Three sisters ditch their jobs and go into the bakery business together.
After years of traditional (and in the case of my sisters – lengthy!) education, which led each of us to traditional jobs in finance and the law, we collectively kissed the conventional world goodbye, pooled our money and bought Ruby et Violette, a tiny bakery in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen.
Everybody asked us if we knew what we were doing. Bekah, the middle sister with a master’s degree in applied mathematics, was due to have her first child within weeks. Jenji, the eldest and a corporate lawyer, had no desire to bake cookies all day and by her own admission, did not function well at pre-dawn hours. As for me – I was getting divorced, and all my stuff was in storage – so on top of figuring out how to run this new business, I had to find a place to live – but what better way to motivate yourself!
As the contract to buy Ruby et Violette was being finalized, everyone we knew tried to dissuade us from taking this radical step: “You guys, not only don’t know anything about running a business, you know NOTHING about baking – so what are you thinking?” “Do you realize that you’re not going to have a life outside of this business for at least 2 years?” And my favorite: “Remember that donut commercial from the eighties, where the poor guy has to schlep out of bed in the middle of the night to make the donuts –you get that that’s going to be you, don't you?”
They were right – on every score. But we had always thought it would be a great idea for the three of us to go into business, because we had such different strengths and talents – and seriously – how hard could it really be??
Ah, what naivete!
Our days began by 5am and ended around midnight, each one filled with nonstop dishwashing, mopping, scrubbing, selling, packaging, shipping, baking, batter making, negotiating with vendors, drawing up business plans and meeting with web designers, credit card processors, and corporate clients. At first, we had no employees, so we were in a constant state of exhaustion. Everything hurt – from our minds, tired of trying to figure out the mess of files that had been left to us, to our aching arms and backs from lugging 25lb vats of batter and 50lb flour deliveries. “One day,” I said to Jenji as I mopped the floor late one night, “when Ruby et Violette is a household name, we’ll look back at these days and laugh.”
That first year, I spent every waking moment ordering foods from all over the world and experimenting with recipes to find the perfect ingredients for each of our new creations, until we had over 100 flavors of chocolate chunk cookies.
Our first holiday season, proved us victims of our own success. We had to stop accepting orders during first week of December and were forced to close our doors to walk-in customers, when gift boxes, packaged to ship from coast to coast, took over the entire front of our small shop and required round the clock use of our only oven. It was painful to have to turn away business, but we simply couldn’t handle the demand.
With our sights set on turning Ruby et Violette into a household name, we embarked on numerous projects over the following year. We found commissary space in Queens, New York, where we created offices and hired professional French pastry chefs to help create new lines of handmade, small batch ice creams, sorbets, coffee and chocolate drinks to accompany our famous cookies and brownies. We stripped our worn-out Hell’s Kitchen shop to the studs to create a beautiful café. We created a new personalized website to allow easy ordering from across the country. And most importantly, we redesigned the brand, creating a new logo and award winning packaging – including a line of favor boxes to cater to our ever-growing requests for parties, weddings and corporate events.
Each of those tasks, from dealing with contractors and designing a café, to putting together training manuals for baristas and managing staff, led us up an entirely new learning curve. No matter how far we’ve come, there is always a new problem, a new challenge, a new lesson to be learned – and that is both the frustration and the joy of being small business owners. There’s never an opportunity to be bored, and there’s every opportunity to be fulfilled by seeing a vision – our vision – come to life.
No one else does what we do. We have changed people's traditional view of what a cookie is and how it should be presented. We have created a unique, fun, delicious and absolutely gorgeous product – and we did it without knowing “anything about how to run a business or bake cookies.”
Today, Ruby et Violette has devoted fans all over the country, is enjoyed by presidents, royalty, celebrities and most importantly, by kids, who tell us that we “have the coolest job ever!” And you know what? We do!
Ruby et Violette
http://www.rubyetviolette.com
(718) 728-6250
