First off, let us just say: wow. Wow! We can’t believe we made it three years. (And we can’t believe you want to read more about it.) We simultaneously catch ourselves saying, “holy cow, I can’t believe we made it three years!” and “it has been three years already?!” 

 

Partially, it hasn’t felt like three years because of how often we’ve had to reinvent ourselves in order to keep the doors open. After the one year mark, we had to drastically (and sadly) cut our staff and hours. At the two and a half year mark, we had two key team members move on to new, wonderful adventures. These two team members played a massive role in shaping our identity as a bakery. We felt a little lost without them. (And still do at times.) Then, just a few months later, we added an espresso machine. We have had to change and adapt over and over again. 

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Oh.. and our fridge is still broken. It has been almost five months now, we are waiting on a part that is on back order. In theory we could buy a new fridge, but they run about $6,000 and we can’t afford that. So we wait! Having our main fridge back will allow us to do some things that we’ve been eager to do. We plan to do a pizza pop up (at least one) and also ticketed dinner. We just tested out a chorizo and ricotta tortellini with hand rolled pasta and it was a real treat. Fingers crossed that we get it fixed soon! 

 

As we mentioned in the social media post, after three years we are still wrestling with some of the same questions we started out with. Here are some of questions we still have: 

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How do we stay true to who we are when it comes to our menu? 

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We are always wrestling with this one and it is a careful balance. How do we bake things that excite and inspire us while also baking things people want to buy?

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For example: apricot. Our team loves all things apricot. However, whenever we put an apricot baked good in the case you can literally almost hear crickets. There are so many things we are inspired to bake, but there is not always enough people who are interested in eating those same things. We want to expand people’s palates and interests, but we also don’t want to throw away dozens of pastries at the end of the day. 

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We want to play two roles in the community. The primary role is to nurture. We want to feed the people we love good food. We want to serve food that makes people feel good mentally, emotionally, and physically. We want to give you food that is made with love, food made with quality ingredients, and food that tastes good! All three are important. But we also want you to try new things! Almost every day at the bakery, our team is trying something new. Whether it is a new recipe we’re working on or a random, new flavor of chips from the gas station. Exploring new flavors and having a curiosity about food is a big part of who we are.

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We want to bake things that excite us, but this means at times we have menu items that scare people off a little. But in reality? When you compare us to the slew of bakeries you can find in any major city, we are hardly pushing the envelope. The ingredients we use that are labeled as adventurous for our area are commonplace in other cities. 

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The other role we want to play is elevating the standard for restaurants in our area. We should not be the only brick and mortar bakery in our area using local flour. We should not be the only bakery offering vegan soups every day. We should not be the only brick and mortar bakery with sourdough bread as its main product. We want to live in a community where it is the norm to buy bread from local bakeries instead of buying store bought bread.

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What goes on the menu is only part of it, we also try to balance how often the menu changes. Half of our customers seem to say, politely, “We are bored, rotate new things in more often.” And the other half say, again very politely, “You took away my favorite thing!! Please bring it back and keep it back.” 

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There is so much to balance when it comes to choosing a menu, it is such a fine line to walk. We keep trying to find the middle ground, week in and week out, and we definitely don’t feel we have this figured out.

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How do we share on social media and stay authentic? 

 

Let’s be honest, social media is the worst. It is a scourge on society. We loathe it. And here is why: Social media forces you to make a choice. You must choose between being present or capturing the moment. In any given moment, on any given day, you must choose, “Will I be present in this moment, be fully immersed in it and enjoy it for what it is? Or will I pull myself out of the moment to document it, so that I can market to our customers that this moment is happening?” It feels gross just typing that out.

 

How do we stay focused on baking the best loaf of bread possible while also trying to capture the process? What is more important, baking a good loaf of bread or capturing the process of a bad loaf of bread? We could hire someone to capture the process so that we can focus on baking and helping customers, but we are a small team with a tight budget. We can't afford a dedicated team member just for social media. But we see what happens to our sales when we forego social media posts. More posting directly impacts how many customers walk through the door, there is no way around it.

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We are grateful for the ways social media helps us communicate to you all and stay in touch with people, but let’s not pretend like it isn’t exacerbating many of our problems as individuals and as a society. Much of social media is about presenting yourself, your brand (gross word alert) or your product as better than it actually is. It is about faking it, polishing it, obfuscating what is really happening. It is about making things look better than reality and convincing everyone that things always look that way. And our team could not be less interested in playing that awful game. 

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Three years later and we still struggle to find authentic, non-soul sucking ways to participate in social media.

 

Is “Call My Name” by Prince the best R&B song of all time?

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This is an important question. One we wrestle with often. Is it “Call My Name” ?  Is it a dozen other Prince songs? Is it “Don’t Let Go” by En Vogue? Or maybe it is “Charlene” by Anthony Hamilton? Or, quite possibly, is it “Back Together” by Jill Scott?

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The mystery will live on. 

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How do we become sustainably profitable? 

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This is a tough one. We are yet to find a book or a resource that tells you how to run a business the way we would like to run our business. How do you reach profitability without exploitation? How do we keep prices accessible to all walks of life AND pay a livable wage? What is the right mixture of pastries, sandwiches, lattes, and loaves to sell? Should we focus more on bread? Should we focus more on lunch? Do we do more bread classes? We keep tweaking, and then analyzing, to try to see where are efforts are best rewarded. But money is only one kind of reward. We don't want to be profitable but hate coming into work every day. There has to be a balance. 

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We believe the world would be a better place if people bought local bread, made with local ingredients. But the infrastructure isn’t quite there yet. Anything local is more expensive, there is no way around it. So how do we buy local, but stay affordable? We don’t know. We will keep trying to figure it out.

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Bonus Round: Questions We Often Hear.

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In this last section I'd like to address some of the most common questions we hear. The problem is, we often hear them in passing or at the register and we don't have the time to go in depth and answer them appropriately.

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How come you're only open three days? Will you open more days?

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We hear it all the time, “this location must be great!” It is indeed a great location. We love it here. It is a central location. We’ve created, and keep working to create, a space that feels welcoming. We want an interior that captures who we are. But there is a myth that downtown gets a lot of foot traffic, but that sadly is not the case. Downtown is often busy at night, but during the day it is often a ghost town.

 

We are only open three days because there are not enough people downtown Sunday through Wednesday. Trust us, we are often in the building those days. We have spent many a morning working Sunday through Wednesday and there is no one walking by. To put it into perspective, we used to be open seven days a week. We went from being open seven days to only three. So you think our weekly revenue would be cut in half, at least. But in reality our revenue only dipped about 15%. Meaning, there was hardly any business to be had those other days. 

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Also, we have had people say, “Once those apartments are finished down the block, things will pick up.” As if new apartments are a cure- all that magically generates sales. It just isn’t true. We have had the two apartment buildings open. One across the street, above Raygun, and then the units down the street at Bucktown. This has gained us three to four new regulars who spend around $8 a day. So each new apartment equals $30-40 of sales a day. That is a far cry from a cure-all. That being said, we absolutely love standing out front in the morning before we open and sipping on our coffees, to be a part of a growing neighborhood, and to see people off as they are leaving for work.

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How do the street fairs and events effect business?

 

The vendor markets are fun! And downtown sees an increase in foot traffic, which is fun to see, but it isn’t that simple. There might be a huge percent increase in foot traffic, but there is also a huge increase in vendors. There is only so much money to go around. There is more money spent, but it is divided between 50 vendors instead of the eight to ten brick and mortar businesses. On top of that, we are very much a regular-driven business. We have our Saturday crowd that comes literally every Saturday. When there is a street fest, almost all of our regulars don't make it in. That means even if we did get a boost from the extra foot traffic, it isn't enough to cover the loss of not having our regulars. Last year for BIX, for example, we stood out front and tried to sell lemonades. We spent a lot of money prepping for about 100 lemonades. We sold about 10, ha! We lost a lot of money that day. It is tricky. We are still strategizing on how to join in on the street fests.

 

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! It has been a while since we’ve had time to share any type of business update and offer a glimpse into the many things we are thinking about and discussing as a group.

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We want to re-iterate just how thankful we are to get to do this. We are thankful that we get to wrestle with these tough questions. Here is hoping for another year of baking and cooking and feeding this community!

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-The Team at Blue Spruce