Smile, Pumpkin | The Story Behind PetriCoffin

This content originally appeared in the 2024 issue of Spooky Little Halloween—The Magazine. All photos are courtesy of Anna Lensch.

The jack-o-lantern water tower shined like a spooky beacon, grinning down at Anna Lensch (she/they) and knowing it would lead her to right to where she belonged: making her living running a Halloween-inspired business.

But she wasn’t there yet. No, in this moment under the grin of a giant pumpkin in the sky, Anna was at a crossroads in her life. Dealing with burn out, depression, and anxiety, she was unsure what to do next. So she’d started taking long drives out of Salt Lake City, up the backroads of Syracuse, Clearfield, and Clinton around the edge of the Great Salt Lake, to clear her head and explore the world a bit.

On this day, she’d happened upon Black Island Farms, a heritage farm home to a fall festival and the largest corn maze in the state. It was nowhere near October, but Anna was flooded with her love of fall and pumpkins, the smell of bonfires, and the memories of the ghostly tops of corn stalks waving in their fields under the moonlight.

“That was one of the moments I realized that there were no rules in life and living,” she says. “I could love and celebrate Halloween anytime I wanted. It truly didn’t matter if it wasn’t the season. I had free will and if it made me happy, I could choose it each and every day.”

And that day, Anna decided to start celebrating ‘a little early.’ “It may seem silly, but that pumpkin water tower helped me realize I had agency in my own life and started my healing process and mental health journey,” she says. “Halloween could be forever, and I could choose myself and my happiness every day if I wanted.”

ENTERING A NEW WORLD

It would take a few tries to get to her thriving handbag business, PetriCoffin. Anna’s first step into the small business world was an Etsy shop called Ink & Fog. She filled it with handmade items, from felted eyeball pillows to jewelry and illustrations.

“I didn’t sell a single thing,” she says, “but it helped me reconnect to making art and doing things with my hands. It helped me build confidence to pursue and deepen my other skills.”

At the same time, she began helping her best friend, Jonathon, with his special fx company, CrowCaw FX. From designing his blood splatter crow logo to photographing his prosthetics and packaging, the work exposed her to the growing Halloween and haunt world. It also gave Anna a window into the world of artists living creative lives in the way she knew she wanted too.

Over time, Anna delved further into the online world of Halloween, following spooky illustrators, small businesses, designers, and influencers on Instagram. She started curating her home to have a spooky feel. She surrounded herself with all things Halloween.

She also began to build a portfolio of all her design work, which led to securing a full-time job as a video producer in 2019. After years of freelance work, it felt like a breath of fresh air to have her skills validated in this way.

“It was everything I wanted — all my talents and skills into one job, and they even found my alternative lifestyle charming and not off-putting,” Anna says. “I was finally becoming financially stable and so very happy…until I wasn’t.”

COMFORT IN HALLOWEEN

The pandemic changed everything for her. In addition to trying to adjust to the new way of the world as a whole, Anna had a hard time adjusting to working from home. By the end of 2020, she had experienced multiple natural disasters in Utah, ended a long-term relationship, and lost three family members.

“My anxiety came back full force, and even doing small everyday things started to feel impossible again,” she says. “One of the only respites I had was the online Halloween community. I poured over everyone’s posts, wanting desperately to be anywhere other than where I was. I needed Halloween more than ever.”

CROSSROADS, REVISITED

In July 2021, Anna found herself at another crossroads. Her life looked nothing like it had just 18 months prior, but this time she had a few more years of life experience to understand that to quell her anxiety and find happiness, she needed to make some changes.

So she quit the video production job, loaded up her car, and moved back home to Butte, Montana to stay in the spare bedroom at her mother’s house.

“After a few days of decompressing, I decided I should take the chance to do what I had tried to do back in 2016 — start my own business and sell things I make,” Anna says.

Her plan: design and sell enamel pins, stickers, and stationary supplies. “To me, these were safer bets than handmade items, as they could be manufactured and were items that I saw to be quite popular. I wanted to lean on my illustration roots.”

To get her work out there and find her audience, she jumped into Halloween Happy’s 100 Days of Halloween Challenge on Instagram. And rather than use her personal account, she unearthed an old one to streamline the content.

The account name? @petricoffin.

PETRICOFFIN RECLAIMED

It may seem offbeat at first, but the name is a mash-up of the words petrichor (the smell of rain on warm, dry earth) and coffin.

“Petrichor is my absolute favorite smell and is the epitome of the changing of the seasons in Utah for me,” Anna says. “Rainy autumn days are my definition of a perfect day, and I wanted to imbue that feeling into everything I did. The name and account seemed perfect to reclaim for my budding brand.”

Her logo speaks to this love as well, with a view of the Wasatch Mountains and blades of grass peeking out of the coffin under a star-lit night sky.

Anna launched her new Etsy shop, but it would take another step or two before she firmly found her footing as a handbag maker. Her new items didn’t sell the way she hoped, but in the meantime, she was spending time at her mom’s small business in Butte, Suzy Q’s Sewing & Repair.

“While hanging around with her one day, I wondered if she could help me make a purse,” Anna says. “My original idea was a candy corn bag made from various batik fabrics. It was intentionally designed to be very different from the many Halloween purses I’d seen, as I was an avid fan of at least 15-20 Halloween purse makers and didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

Though well-skilled, Anna’s mother had never made a purse before. Never one to shy away from a new artistic endeavor, Anna took it upon herself to figure out how to make a pattern that would suit her needs.

“I didn’t have any previous experience with making patterns or sewing much more than two edges together, but I went to work teaching myself how by examining the bags I owned, watching behind the scenes videos posted by other bag makers and sewists, watching manufacturing videos, and deep diving into Google with every vague sewing term I came across.”

Anna and her mom created six candy corn bags in the summer of 2021, but when they launched it was once again crickets. Anna wasn’t worried, though. She knew she had to be patient and moved on to solving another problem: replacing her favorite jack-o-lantern bag from Love Pain and Stitches that was well-loved and past its prime. With her new sewing skills, she decided to try making one herself.

Hopefully, she was ready to make a heck of a lot more.

A VIRAL JACK-O-LANTERN

Round one introduced two designs: a black vinyl pumpkin with an orange velvet face, and a tropical pumpkin made with vintages 80s fabric and a holographic silver vinyl face. Anna made a few social media posts and hoped for the best. If nothing else, she thought, at least they were one more item in her portfolio she genuinely enjoyed making.

Then social media did it’s magical thing and everything changed: on September 21, 2021, Anna had a behind-the-scenes video of making the bags go viral. More than 20,000 views later, her preorders were sold out. She quickly reposted the preorder link, and that round sold out too.

“Originally, I was hoping to sell a handful. Now, I had 200 pumpkins to make all at once and thousands of eyes on me watching me do it,” she says. “It was exhilarating and terrifying, but I tried to grab the moment with both hands and did my best to fulfill orders as best I could, learning how to make a production line, source materials, do business taxes, and provide customer service all at once. PetriCoffin has been my full-time job ever since that day.”

In just three years, Anna has grown her business to offering large and small vinyl bags and large velvet bags in a wide range of colors and prints (more than 200 over her business’ lifetime, to date).

She’s designed a laptop bag in her signature style (the next item on this writer’s wish list) and has even added in a few home goods and quilted Halloween tote bags.

But you can bet, much like the water tower that started the journey, the smiling jack-o-lantern will always be her signature.

Find all her offerings at petricoffin.com.