The Best Kind of Co-Dependence

Two parents. Four (and a half) children. Three dogs. Two(ish) cats. Twenty-four assorted reptiles and amphibians. Unknown numbers of houseplants.
Sounds like pure chaos, right? Now, throw in two successful but wildly different small businesses.

Meet Shea and Conor Dardis, ringleaders of the aforementioned chaos and owners of Wandering Roots Markets and Thirst & Co., respectively.

If you live in Fort Worth, you are surely aware of Wandering Roots Markets. From pop-up artisan markets at small businesses like Tulips FTW and Funky Picnic to the wildly popular seasonal markets in the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, Wandering Roots Markets led the way for pop-up vendor markets in our area. And while Conor and Thirst & Co. might not be a household name (yet), their design work, both for corporate and creative clients, is seen all over.

photo credit: Carolyn Morris/OMG Photostuff

In fact, you’re holding an example of Thirst & Co.’s designs in your hands right now.

Conor has been the lead designer for Madeworthy for over half of our existence. He’s the genius behind our layouts and our branding. If you enjoy reading Madeworthy, you have Conor to thank. We may provide the content, but he makes us look GOOD.

But how does a boy from Ireland meet a girl from Waco and become parents and owners of two small businesses in Fort Worth?

Born and raised in Waco, Shea wanted to move to Austin or Fort Worth. “I was on Google looking for jobs, putting my resume in envelopes and mailing them to businesses in Fort Worth and Austin. I just happened to get an interview in Fort Worth first.”

A Fort Worthian since 2005, Shea can’t imagine life anywhere else. “I’m a Fort Worth gal through and through,” she said. “The most magical thing happened when I first moved here. I didn’t know anybody. A girl I worked with said, ‘Hey, I play guitar, and I’m going to play at a little bar called The Moon after work. Wanna come?’ Until then, it had been just me and my pit bull, so I said, ‘Oh my gosh, yes!'”

“That night, I met all of the people I’m close friends with today,” Shea said. “I feel like I finally found my people.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Conor was busy pursuing music and design. There is a strong storytelling tradition in Ireland, and Conor is a master storyteller in his music and his art. While in Dublin, he did design work with “some big car brands with Coca-Cola and things like that.” (Conor is nothing if not self-effacing.) After the ultimate meet-cute, he left Dublin for the wilds of Texas.

“I love telling the story of how we met – it was such a fluke,” Shea said. “I was a single mom. I wasn’t looking for anything. It was just me and Jo (Johanna, age 13), and I was happy. I found Conor on Instagram, where he was mostly posting song lyrics and stuff, and I made a comment on one of his posts. He started following me, and I started following him. Then I accidentally unfollowed him.”

Conor interrupted, “No, I accidentally unfollowed you.”

“That’s right! He accidentally unfollowed me, but then he re-followed me, which confused me. So I sent him a message, asking if I had offended him somehow. He messaged me back, and that was it. We immediately clicked. We started talking 24/7.”

photo credit: Carolyn Morris/OMG Photostuff

That was in July of 2015. By November of 2015, Conor came to visit for the first time. “All the clichés and romantic movies? They were happening,” Shea said. “He kept rescheduling his flight back. After that, he would come visit every couple of months.”

It was when he was visiting Shea that Conor met his future business partners. “My two best friends here, outside of Shea, are Kris and Levi, who now work with me. They’re really like my brothers. To find that sort of kinship when you’re older and thinking about moving somewhere unknown is quite unique.”

After deciding they wouldn’t move Johanna away from her family and friends, Conor moved to Fort Worth in 2017. Or maybe 2016. They can’t agree on the date. Now they have Johanna, Amelia (age six), Ada (age five), and Sophie (age two). Plus the dogs and cats and reptiles and amphibians.

Owning one small business requires immense sacrifice. Finding a balance between work life and family life is always difficult because you’re the boss. If anything goes wrong, it’s your job to fix it. Multiply that by two, and things get exponentially more challenging. Yet Shea and Conor manage to make everything work.

“My background is in property management,” Shea said as we enjoyed a rare child-free afternoon. “I worked in property management for 17 years before I was able to become a stay-at-home mom. The plan was that I would quit to work alongside Conor. We would have a couples’ business.”

“We had a home office and everything,” Shea laughed. “Within three or four months of my quitting, 2020 happened.”

Conor chimed in, “When the pandemic hit, we realized things were going to change quite dramatically. There was a moment when the kids were all home because the schools were closed, and we realized we needed to have a conversation. We decided if we were going to get through this, Shea would take over more of the day-to-day parenting so I could work on continuing to build the business.”

photo credit: Carolyn Morris/OMG Photostuff

The worldwide Covid pandemic was brutal for everyone, but it hit small businesses particularly hard. “I still had some clients in Europe,” Conor said. “One of them was going through a rebrand at the time, which really helped. They were using that time to look internally and make some changes; I helped them through the rebranding process, which kept us going.”

While at home during the pandemic, Shea started focusing on growing houseplants. “I’ve always been a plant person, but like a lot of people during the pandemic, I really started getting into them. I started learning about things like propagation because I was bored at home. But then what was I going to do with these 25 cuttings I had? So I started doing vendor markets.”

It was at a vendor market that Shea met Maria Arriaga, who would become her business partner and soul sister.

“This [Wandering Roots Markets] was just supposed to be a November/December thing,” Shea remembered. “Maria was a full-time vendor, but I was just dabbling, selling houseplants to give me something to do during Covid. We decided to do a few pop-up markets to help small businesses and vendors because nothing was going on. All the people who did vendor markets for a living had nowhere to go, and small businesses in town were struggling.”

What was supposed to be a temporary thing to help people make it through the holidays became a hit. “We did safe everything – distancing, hand sanitizers everywhere, we were very strict on masks… People felt guilty for going out, so we provided a safe space for vendors to sell their goods, for small venues to get some business, and for people to get out of the house and shake off the funk of 2020.”

Both businesses hit a sweet spot in 2021. As the world came back online, more companies needed rebranding. And the music scene in Fort Worth had discovered Conor’s creative work. His posters and album covers are immediately recognizable for their cool retro vibes. “That’s one thing I wish people knew,” Shea said. “People may see his cool retro music stuff, but Thirst is so much more than that. He can do the beautifully clean corporate branding designs. He really can do anything!”

The problem with owning a small business is that when tragedy strikes, the business has to go on because the rest of the world goes on. In October of 2022, Maria Arriaga died of a brain aneurysm.

“Maria was the first person I talked to in the morning, aside from Conor,” Shea said. “She was usually the last person I talked to at night, aside from Conor. I told her most things before I told Conor. After she died, my first thought was, ‘I quit.'”

“You told me that Maria wouldn’t want you to quit,” Conor interrupted gently.

“No. And if I were the one who had passed away, Maria would still be out there doing the markets,” Shea admitted. “The incredible outpouring of love from our community – all the businesses we worked with and the relationships we made – made me see all the positive things these markets do for people. I’m just trying to continue [Wandering Roots] for our legacy and all the small businesses. I’ve watched people go from their first market with us to having a little shopfront. I live for that stuff.”

“See, you say you’ve lost your passion,” Conor said. “But just then, when you were talking about it, your passion is very clear.”

But the hits just kept on coming. When Shea was pregnant with their fifth child, scans revealed that the child had Trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder that is almost always fatal within the first year of life. Shea and Conor named their son Aiden Jude and, while hoping for the best, prepared for the worst. They lost AJ on June 18, 2023.

“When we lost our best friend, when we lost our son, we couldn’t take off the time to grieve,” Conor said. “We both have small businesses, and we’ll stop making money.”

photo credit: Carolyn Morris/OMG Photostuff

The couple turned to each other and their work for support. Conor said, “We get through difficult things by leaning into the reality of the mundane. We’ll get through what we have to do during the day and worry about things when we have 30 minutes at the end of the day. We would reconnect after the girls were in bed. A lot of our grieving for AJ happened on the couch at 10 pm when one of us would start talking about him. It was like, ‘I’m here with my person, and I can tell her what I’m feeling.'”

“There’s a public face and a private face to grief,” Conor continued. “The world moves on, but I couldn’t really get out there and pursue new business. And I know there were days when Shea needed me to stay home, but because she has her own business, she understood the need for me to do the work.”

“We have a greater appreciation for the flexibility of being our own bosses now,” Shea added.

“There’s normalcy in the work, and it helps ground you,” Conor said.

Now Shea is pregnant again. “This is the last baby. It really is. I didn’t want any more children until I met Conor, and now I want all the children. But this is the last one.” The baby is due on June 11, 2024.

I get overwhelmed with two children. What these two people have been through in the last two years is unimaginable. The fact that they can smile and laugh is remarkable. When I said something about controlling the chaos of family and work without losing their collective minds, Shea and Conor laughed. “There’s a joke in our house if we’ve over-ordered supplies or over-bought at the store. We say, ‘We’ll get through it.’ Now, it’s become our family motto.”

To have kept both businesses going through grief while being good parents and good spouses is a pretty amazing achievement. But Conor and Shea take it in stride.

Shea explained, “We respect the fact that we’re both running completely different businesses. I don’t see the world like he does with his creative brain.”

“Being a creative person is not what most people think it’s like. The whole obsessive-compulsive nature of creative industries can be difficult,” Conor said. “Sometimes I’ll come home, and Shea wants to talk about the kids and her job, but my brain is still fully focused on a project I’m working on. I can’t turn it off.”

“But he’s definitely my right-hand man,” Shea continued. “I can’t go for an hour without texting him, and he can’t go for an hour without texting me.”

Conor smiled. “It’s the best kind of co-dependence.”