5 Years is a Long Time
Five years is a long time for a small business. I remember back to where we started; a little comicbook store that played games for fun. Now when I take a step back, I see a company with two stores, still in the process of growing. We’ve been extremely fortunate as a business, and in the process I have personally been fortunate; getting married and now having a beautiful little girl. It’s been a spectacular adventure.
Grand Opening (Ooltewah) 2011
For those of you that have been with us for the whole journey, you might remember that we started off as “Epic Games and Comics”. On our first weekend as a store, we received a cease and desist which is why we are now “Epikos Comics, Cards & Games” (Epikos is Greek for Epic). While it was difficult at the time, just getting started, we are glad to have changed our name to help us stand out from the masses. As many of our customers say, “there is no place like Epikos”. We strive to be a home for everyone.
We were truly blessed to start with help from a lot of folks, both working for us and just helping us get things started up, like Jeremy Long. Jeremy had been a good friend for many years before we opened up. He helped us reach out to the Magic the Gathering community, which helped us quickly grow our gaming population. At one point we were the largest World of Warcraft CCG store in all of east Tennessee. We have even enjoyed hosting some of the largest Free Comic Book Day events in the Chattanooga area for the past few years. This year we are looking forward to having FCBD at both of our stores and having 7 or 8 artists between our two locations.
Build Out (Hixson) August 2015
Speaking of our two locations, in September of 2015 we opened our second store, which has been become our flagship store where layout and design is concerned. Opening a second location has been crazy, fun and hard all at the same time. There are so many mistakes and challenges that we never saw coming, which at some point I will talk about. At the same time, we have had more fun and met more friends since opening. And now we are even working on our website to expand our online services.
So here’s to the future, the next adventure and the continuing journey we hope will bring the joy and excitement of our Epikos family to even more people. I think that we’re going to have fun. I look forward to seeing our future blogs and I hope you will join us for this new and ever expanding adventure.
Sincerely, Henry Flood
