First 3 months in the Shop

Like a baby, we referred to the store in number of weeks until about 7 weeks :) 

The good: 

• We can finally meet our customers in person! We have quite a rare and unique relationship with many of our customers - often I find myself chatting with them on Instagram at length. About flavor development, inspiration, and life. I’ve gotten to know so many of you kind souls over the years, and finally, my staff get to meet you in the brick & mortar :) Thanks so much for making us a part of your week, visiting us from afar, bringing you friends and family - it’s because of you that we can continue doing this work!
• The Los Gatos community is welcoming and then some! They are so curious and invested in their community and the businesses in it! I don’t think we could’ve found a better first store location. We're enjoying meeting you and your families, and chatting about the business :) 
• The scope of work is massive compared to a home bakery and nothing thrills me more. We’re beyond lucky to have Lawrance for the financial and business strategy parts - those are the aspects that I don’t talk because I don’t really do them. Going from home bakery to store, some things that are different are: the sheer scale of operations (and figuring out what we need to optimize vs be flexible on), training and managing a higher volume of staff, keeping product quality high across everyone, payroll and managing labor cost + optimizing staff schedules, managing the online and physical store experience, advertising, finding vendors to help us fix equipment, maintaining equipment, and being more mindful of our slow and busy seasons.
• Production: In 3 months' time, we've done what would've taken us 2 years in the home bakery. Our 5 years of experience is paying dividends, along with an incredibly busy first week. On the outside, we had massive lines during our soft & grand open, but our back of house was like a kitchen nightmare with so many cooks in the kitchen running around with their heads cut off. The learning curve was like drinking from a firehose. It helped us standardize how we do our morning and subsequent bakes and figure out how to schedule our production and staffing. Today it already feels like a well-oiled machine. We're gearing up for our busy season now.
• The team: Our team is incredibly growth and optimization-oriented, so we’ve obsessively dialed in our production planning, staffed properly to optimize for efficiency, and we’ve been doing okay on ordering ingredients. We started training staff last year and I’ve been practicing managing a team over the last few years, so all the process and documentation is coming in handy :”) I’m very grateful to be able to leave the store in capable hands.
• Having our own space: I think the nature of having your own space comes as a double-edged sword. On one hand, things break constantly and we’re responsible for fixing them, and things get dirty so quickly. But it’s a privilege to have a dedicated space, to keep it clean and tidy, to maintain our equipment, and to keep our front of house looking on-brand and beautiful. Nothing makes me more content than to finish our weekly and monthly deep cleanings even at the end of consecutive long shifts. I refuse to abuse our kitchen and to make it a space that people don’t want to work in. There are a lot of gross, disorganized kitchens and ours won’t ever reach that point.
• Sidenote: I am also in awe of how the front of house came together; it is so beautiful and such an ode to cookies!!! And the florals that my sister in law did brighten the space alongside the super cute mural my friend Emily drew! And the kitchen is just the right size for us. To all who graced our store with flowers in the last 3 months - thank you so so much!
• Staying true to the brand: When we ran the home bakery, it was 99% online pre-order, so all of our customers knew that we were very technical and iterative as a brand but I feared we might lose some of this when we opened the shop. But we’ve stayed really true to this and been able to communicate with our customers through our staff,  Instagram and email - and through our new limited drops!!

The bad (ish):

• Business is seasonal. As we know from the last 5 years from the home bakery, summers have always been slower, but it’s a little scarier in the storefront. The stakes are higher and the stress is more (how’s my blood pressure? I don’t want to know!). It gave me the time to test flavors more quickly and to start the limited drops - we launched our first one in August: The Summer Box. These drops are meant to be thematically curated or to show you what we’re working on, include exclusive merch, off-menu items, and more. Had it been really busy, we may not have had the time to do our first one! I’m really excited to do more of these.
• With more staff come more volatility. People get sick, call out on short notice, quit out of nowhere, etc.
• The responsibility to absorb everyone’s mistakes. For years I have accepted that the owners / the brand takes on the staff’s mistakes. While we do have quite a low error rate / low percentage of lost batches, it hurts when it happens and it is still on me to eat the cost and see how we can avoid it in the future. I think I’ve gotten used to this though but it’s not something people often talk about.

The ugly: everything breaks at scale

• Everything everywhere all at once. We’ve had our mixers break a couple times already, but on one single day, our toilet overflowed, our A/C was dripping (actually it had been dripping for 3 weeks…), AND a mixer broke all on the same day while someone missed their shift. I expected this level of hazing but it was not fun.
• It’s expensive. the normal costs are high and we budget for them, but when random stuff like the toilet breaks, those costs can be pricey and we can’t really not pay if we don’t know how to do it ourselves.