Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Koral Casillas & Michela Ricci of Central Phoenix

We recently had the chance to connect with Koral Casillas & Michela Ricci and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Koral & Michela , thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: What is a normal day like for you right now?
A normal day for us right now begins at our newly opened coffee shop, Strip Mall. We open during the week at 7am and on the weekends at 8am. Today we’ll start with our favorite drink of the moment, a pistachio latte and pair it with a “fun guy” crepe from La Rue. This combo is the best way to start our day! You can find La Rue every Saturday & Sunday from 9am until 2pm.

After we spend some time catching up on emails and planning our upcoming events, we will hop over to open up Monsoon Market for the day. Every time we open the doors we are greeted with a room full of our favorite things. To us, it feels like home in here. We’re joined by our lovely team members who share in making the market special. We light an incense and spend our shift welcoming in newcomers and market regulars, helping them shop for any occasion and showing off our natural wine selection. We host complimentary wine tastings every weekend for our guests. After work we’re either excited to head home with our favorite bottle and relax, or to be stepping out in the city to visit our favorite local businesses in Phoenix!

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
We’re Koral Casillas and Michela Ricci, co-founders of Monsoon Market and Strip Mall. Our decade long friendship leveled up into a business partnership in 2021 when we opened up Monsoon Market. Located in central Phoenix, we wanted to be a neighborhood market highlighting both local faves and hard-to-find items from outside the city. We took everything we could imagine from natural wine, gifts, books, flowers, pantry items, vintage home decor to non-alcoholic drinks and more, and put it under one roof. We filled our store with thrifted furniture and our walls with local art. We spend our weekends hosting special events like aura photos, yoga, snack sampling and so much more. It’s incredible to see how Monsoon Market interacts with it’s community as a contributor and less like a business.

Proud of what we’ve built and ready to do more, we decided to expand into the empty suite next door. The old cafe space was calling to us and our background in coffee gave us the confidence to make it ours. We decided to name the coffee shop Strip Mall, which was originally a joke that turned into a legit concept. It’s more than a coffee shop, it’s a third space and a venue for the community we’ve built here. It’s an extension of Monsoon Market while establishing it’s own identity with time. We’re so excited to see where this new space takes us, all of us.

Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
The relationship between us has continued to shape us individually in great ways. Having begun as friends who met at work, we’ve always had a strong bond over working hard and having fun. After working together initially, we both moved on to new roles and we supported each other more in our personal lives throughout this time. We watched each other celebrate some really big wins and this continued support from one another was reassurance. We built confidence by cheering each other on, sometimes up close and sometimes from the distance. Now, as business partners for nearly 4 years, we continue to grow in this relationship each day. We spend a lot of time together and we talk about everything. We continue to learn from each other, looking at ourselves through the lens of someone we love and respect. It’s shaped how we see ourselves in real, special ways.

When did you last change your mind about something important?
When we opened Strip Mall we were dead set on being offline. We didn’t want to be another Instagram brand, focused on constantly feeding the algorithm for clicks. We wanted the coffee shop to be an IRL spot, an “if you know, you know” spot. But after 6 months of resisting the urge to use our social accounts more, we recently gave in. We understand that society spends a lot of time online discovering new things in their neighborhood, and we do really want to be found. So, follow us on IG @stripmallphx !!

Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
“You gotta spend money to make money” — We’d like to debunk this theory and encourage entrepreneurs to spend their initial funds wisely and to get to their first sale as fast as possible. Pay attention and you will figure the rest out, and it doesn’t need to cost you a lot.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
This question is major to us. It’s something we keep top of mind and it guides us in business. We strive to be people, and a business, who put on for Phoenix and that people want to work with. We ride hard for our city and when we’re gone we hope that our legacy in PHX is one of commitment and inspiration. We hope that Monsoon Market and Strip Mall are synonymous with the creative Phoenix community. We hope that people look back to our spaces and to this time period as one that left a lasting mark and positive impact on their experience in the city, whether they were traveling through or as a resident in Phoenix.

Contact Info:

• Website: monsoonmrkt.com // stripmallphx.com
• Instagram: @monsoonmrkt // @stripmallphx
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@monsoonwrld

Image Credits
all photos by Monsoon Market