We had the good fortune of connecting with Richie Conry and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Richie, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking.
Honestly, I think the bigger risk is not doing the thing. Everybody talks about the risk of starting a business — quitting the steady job, the trailer, the lease, all of it. But the risk that gets me is the one where you don’t try and you spend the rest of your life wondering. That one’s worse.

Pulling a coffee trailer around DFW for 4 years before signing a lease in Richardson — that was a long bet. There were a lot of mornings where it was me, the trailer, and three customers at a market in the cold. You either trust the thing you’re building or you don’t. We trusted it.

I’d say the same for the shop itself. Doing a high-desert, handmade, anti-modern coffee shop in suburbia is not the safe play. The safe play is bright lights, white walls, an app. We went the other way on purpose.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Was it easy? No, man. None of it was easy. The lessons I keep coming back to:

Delegate the thing you’re not. I’m a maker. I sew bags, I build the space, I run the bar. But I’m not a roaster, and pretending to be one would’ve cost us the shop. Letting the pros do the pro work freed us up to do our work better. Same with the brand and the back-end — we leaned on people who do that for a living, and the place is stronger for it.

The pack comes if you build something real. We didn’t run ads to fill the Den opening week. We had 200 people on the Wolfpack list before the doors opened, almost all of them from the trailer years. They showed up because we’d already shown up for them — on a hundred Saturdays, in a hundred parking lots.

Slow is the point. The instinct in business is to speed up — more locations, more SKUs, more output. The Den works because it’s the opposite of that. We’re not trying to scale. We’re trying to be a reprieve. That’s the lesson — pick the thing the world doesn’t have enough of and protect it.

What I want people to know: this isn’t a brand someone designed in a deck. It’s a real place, built by hand, with real people behind it. Come sit a while.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Best friend in town for a week? Alright. We’d take it slow.

Coffee mornings. Obviously start out here at Moon Wolf. From there, go hit @iamclothesminded or Vagabond for some vintage threads.

Eats. Grab an everything bagel with the scallion schmear and lox. Later that night hit Mike’s Gemini for a martini and a wagyu hot dog.

Goods + records. Before Mike’s Gemini make sure to go to Rhodes & Sons for some highly curated goods. Other places of note would be Dolly Python, East Dallas Vintage, and Lula B’s.

A drive. Get them out of Dallas proper for an afternoon. Fort Worth Stockyards — cowtown still has soul, and the 11 AM cattle drive reminds you DFW is bigger than just the metroplex.

A drink to land the night. A quiet vintage spot somewhere in Deep Ellum or Bishop Arts — no TVs on the wall, somewhere you can actually hear the conversation.

The thread? Places that feel made by somebody, not designed by a committee. Same energy as the Den.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Gosh, where do you start. The pack (The Wolfpack is our version of a loyalty program) is the obvious one — the people who showed up at the trailer in 2022 when there was no shop, no website, just me and a bag of beans. They built this with us.

Sarah Ratliff, my partner, gets the deepest credit. She’s the one I took the trip out west with — Moon Wolf as a feeling started on that drive. She also drew the brand: the logo, the typography, the cowboy and cowgirl illustrations that make the place feel like itself. There’s no version of this shop without her, in any direction.

My brother Stu Conry for the videos, the photography, the visual side of Moon Wolf. None of the way it looks online happens without him.

Katey Loveless for slinging all of handmade ceramics and mugs.

Chuck Ratliff, Sarah’s dad, so much help with the trailer and a constant source of knowledge and inspirational expertise.

Derek Conry, for always coming in clutch when help is needed.

Family in general because there’s a lot of them that need recognition and huge gratitude sent their way.

Michael Sebastian and the team at Branded Mayhem Collective. What started as a website project turned into Michael building the back-end of the whole shop — the site, the Wolfpack email system, the voice, the press, the Google listing. He went way past anything we’d agreed to on paper, because he actually cared about what we were building. Small businesses like ours don’t usually get an operator like that in their corner.

Clay Eiland and the Eiland Coffee crew, and the Liaise Coffees team, for taking the roasting seriously so we don’t have to. Starship Bagel for the bagel partnership. The local makers whose work fills our merch wall — every mug, print, card, and ceramic in the shop comes from a real person. We’re a stage for them as much as we are a coffee shop.

And anybody who’s ever walked in, sat on the couch, talked to a stranger, and let the place be what it’s trying to be. That’s the whole thing. We are never alone — we are all wolves howling to the same moon. That’s Atticus by the way, and I’d say I agree.

— Richie

Website: https://moonwolfprovisions.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moonwolftx/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588478840122

Image Credits
Primary Photo Credit to Stu Conry, All other photos courtesy of Michael Sebastian of Branded Mayhem

Nominate Someone: ShoutoutDFW is built on recommendations and shoutouts from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.