Hello and good day!
***
For the longest time, we’d been doing all this hard work, taking risks, making sacrifices in the name of a family business.
It never occurred to us that we didn’t even know who was eating our chocolate or how profoundly good it would feel to know them.
I sometimes tell Brian that maybe we should have been working our current model all along.
He responds that maybe we weren’t ready for it.
Maybe we needed a story to tell.
Maybe we needed to feel the absence of interacting with our customers to truly appreciate it.
Maybe so.
For me personally, our forced pivot made me feel that my dad and I had stepped out from a giant shadow that had followed our lives.
That now we are doing what we were born to do.
Welcoming our customers in, giving them something wonderful to eat, getting to know them.
Living the legacy of my grandfather, Victor Wick.
E-commerce went well in 2020 and got off to a fast start in 2021.
We had outgrown the space we’d rented.
However, after being furloughed two summers in a row, our excellent and loyal fulfillment team didn’t think they could stay with us through another hiatus.
Some other companies might just accept that fulfillment is a seasonal, high-turnover position.
We’re used to team members staying with us over the long haul.
That’s how we like it.
The folks who run our team in Peru have been with us from the very start.
Our mantra in Peru was to never leave our partners.
That’s what we wanted in the United States too.
We brainstormed solutions for more fulfillment space and how to keep our team working in the summer.
An agent took us on a tour of available spaces.
The first place we saw was three times too big for our current needs, but standing in it, an idea hit us.
Why not open a chocolate shop in this space?
We could do online fulfilment in one corner and sell chocolate to the public in the rest.
There were big problems with this concept.
We only had three products to sell online: our dark chocolate and two milk chocolates in the big 1.1-lb. bricks from Felchlin.
Who in their right mind makes a trip to a chocolate shop with such a limited selection?
Also, the space was in an industrial area with no foot traffic.
Last but certainly not least, retail was going through its worst downturn in history because of the pandemic.
All valid reasons to say no.
But we had a great team, and none of us wanted to lose even a single player.
It appeared we’d have enough space to build a kitchen and start making additional products.
Perhaps our team could work on new product ideas, and we could come up with cold treats to sell in the shop during the hot weather.
As for the foot-traffic issue, I pledged to do whatever it took to get people into the shop.
I’d run digital advertising.
I’d walk around handing out flyers.
I’d beg and plead.
And the icing on the cake: we’d give away free hot chocolate all day every day to lure visitors in.
Our little town of Issaquah is very supportive of locally owned businesses.
We’d just have to get the word out.
In November 2021, we moved into our new, bigger space and opened the world’s most austere chocolate shop.
In one corner, we had a shipping station with a table and shipping supplies.
In another corner, we had a bunch of chocolate sitting on wooden pallets, just as it comes from the manufacturer.
Running through the middle of this big empty room was a counter that Nery built with kitchen cabinets and butcher block from Home Depot.
She painted the counter baby blue.
On the counter we had jars filled up with samples of our three products along with a hot chocolate machine.
That was the whole shopping experience when we opened.
Customers came into a big empty room with Peruvian music playing on a Bluetooth speaker.
We offered them a free hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows.
It took us fifteen tries to come up with a perfect hot chocolate recipe.
In the end, it was two parts dark chocolate and one part milk chocolate melted into water using a small hot chocolate machine we purchased on Amazon.
Customers could sample the three products on the counter and buy a 1.1-pound block of chocolate.
Our first customers thought the whole setup was a bit weird, and I don’t blame them.
But it wasn’t as weird as processing cacao in an old parking lot in northern Peru or sleeping in a room full of roaches.
That’s how it goes.
You just get started and figure it out as you go along.
***
Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day.
Adam
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