About Us

Who We Are

We're a small (but growing) operation born out of a passion for our arachnids and for providing great customer service.  We DEMAND that we give our customers the best possible "critters" in the best possible health.  We strive to have a large selection, but please drop us an email if there is something in particular you are looking for - this is one of the ways we figure out what arachnids are in demand.

We're located in Goose Creek, SC, a suburb of Charleston.  We don't have a "storefront" or location that can be visited but we are willing to meet local customers at a safe location.  Usually when I meet someone locally, I’ll bring along a number of each species you want so that you can pick and chose the exact one you want.

Thank you again for your interest,
Erik Wisniewski (pronounced Wiz-Nes-Ski)
Pinchers & Pokies Exotics, LLC




Interested in selling your arachnids?  We are always interested in wholesale pricing on your critters - just contact us and we can talk about purchase/trades.

Our History

Pinchers & Pokies Exotics, LLC is a small business that started in October of 2012.

My fiancé (at the time) asked if she could bring her son’s tarantulas over to my house to keep them safe.  I set the five of them up in my spare bedroom, aka computer room.  When I came home from work and was surfing the net, I found myself leaning back in the chair watching the T’s instead of actually working on the computer. 

​At first, I was skittish about feeding them and messing with the roaches she’d bring over, and I’d make her do it.  I found it fascinating to watch them stalk and attack the roaches! 

A few months later she took me to a Repticon in Charlotte, NC, and we came home with a bunch of slings. Let the addiction begin!

At the next Repticon, in Columbia, SC we came home with a bunch of scorpions, including a few Emperors and a few Desert Hairy’s, and now we had some new pets!

I simply couldn’t say no to my former wife, so we managed to amass a bit of a menagerie of different critters.   Over time, we started to purchase three to five of each species, as we wanted females (as everyone does), and we would sell the “extras” after sexing out a female.

Through lots of trial and error, we started to figure out that we had very advantageous skill sets for a business.  Namely, we had years and years of both customer service and shipping experience.  Originally, we just booked a table or two at our local reptile shows so we can sell directly to our customers in person.  When we would receive an incoming shipment from a supplier, we would quickly judge who knew what they were doing, and who didn’t.  Of course, we thought, we can do this!

Once we started the website and began shipping, we knew we wanted to grow SLOWLY.  We’ve all heard stories of businesses that just simply got in over their head’s and just couldn’t keep up.  Sure, we’d love to purchase THOUSANDS of slings at a time, but we were smart enough to know that we would have to maintain all of those slings, so we just had to take baby steps. 

Eventually, I realized that vending at reptile shows was just too much.  As much as I loved interacting with our customers, I knew I was at a crossroads.  Basically, I knew that I couldn’t both run the website, shipping orders, AND vend at reptile shows.  Coincidentally, my beautiful, amazing daughter arrived in March of 2020 (sounds like I ordered her from Amazon, doesn’t it?), and a newborn in my life is a lot to handle with all the requirements of vending at the reptile shows.  So, Pinchers & Pokies Exotics is now solely an online store, and I’ve decided to concentrate all my time and efforts to this endeavor.  Maybe someday I’ll decide to start vending at shows again, or maybe someday I’ll take the plunge and try to open a brick-and-mortar location, who knows what’s in the future?  I sure didn’t expect to be doing this back when I was in college, or I would have chosen to major in something other than music production!

Personally, I love doing research, and I have been working on a GIANT spreadsheet project with as much information as I can find for EVERY tarantula and scorpion.  A bit ambitious, huh?  The benefit of this is that while doing all of my research, I’ve certainly added a huge amount of knowledge, and I’ve been able to keep up on all of the legal aspects of the business.  When you take a look at the name of our business, it’s obvious that one of my first “loves” are the Poecilotheria (Pokies) genus.  Since the Sri Lankan species have been added to the International Endangered Species list, it is no longer legal to ship them over state lines.  So, any Sri Lankan Poecilotheria species we carry in much smaller quantities.  However, since they are an “endangered species”, that makes me want to continue to breed them for the health and longevity of the species!

We're constantly researching and discovering new stuff about our arachnids, and we love talking to other "arachnid passionate" people.