Community Highlights: Meet Adele Edwards and Alec Featherstone of Magpie and Crow

Today we’d like to introduce you to Adele Edwards and Alec Featherstone. They and their team shared their story with us below:

Magpie and Crow is a local buy/sell/trade video game store specializing in video games (both retro and modern), vintage toys, trading cards, comics, movies, and so much more. We have a passion for all things nerdy and strive to cultivate an environment where fandom and nostalgia meet fair pricing, quality products, and friendly, exceptional service. Like the birds of our namesake, we love collecting all the things that make us happy and sharing them with others. Since our grand opening in August 2023, we have been blown away by the amount of support and well-wishes we have received from the local community. Community is a huge part of our business, and we hope to continue to foster that relationship of trust and transparency as we only continue to grow. 

Magpie was born in 2021 by partners and co-owners Alec and Adele, who have always been avid video game players and collectors. That passion for collecting began early for Alec, who has been a natural entrepreneur since he was very young, selling and trading toys and other items as a teenager in his hometown of Las Vegas. That led to selling at conventions, trade shows, and online, which grew into a massive amount of inventory as years passed. In 2015, he opened his first game store, Freaks and Geeks, in Denton, Texas. Freaks gained a large following, both locally and online, and was recognized as one of the best game stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 and rising rent costs, Freaks closed, and that business was dissolved. It was during this time when Alec and Adele — an author and online content creator – became a couple, and soon decided to partner up to bring about a new era of game store experience. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
What began as primarily an online selling presence quickly grew faster than we could have ever imagined. We moved to North Carolina in early 2023 with all of our inventory, and once we decided to move from online to brick-and-mortar, all our efforts went into finding that perfect space to execute our vision. We are so happy that we found that in Downtown Wake Forest. We spent four straight months of 10–15-hour days cleaning, building, painting, and getting all of our inventory ready. 

Something not many people realize is just how much work goes into doing what we do. Once we have an item, it has to be tested and cleaned to ensure we are putting out products in good condition that meet our standard of quality. If it’s a video game, that means wiping down the outside case, removing any stickers, checking if it has the manual or not, and resurfacing the disc to remove scratches. If it’s a game console, we take the system apart, inspect and clean the inside, put it back together, and clean the outside before testing it. We research each item to make sure we price fairly based on the current market. Then, we can catalog the item into our inventory and merchandise in the store. 

We buy/sell/trade, so we get dozens of trade-ins every day–way more than we had planned for. We are, of course, incredibly grateful for all the new inventory people bring in, but it is also a huge roadblock for us since we can’t process everything fast enough to get it out on the floor. We still have a big storage room full of inventory from before we even opened, and now we are accumulating even more and more product, and we can’t keep up. We have two employees, which helps so much, but it’s been hard to plan for the future (i.e., starting tournaments, hosting events, classes, and seminars) when we still have so much organization left to do. We’re still trying to figure out how to keep up with all the rapid growth that we didn’t expect and hadn’t yet planned for. So many times, we have to stop and remind ourselves that it’s only been six months! 

Another thing not many people often talk about is the struggles a couple who are also business partners face. It’s already hard to find a balance between work and play, and it’s an even more delicate balance when you are in a relationship with the person you also run a business with. Boundaries are important but can be hard to enforce in practice, especially with someone you love. It’s been a struggle sometimes to find that balance of communication between us. Magpie has infinitely strengthened our personal relationship, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We fully believe that so many things set us apart from others in our industry. From truly friendly and personable customer service to an eclectic and varied stock in all aspects of nerdiness and vintage media, we are so proud of the store that we’ve created. We are proud of the experience that we have to offer our guests. We want them to feel the same nostalgia and whimsy that we do and have a unique experience every time they step through our door. We do that by offering free play arcade machines and retro game consoles in our vintage living room setup, and we don’t even mind if you don’t buy anything. Come hop on the couch, play some games, and hang out! 

Above all, we are truly proud of and so grateful for the community that we’ve built. We would absolutely not be here without all the incredibly kind, supportive, and beautiful people we have met here since opening our doors. From a single interaction or passing conversation to buying us Christmas presents or bringing lunch to make sure we eat; we see you and thank you. We are overwhelmed by the generosity we’ve received. We may have the physical space, but the true community is everyone who has supported us along the way. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
We don’t much believe in luck, but we have encountered events on this journey that can definitely be attributed to luck. We moved from Texas with all of our belongings and our dog across multiple states and lived in Kentucky for a few months to house-sit for Alec’s parents. During this time, the house and our cars were flooded in the summer 2022 Eastern Kentucky floods, and we lost not only personal items but also inventory and were displaced to West Virginia. We spent weeks cleaning and recovering what we could, which was a long and difficult process but one that reaffirmed that this was what we wanted to do. It was a hard time, but we made it through even stronger than before. 

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magpieandcrowllc
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/magpieandcrowllc
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/magpie-and-crow-wake-forest
• Other: https://www.ebay.com/str/magpieandcrowllc