- Muse Boutique is a new retail incubator in Covington supporting 17 women-owned, product-based businesses.
- The space offers below-market rent and prime storefront access to help entrepreneurs reach customers.
- Businesses like Cora’s Cakery will use the model to test retail demand without full storefront costs.
Entrepreneur Shaucuana Knight is returning to the retail space with the help of Aviatra Accelerators.
Knight is the founder and operator of Cora’s Cakery, a mobile cake bar named after her late grandmother Cora. After operating storefronts in Cincinnati, she moved into Newport’s Incubator Kitchen Collective to reorient her primary business model toward catering and wholesale.
However, Knight told LINK nky that Cora’s Cakery still has plenty of loyal customers who want to buy her products from an accessible storefront. Aviatra’s Muse Boutique is providing that opportunity.
“I’ve had a storefront in downtown Cincinnati and OTR,” Knight said. “Everyone wants a storefront, but there’s a lot that comes with that, overhead, staffing, things like that, so this is an opportunity for me to have that again, since we have gone more catering and wholesale.
Aviatra Accelerators is a Covington-based entrepreneurial nonprofit that supports women-owned startups and small businesses. Muse Boutique, one of its latest initiatives, is a retail incubator based out of Aviatra’s headquarters at 114 W. Pike St. in Covington. The space will host 17 women-owned retail businesses, ranging from cookbooks and scavenger hunts to clothing boutiques and handmade jewelry.
“It’s a new model for early-stage, product-based business owners. The collective marketplace has been done – antique malls and that sort of thing,” Aviatra CEO Jill Morenz said. “It’s a very successful model, but what we have seen is there’s a lot of co-working spaces and opportunities for service-based business owners who can’t yet afford an office, but the gap that we really saw was with the product-based business owners: how are they getting in front of the customers?”
Morenz said the initiative provides product-based businesses with a premier retail space at below-market-rate rent, allowing business owners to access a highly trafficked retail corridor during the busiest shopping seasons of the year. The leases last through the end of 2026.
“They can learn from the customers what is working and what is not working from an offering perspective; what’s popular, what doesn’t sell very well and potentially take it somewhere else or take it to their brick and mortar or maybe even grow with us,” Morenz said.
Morenz believes the success of Poor Charlotte’s Books, founded by Leslie Schicht, led her to be confident that the concept could be expanded. Poor Charlotte’s opened inside Aviatra last October. Schicht said the space helped her attract new customers who were walking by on the street.
“It’s just kind of this wonderful, kind of on the path to other places spot, so a lot of people don’t know about us, but see our sign and come in and we’ll have a nice conversation, talk about books,” Schicht said. “It’s really great.”
One of Muse Boutique’s most exciting prospects is the chance to showcase a wide variety of businesses and products all under one roof, Morenz said. Schicht concurred.
“It was a low-risk way to try this out, and so I rented the space from them, and it’s been phenomenal,” she said. “Aviatra is wonderful with their support, the location’s pretty fantastic.”
Muse Boutique is set to open to the public at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 15 at 3 p.m.
