Seven and a half years after Tiffany McMahon opened her first Helena shop, the East Helena native has finally brought Karma Korner home.
McMahon opened the shop’s fourth location in February in her dream venue: the former Creative Stitch building on the corner of Main St. and Montana Ave., across from City Hall. An eclectic novelty and head shop, Karma Korner offers an array of quirky gifts, freeze-dried ice cream bars, hemp and CBD products, hand-blown pipes, glass figurines, tapestries, and much more.
“This is my hometown,” said a delighted McMahon, “where else would I do it?”
Born and raised in East Helena, the 56-year-old McMahon always had an entrepreneurial streak. She began selling clothes on eBay in 2001, as a stay-at-home mom to her two daughters in South Carolina. After moving back to southwest Montana 16 years ago to be closer to family, she threw herself into building her businesses.
Decades ago, her grandmother waited tables at a Main Street restaurant, and her father’s first job was across the street from her new shop, at the now-closed Schiller’s Service Station. McMahon remembers coming into what would become Creative Stitch as a kid to buy candy. Now, she’s the one selling goodies – and more and more of them.
Over the last six months, McMahon has opened three new outlets. The first was Quench Elixir House, a juice and mocktail bar in downtown Helena, last August. Next, a third Karma Korner (in addition to the original Helena spot and another in Bozeman) in Missoula in late January, and finally, the East Helena homecoming.
After serving as Karma Korner’s lone staffer for the shop’s first year and a half of operations, she now manages 26 employees. Her focus on nurturing ambition has resulted in McMahon bonding with her staff and helping enable their professional development.
Her managerial team is almost entirely made up of former Karma Korner shop workers. In a recent interview, she named them one by one, noting their accomplishments, who’s having a baby, and who just moved for the job, her eyes welling up as if they were family.
“We used to have a Sunday dinner at my house, and now we have Zoom meetings on Wednesday,” McMahon said, smiling. “I’m so proud of how well they’re doing.”
Kadrien Eide, general manager at Quench and Karma Korner, has worked for McMahon for five years and appreciates her guidance. “There’s not a lot of bosses out there that are willing to teach you everything that she’s taught me,” said Eide. “She’s just a very good mentor and role model.”
Yet McMahon goes beyond mentoring; she helps her charges fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams. Two years ago, she loaned Eide $1,000 to purchase an embroidery machine to launch Kadz Klosest, a customized embroidery business online. Ema Terry, sales rep at the East Helena Karma Korner, will run her new venture, True Blue Body Piercing, inside the shop – thanks to McMahon’s help landing a piercing apprenticeship.
McMahon seems to brim with pride as she explains her thinking on creating opportunity. “I want this to start out as a job for them and turn into a career,” she said. “It’s hard to get anywhere working from behind a desk…There’s got to be another way, another option.”
McMahon seems attuned to the needs of those around her. When her mom was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, McMahon earned her medical marijuana provider’s license to help her manage the pain. Yet she soon found that Helena-area dispensaries lacked the knowledge, and the products, she sought.
“There’s a lot that isn’t provided in the cannabis plant that’s provided in the hemp plant,” McMahon said.
So in 2019 she opened the first Karma Korner, at the corner of Montana Ave. and Walnut St. in Helena, offering select hemp and CBD products and a broad selection of the gifts and trinkets she’d always loved. “If nothing else, it was gonna help my mom,” said McMahon, which explains why the shop logo is an elephant, her mother’s favorite animal.
Working at Karma Korner, she found it hard to find a place to get a healthy meal or non-alcoholic drink after hours, and decided to open Quench Elixir House, on Last Chance Gulch. The store is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., offering fruit smoothies, sandwiches, and mocktails.
The East Helena location will combine Karma Korner and Quench, with the cafe set to open in late summer and offer a select drinks and food menu. “There are a lot of people who don’t travel too much into town,” McMahon said, referring to Helena. “There needs to be accessibility for both Quench and for Karma Korner.”
Many East Helenans expressed excitement about the new shop on Facebook, while others seemed concerned about its potential impact.“A new vape shop in town,” commented Rick Cherry. “Interesting choice.” Others rushed to defend McMahon and her business.
“The Karma Korner has loads of great stuff. I don’t smoke/vape of any kind of anything and I shop there often,” posted East Helena resident Elizabeth Elise. “We are growing and local businesses deserve to have a shot at thriving.”
McMahon insists Karma Korner is more than a place to nurse vices. “I have so much more than the 18-plus stuff,” McMahon said, gesturing to the main room, full of handmade figurines and kids’ toys like the wildly popular Labubus.
She sells no products containing intoxicating levels of THC, the chemical compound that produces the feeling of being “high”.
“You’ll never see me hanging a vape sign in my window,” said McMahon, adding that she rigorously trains her staff on checking IDs and plans to install an ID scanner for all adult purchases. “You gotta be responsible to the community, and that’s what I want to do.”
Karma Korner’s two 18+ rooms are blocked off by closed doors that have signs designating them as off-limits to underage customers. The first is full of risque gag gifts and snapback caps bedecked with marijuana motifs. The second offers glass bongs, Juul e-cigarette devices, flavored hemp joints, and other smoking paraphernalia.
McMahon plans to install blackout coverings on the glass door entrances to the adult spaces to keep out prying underage eyes. For now, she and her staff arrange the least “adult” products closest to the front windows.
There’s much work to be done before the new East Helena shop is fully operational. The juice bar and cafe need seating, and the cafe’s opening later this year will likely push the shop’s hours, now 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., a bit earlier. The space still felt a bit unfinished in early March, with clerks hanging tapestries and boxes crowding what will become the juice bar. Even so, customers steadily streamed in and out, with many greeting McMahon and staffers by name.
It’s no surprise this was the first location she looked at when she first considered opening a shop in East Helena. Back then, she couldn’t afford the rent. But when the building again became available last June, McMahon jumped at the chance, renting the space long before she had inventory to fill it.
“I’ve wanted to move out here for a long time,” she said. “This just shows growth, that I’m finally able to be out here and provide in East Helena like I wanted to.”
