Fins Up: Mermaids on Cape Cod

Mermaids on Cape Cod’s mobile boutique is available to host for your mermazing party or event. Photo courtesy of Shari Aussant

What’s proven to be her most impactful collaboration is that with her customers. Prior to Mermaids on Cape Cod, Aussant spent 27 years running the Old Company Store in Wareham, where she sold her own jewelry as well as crafts made by area artists. In 2013 she launched the Mermaid on Cape Cod mobile boutique, continuing her desire to bring together locally made products all in one place—this time on a converted miniature school bus, painted teal and depicting her custom mermaid logo. She made T-shirts featuring the mermaid image, and people loved the design so much they started asking for more of it. Tank tops, sweatshirts, hats and beach towels soon followed.

“We started having a lot of fun with it, like wearing mermaid crowns when we went places and wearing the seashells and the mermaid skirts,” she says. “The more we started having fun with it, the more we started connecting our look and our brand and creating this amazing little thing—this little group of women on Cape Cod who all believe that they’re mermaids. And we are mermaids! We all come from the sea.”

For Aussant, seeing her customers—her friends, as she calls them—get excited about a product makes her all the more excited. “A lot of these shirts I’ll ask them to help me design,” she says. “And then the person who started the design gets the first one for free. It’s all of us growing together in this brand, and when they tire of something they say, ‘C’mon, let’s make something new.’”