Whimsy-filled art gallery, gift shop opens in SLO County beach town. See inside
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- Art and more at Cambria’s Mincing Mockingbird shop is quirky, whimsical and fun.
- Artists/owners Matt Adrian and Bagwill create much of the art and curate other offerings.
- Main St. shop is open Wednesdays through Sundays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., phone 805-257-8020.
Given the shop name, astute customers going into the new Mincing Mockingbird in Cambria should sense that they’re in for an unusual experience laced with laughter.
They would be right.
The small sign on the quirky art gallery and gift shop that’s self-described as “pretty & cheeky” says it all: “Enter for a delightful diversion from a world gone mad.”
“We’re hoping people can come in, have some enjoyment, laugh, and if we’ve connected with them, maybe buy something,” Matt Adrian told The Tribune.
“Buying something is easy,” wife Kim Bagwill added. “Finding something is where the fun is.”
Adrian and Bagwill, also an artist and writer, co-own the store they created out of their fertile imaginations.
“We’re not just in the for the money,” Adrian said. “We look at the entire store as a piece of art we’ve created. We have lots of weird little things for people to discover.”
There are touches of humor and whimsy everywhere, plus fine art of birds and meerkats and other critters.
Browsers find greeting cards with attitude, journals with cover art to make you smile and think and much more.
Bagwill and Adrian create much of what’s on display at The Mincing Mockingbird, with skilled assistance from two of Bagwill’s 30-something sons Christian and Noah Eusebio, who contribute remotely from Chicago and Oregon, respectively.
Mincing Mockingbird’s stock at 783 Main St. in Cambria’s West Village shopping area is filled out with other finds, too, much of it ferreted out in various sales and locations by Bagwill and Adrian.
Eagle-eyed poking around in the shop reveals home goods, jewelry, weird vintage finds and scarves, plus a wide variety of gifts from other artists and makers.
“Our favorite products in the store are probably jewelry and the bizarre vintage finds,” Bagwill said. “We love hitting flea markets and looking for the weird and the wonderful — and can’t wait to get back and put them in the store.”
Her husband agrees that the search for oddball stuff thrills them, as does offering it to their customers.
“We recently sold a handmade machine that dispensed pencils, and the front of it read: ‘Left-handed pencils for our right good friends.’ It’s that kind of folk art we love featuring in the store,” Adrian said with a laugh.
What shoppers find at The Mincing Mockingbird
It’s easy to figure out that sharp, tongue-in-cheek humor is a stock element behind most of the artists’ works in the shop.
There’s a bird-imaged magnet with the title, “The risk I took was calculated … but boy, am I bad at math,” subhead, “What’s the square root of oh sh__t?”
Another has a sketchy, literary owl emphasizing “Whom?”
Journal titles include “Ledgers of perceived slights,” “Strange ideas and impure thoughts,” “Psychiatric evaluations of my dog,” “One page line word at a time,” and the “Womankind world domination action plan.”
Various notables use the journals, Bagwill said, including “bestselling author V.E. Schwab (who writes her novels in them) to musicians Beyoncé and Ryan Adams.”
You can also find Adrian’s popular 2012 field manual there: “The Mincing Mockingbird Guide to Troubled Birds.”
Birthday cards with legends as bizarre as a gull saying “I’d sell you to Satan for one corn chip” and “Birthdays are like birds (inside, “They come out of nowhere and scare the bejeezus out of you. Happy Birthday!”)
“We write to entertain ourselves,” Bagwill said of their hope to appeal to “curious people who pay attention and enjoy bits of whimsy.”
They love retro analog.
“We don’t do much on computers anymore,” Adrian said of the couple, as they leave that for their more tech-happy and skilled sons. “AI is being forced down our throats.”
He added of his typewriter collection: “I’m heading back in time in terms of my tools.”
Even the things the couple didn’t create but instead curated for the store have an edge to them that elevate their finds above the norm.
They rebel in other ways, too.
“Our employees are paid for five days, but only work four,” their website says. “And those four days are capped at eight hours. No working late, no working weekends, no after hours or weekend emails, no rat race. Growth for the sake of growth is a sickness in American business, and we think our approach to the workweek creates the kind of work/life balance we think our team of most excellent human beings deserve.”
Artist-owners’ history is the soul of Mincing Mockingbird shop
Both Adrian and Bagwill were raised in the same small Illinois farm town of about 1,700 residents with not many artists in it, “so creative gravity kind of brought us together,” she said.
Each attended art school, she at Bradley University and him at Columbia College in Chicago.
Bagwill flexed her entrepreneurial muscles early, starting an arts-and-literature magazine and running a newspaper. Both also indulged their artistic sides whenever they could.
After becoming a couple (married in Las Vegas, but opting out of fake Elvises, Bagwill said), they “began selling on Etsy when that website was just getting off the ground.” That started with separate launches, him first in 2007 with The Mincing Mockingbird and her with The Frantic Meerkat about a year later.
“We operated out of our garage for a number of years,” Adrian said.
Then they moved the operation to a Paso Robles warehouse “because at that point the business had taken over every room in our house,” he said.
They started a wholesale business and then opened a retail shop in Joshua Tree in 2019 but had to close for about six months when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Business rebounded after they reopened, but when they decided to move away, “we didn’t want to maintain a store there, even though we loved doing it,” Bagwill said.
They thought “let’s get out of LA and see what it’s like to live closer to the ocean,” Adrian said, because San Luis Obispo County, Paso Robles and Cambria “are about as close to living in heaven as possible.”
They moved to Paso Robles in 2012, where they already had a warehouse and still live, but they always felt a strong draw to the arts vibe and ocean proximity of Cambria.
About five weeks ago, they opened their 1,800-square-foot Main Street store there, and are already working toward opening a Paso store that’s half that size.
They plan to open in June near Anarchy Wine Company and the Primal House butcher shop-restaurant-taproom alongside Highway 101 in the Ramada Drive complex.
And the catchy name of the shop and company?
The couple say that everywhere they’ve lived, there’s been a cheeky mockingbird, front and center. The mincing part? It “was an alliterative bit of fun that says we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Adrian said.
For more information
The company’s website gives a good overview of the couple’s creations on display at 783 Main St. in Cambria.
You can also see more of Adrian’s artwork mattadrian.com and Bagwill’s paintings at kimbagwill.com.
The shop is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 805-257-8020 for more information.
