After bonding over a mutal love of the arts, the shop is their latest architectural collaboration
CM: Y’all are so cute. Tell us your story.
RH: We met in Connecticut in the early 2000s. I was an art professor at Manchester Community College for 24 years and would take my students on day trips to New York to look at galleries with Carol coming along as my unofficial assistant.
CF: First and foremost, we’re artists. Much of our relationship has been built around our shared love of making art together, including some large paintings and architectural projects. It’s funny fast-forwarding to now, where this shop is our biggest collaboration.
CM: What inspired the life change?
CF: Rick and I moved to Charleston 13 years ago. We’d always joked about opening a coffee shop, but it was never really a dream.
RH: Then, Carol comes to me one day and says, “You know that little hummus place on the corner? It’s closing. Should we do this?” We had no background in coffee, so we hired Brianna Berry from Second State to train us, because she is tops in terms of artisanal coffee.
CM: What was the renovation process?
RH: We built this place with our own hands. Nothing is off the shelf. It really became an over-the-top, architectural art project.
CF: A lot of shops look like they could go anywhere, but we wanted ours to fit Charleston and have an old-world feel. We spent a good part of two years building it and were having so much fun making art together that we almost forgot to learn about coffee.
CM: Where did the name come from?
CF: Rick invented these two little bunny characters to represent us, and over the years, he would leave me little love notes. For our shop bathroom, I blew up all the Post-its I’d collected and shellacked them to the wall.
RH: The older and more grizzled I got, the more the caricature fit. More than a decade later, that bunny has seen some things.
CM: What sort of vibe do you want the shop to have?
RH: We built a space we wanted to be in. People are more inclined to share a laugh or a cry in a place that’s warm rather than somewhere made of cold steel and glass.
CF: This place is about building community, and as a result, people keep coming back. I didn’t anticipate how much this business would add to our lives, the stories we’d hear, and the friends we’d make.
CM: How does your location influence the customer base?
CF: We love living just 185 steps away; a shorter amount of time than it takes to eat a peach! When we came to Charleston, it was all full-time residents in our neighborhood, and that’s shifted a lot. This is an Airbnb area, so we get a ton of tourists, but also lots of students, who we really love spending time with.
CM: Any plans for the future?
RH: We don’t aim to slow down; life isn’t long enough to contain all the things we want to do. We’ve become part of a group of coffee shop people and have discovered it’s not competitive in this town; it’s mutually supportive.
CF: We’ve been approached to make Bad Bunnies a franchise, but to us small is truly beautiful. It’s important to us that we continue our mission of keeping quality high and being people-focused.
