of my 5 Love Languages. All the facts may point to me doing a good job, but it’s only once I hear it from someone I know and trust that it hits home.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.childsplaycomics.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/childsplaycomics/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/childsplaygamesandgeekery
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/childsplaycomix
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChildsPlayComics
