This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Guess what today is? Well, you might be listening to this episode later, but regardless, the day this episode is going out is the 31st of October, which just so happens to be Halloween. Now, you've probably been wondering all month, what is Side Hustle School going to do for Halloween? Are we even going to acknowledge it? Well, fear not. We are creeping it real.
You're going to get this party startled. We have a pretty incredible story for you today. It's actually not about trick-or-treating, even though that is a service-based hustle with revenue coming in the form of candy. Perhaps we'll talk about that another time. Today's incredible story involves a Make Your Own Tombstone, a little shop of horrors in Los Angeles, the meth lab featured in Breaking Bad, and a highly unusual side hustle that ties all those things together and actually grows into a seven-figure success.
It's not a ghost story. It's a true case study in serving a niche market. Today is this shop's busiest day of the year, but we were able to catch up with them a couple weeks ago and get their backstory. And all the details for this spooky, spectacular success story are coming right up. If it could fit right in on the set of a Hollywood horror movie, you can pretty much guarantee that BJ and Eileen Winslow of Dapper Cadaver can carve up whatever it is you're looking for. These masters of the macabre
run the world's most surprising mom-and-pop shop, a prop store that serves up masses of mutilated flesh and bone on a silver platter for Hollywood's most elite. While the name Dapper Cadaver may not ring a bell, you've likely seen their work in shows like Breaking Bad, Dexter, Game of Thrones, and Stranger Things. But despite their bloody success, which now exceeds seven figures in annual revenue, Dapper Cadaver began as a side hustle prop shop with modest beginnings operating out of a garage in Los Angeles, California. As is often the case, this fascination with things that go bump in the night started at a young age for BJ Winslow. In fact, he fondly recalls when he first opened his shop finding a box from childhood stuffed with toy lizards soaking in canning jars filled to the brim with formaldehyde.
He says when I had a toy I was no longer interested in, I would stick it in a jar, fill it with fluid, and put it on a shelf. My mom still has some of them. Well, it's not your typical box of memories, but it seems entirely fitting for BJ's dream career. In high school, BJ took a job at a toy fabrication company, and then one at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, where he learned how to tinker with machines. Both of these jobs added to his natural inclination for building, designing, and, well, digging into the guts of things to see how they work.
This interest took a more organic turn when BJ went to college and decided to major in biology. He was intrigued by the study of anatomy, bone structure, and the overall process of decay. Indeed, death-related prop creation seemed to represent the perfect marriage of all his lifelong passions, including his love of the horror genre. So when he moved to Los Angeles, he decided to try his hand at making props. Now, you know how it is. No matter how many decapitated bodies you've worked
with, you never really forget your first. And for BJ, that first project was for post-mortem studio rentals who tested his metal by giving him the ghastly task of building a tombstone overnight. Disney was planning to use it for one of their productions, so the boss of the studio said that if Disney decided to buy the tombstone in the morning, post-mortem studios would give him a job. That began one of the longest nights of BJ's life. He went into the project with scarce resources, but he recruited one of his close friends and Eileen, who was dating BJ at the time, to work well past the witching hour to build a tombstone fit for Walt Disney himself.
Numerous coffee runs and hours holding hair dryers to wet paint later, BJ scored his first job. He had passed that crucial tombstone test. Working at post-mortem gave BJ the blood-covered foundation he needed to make a name for himself in the prop hustling industry. There he learned all the basics, including mixing and molding your horror prop essentials out of polyurethane foam, and the proper painting techniques to give corpses that fresh out of the grindhouse look, as well as the methods that lead to efficiently capturing the stoicism of the undead. Because I just don't care. Since BJ's
salary was on the lower end of the spectrum, his boss struck a deal with him that would allow him to keep all of the props he made. By that point, BJ and Eileen were married, and the Winslow residents began to look more like the kind of place where things went to die terrible deaths. But it was actually through that mass of mutilated flesh that their side hustle, Dapper Cadaver, was born. Or maybe called back from the grave, I guess you could say. However you look at it, one fateful day, the owner of post-mortem studio rentals decided to hang up his butcher apron. He wanted to move on to less bloody
pastures. He also decided since it was Halloween he could mix all the metaphors he wanted. BJ, who had since this change coming, had already started taking his grisly work home with him, using his garage as a makeshift workspace to build props on his own. But then two things happened that led to the beginning of Dapper Cadaver. First, Eileen was also experiencing some work-related changes.
She'd been working at a tech company, and that tech company sold. As a result of the sale, she received some stock options. Then BJ's mentor decided to sell his entire inventory at an all-body-parts-must-go low price. The opportunity was simply too good to pass up, no guts, no gory, so they used the money Eileen made from the sale of the tech company to purchase the tools they needed to launch their own grim endeavor. They had long thought of that family garage as their own personal little shop of horrors, but with the acquisition of all those body parts, they had simply outgrown their space. What would happen next?
Fortunately, they didn't have to rely on witchcraft in order to find their new space. A friend of theirs had just decided to move out of the East Hollywood art studio she had occupied for a while, and she let them know it was available. Their new shop boasted a small retail area where they sold gothic-style clothing and horror-themed toys, but while props were still made in the back and rented out to movie studios, they were not initially the main focus of Dapper Cadaver. At this point, not many prop shops had websites, and those that did often didn't list their prices on those sites. But the first website for Dapper Cadaver contained a gallery showcasing their collection of oddities, pictures of their work that were for sale, along with the price, and a blog where they wrote about special items. Within the first six
months, however, they realized that the retail side of Dapper Cadaver was probably not going to pan out, because it wasn't in enough of a walking neighborhood to support it. On the other severed hand, the prop fabrication side of things was really taking off, because they were a stone's throw away from some of the sound stages in Hollywood. One day they received one of the most interesting proposals they'd ever heard of, which of course was saying a lot. A writer for the hit TV show The X-Files had created this bizarre storyline for a new show that involved a high school chemistry teacher, who is diagnosed with a form of lung cancer and decides to cook meth in order to support his family after he dies. And that writer wasn't calling on the Winslow's for their signature body parts, he wanted them to build a meth lab for the show's pilot.
It was an outrageous concept, but they were all in. The Winslow's knew a lot about blood, guts, and body parts, but they didn't know much about hardcore drugs, and they didn't know the first thing about a meth lab. So as one does, they went online and learned all they could about what a meth lab is supposed to look like, what kind of supplies it includes, what you need to do to get one started. For the longest time they kept thinking the DEA would come bursting through the door unannounced, that they'd have to explain that all their research was for television. And to this day they're certain they've landed on some kind of government list for all the questionable searches they've done. While they were building the TV meth lab,
they had no idea how popular the series would become, but Breaking Bad took off and became known all over the world. It also taught BJ and Eileen a valuable lesson. In this business you should treat everyone well, because you never know which project or client is really going to take off. In the years since the Dapper Cadaver team has grown to include a handful of artists and designers. Their portfolio, which is practically bursting at the stitches, proves that they're one of the most sought-after prop shops in the world.
On any given week BJ, Eileen, and their team could be working on something like Halloween decorations for the White House, or designing a set for Marilyn Manson, or recreating dinosaur bones as exhibits for prestigious museums. And not only that, Dapper Cadaver creations have done more than just entertain. The government did end up calling them after all, but instead of busting them for their searches about how to make a meth lab, they asked to use bodies and props for disaster preparedness exercises. These exercises educate soldiers, medical professionals, and volunteers about what they might witness on the battlefield, what they might encounter upon arriving at an accident scene, or any other situations that could cause serious mental trauma. The Winslow's have worked with both local and federal law enforcement agencies for training like this. And since they have family in the
military, they're especially proud of this work. Way back when he was putting toy lizards into jars filled with formaldehyde, the young BJ Winslow didn't know that one night he'd stay up until dawn, making a tombstone for Disney. And then he and Eileen didn't know they would have their own shop one day. They certainly didn't foresee their creations being used on mega popular TV shows and movies, or that the government would one day ask for their help. Looking back now, they're just glad they had the guts to follow their dream.
I hope you enjoyed this Halloween special episode of Side Hustle School. I want to say a big thank you to my assistant, Whitney Karinek, who spent a ton of time working on this story. Great work, Whitney. If you liked it too, and want to send her a quick note to say thanks, her email is Whitney@sidehustleschool.com. That's Whitney, W-H-I-T-N-E-Y @sidehustleschool.com.
I also hope you have a spooky, successful Halloween. And if it's already taken place, well, I hope it met all your hopes and dreams. By the way, did you hear what happened to the guy who didn't pay his exorcist? It was really bad. He got repossessed.
Today or any day, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Show notes for this special Dapper Kadabra episode are at sidehustleschool.com/304. I'll be back again tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Applause]
