For weeks, regular visitors to downtown Wrightsville Beach have noticed an addition to the south side of the Kohl’s Frozen Custard building: a newly built glass door flanked by signs promising “espresso and fossils” within. On April 21, the shop’s owner, Audrey Longtin, will open the doors to customers, culminating a two-year journey that led her here from her hometown of Montreal.
Longtin’s business, The Workshop, will sell sharks’ tooth jewelry and gourmet coffee, combining two of her passions — one newly discovered and one from her roots. The edible side of the business was inspired by her French-Canadian upbringing.
Her mom owns a restaurant, she said, so she grew up around that industry. Longtin’s menu reflects her hometown, too. She’ll offer frappes, cappuccinos, sandwiches and pastries. She envisions early morning walkers and tourists stopping in to pick up croissants by the bagful to take home to their families.
“This is something from my culture,” she said. “French pastries, croissants and coffee are always part of the morning, so I would like to introduce that here in Wrightsville Beach.”
The other side of Longtin’s business, the handmade sharks’ tooth jewelry, stems from a more recently acquired passion. She has amassed a collection of teeth while scuba diving off the North Carolina coast, but she found her first tooth just two years ago.
She first came to Wrightsville Beach in 2014 after earning a degree in Montreal. The trip was meant to be a visit, she said, but she decided to earn her scuba diving certification while she was here. At the scuba class she met her boyfriend, Chris Slog, who was one of the instructors.
She decided to extend her trip for the rest of the summer.
Slog has extensive experience collecting sharks’ teeth on scuba expeditions, including ancient 6-inch-long teeth from the extinct Megalodon. He took Longtin on one of his expeditions and she was hooked.
“I was like, ‘This is amazing! I want to do this,’” she said.
They usually find the teeth at specific sites either 25 or 40 miles offshore, she said, where the water is about 100 feet deep. Sometimes, finding one tooth is a sign there are others in the area, she said, so if they find several teeth at the same location they’ll go back over and over again. But, she added, even once they’ve found a promising dive site, finding the teeth takes “patience and luck.”
For many sharks’ tooth collectors, the larger the tooth, the better the find, she said. But since her sharks’ teeth are now intended for jewelry, she’s more interested in the quality of the tooth than the size.
The Workshop will sell large sharks’ teeth, but the eccentricity of Longtin’s business model involves the small teeth. Customers will be able to choose a tooth and a type of jewelry and Longtin will custom make it. She’ll even dip the teeth in gold or silver.
“You pick your tooth and then go to another display and choose your type or length of chain … so you end up with the perfect necklace for you,” she explained.
After months of diving for sharks’ teeth with Slog, Longtin experienced the final serendipitous encounter that led to The Workshop’s creation. She met the owner of Kohl’s Frozen Custard and learned the shop had a 400-square-foot spare storage room in which she could make her business idea a reality.
Over the past few months, she and Slog renovated the interior and added a window, a door and signage. And with those final touches, her brief stay in Wrightsville Beach became indefinite.
“The location is perfect, so I decided to stay,” she said, “and I’m very happy about that.”
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