Meet Kathleen and Luke, filling your up with beautiful sights and sounds
December 18, 2023
Kathleen Hotmer and Luke Tandy’s home is filled with beautiful goods and music — and so are their stores.
Kathleen owns Pink Moon Goods at 2027 E. 5th St. Luke owns Skeleton Dust Records at 133 E. 3rd St. in Dayton. The duo has been together since 2008, and married since 2018.
Luke opened his record store first, in October 2017. He carries records, CDs, tapes, audio equipment and a few books that cover a variety of genres, though he specializes in noise and experimental music.
“I constantly was hearing him say things like, I just want to open a record store, and it was just something that kept coming up,” Kathleen recalled. “There was one moment when Luke said it, and I just said, Okay, let’s just do it. You want to do it, let’s start.”
At the time, Kathleen worked in the theater department at Sinclair. Within a couple years, Luke would inspire her to open her own shop, where she specializes in ethically manufactured home goods.
“I never really felt like I was a theater person,” Kathleen said. “So I think that always kind of left a door open that made me feel like there was possibly something else for me that I wanted to do.”
For Luke, the seed was planted during an intro to entrepreneurship class in college. For his final project, he imagined opening a record store. The idea lingered.
“We went to Europe in 2012, and I specifically remember going to a store in Berlin. It was unlike any store I’d ever seen before,” he recalled. “It was incredibly unique, and just a very special store. And that moment was super inspiring to me because I was just thinking, I can make my store however I want to make it. It doesn’t have to be a certain way, it can just be my own creation. And really it was that moment that I was pretty dead set on ultimately opening my own record store.”
Check out Kathleen & Luke’s full story in the latest episode in our I Am an Entrepreneur series.
