It's been nearly five years since my last post, and even that was a repost from my newspaper column. I think you can attribute it to writer's block, but I don't like labels.
I can give you a quick rundown of what's happened since 2020, if you like. If you don't like, don't read.
October 2020: I walked into my director's office at Crowder College and closed the door. We were a very open door office, so closing the door meant either she was doing a yearly employee review or one of us was having a mental breakdown. She must've been expecting a breakdown because it wasn't time for reviews. I clenched my hands in my lap and said, "Kady and I are opening a restaurant." She lit up and said, "OH YAY!" then immediately followed it with, "Oh. Shit." Truly, she was ecstatic for me, but it was a confidence booster knowing she was going to miss my perpetually awkward presence in the office.
December 2020: The whole family (18 of us, minus three) got Covid. I thought I was gonna die. Like, not even lying: I wrote letters to everyone in the family. It was awful. And then I ended up being a long-hauler.
March 2021: After escaping a mid-life demise, Kady and I established our LLC on International Women's Day, March 8th. We were officially The Beestro Route 66 LLC. We had not been able to come up with a name, but it came to her in a dream. What ensued was a whirlwind of finding a building, "auditioning" with the property manager to make sure we fit the look and feel for the location, setting up service with laundry and grocery vendors, creating a menu, getting a logo, transforming the decor into our own eclectic vibe (SO. MANY. DAMN. BEES.), hiring employees, sleeping very little, crying a lot, discovering that there is no good shoe for food service no matter what the ads say, and various other activities.
May 2021: We hosted a super-soft opening for friends and family.
June 2021: We softly opened our doors to the public. We had to open as "a sandwich shop with a bakery" even though sandwiches were never part of the dream. However, the property owner had that stipulation in the lease, so we adapted the dream.
June 2021 - June 2022: It's a blur. We thrived, we succeeded, we learned a lot, we failed a lot, we made approximately a billion trillion mistakes, we learned how to be good employers by being bad ones first, we made so many friends, we ate a lot of fucking sandwiches, we actually turned a profit in our first year, we learned not to take bad reviews online personally, we slept very little.
July 1, 2022: We closed our doors. The economy was sucking so hard. Eggs were $80+ a case, ham was becoming nearly impossible to get and when we could get it, it was so expensive we could barely justify it. We had started the business with my inheritance money from my Uncle Tom and had zero debt. We decided to quit while we were slowly bleeding rather than wait until we were fully hemorrhaging.
July 2022 - a long damn time: I settled into a very well-deserved depression. I cried daily. I slept a lot. I mourned a dream that barely had time to even begin. I felt like I had no purpose, no goal, no skills (other than making friggin' sandwiches) (and some bomb-ass cinnamon rolls), I felt like a failure. My husband, not known for his super great sympathy skills, stood beside me, never criticized, never judged, tolerated my moods and tears, and assured me I had purpose and value. I thought he was a filthy liar. But I'm glad he kept reminding me.
July 2022 - spring 2023: Some time in there, Kady again had a dream about our bakery. The bakery was always what we wanted. She called me and said, "Mom. I have a name for our bakery. Bittersweet Bakery." I laughed and said, "I'm the bitter, you're the sweet. I get it." She assured me that wasn't the reason, but explained that because of everything we had experienced over the past few years - opening a business, closing a business, mourning a dream - the new dream had a bit of a bittersweet feel to it. I did have to agree. And just like that, Bittersweet Bakery was born. We operated out of our homes for a good long while, contentedly utilizing Oklahoma's Food Freedom Act. And we did really well that way. But we wanted to do more. NOT sandwiches, but we wanted to bring back the dinners Kady had been doing during Covid, we had public demand for the soups we had perfected at the restaurant, and we couldn't do those in a cottage food setting. But the health department wouldn't even consider us while we were still in our own kitchens. So we started scheming.
*wibbly wobbly timeline just for a little bit* September 2022: We found out my amazingly wonderful sister had breast cancer. That threw us all into a tailspin for a bit, but she kicked cancer's ass and is even more amazingly wonderful than ever. We have often wondered about the timing of everything and if the Universe said, "Y'all are going to need to be more accessible here in a few months, so that little business might not be the most important thing in your world for a bit." I'm not sure how I feel about Divine Intervention and all that these days, but it all worked out and that's what's important. I would walk through fire and broken glass - even broken fiery glass - for that woman, and if my business closed to free me up to be her Appointment Scribe and Chemo Buddy every now and again, I'm glad it happened. No regrets. None.
May 2023: We bought a building. We found a company that makes small buildings to your specs and delivers them. It wasn't finished out, but we knew that was a job we could handle. When it came time to decide on the color of the siding, as soon as Kady showed me the color options, I knew what it had to be: pink. The guy who took our order said, "Are you sure about the pink?" Kady assured him that it fit us perfectly and yes, we were sure. He replied, "The ones who choose pink are always very sure of themselves." 💗We couldn't find any property outside the city limits to set her (one thing we walked away from The Beestro with was the decision to never do business inside Miami's city limits ever again, but that's a whole other story for a whole other time), so we did some background research, called a few people, and decided to put her on my property. She was delivered on May 30th. We loved her instantly. The plan had been to be open by Halloween. Then by Thanksgiving. Then "after the first of the year." Then we just stopped answering that question with anything other than a shrug. Our husbands worked long and hard in the evenings, in a building with no electricity through the hot summer, after their day jobs until they got burned out and exhausted. So we hired a guy who promised completion in four days. Then we fired a guy when his four days turned into many more days and also really awful work. Then our neighbors decided they didn't want the bakery there and we didn't want any negative vibes involved, so we found a little lot to lease in Commerce, OK, and moved our little pink building about 15 minutes north. The city of Commerce welcomed us with open arms and has made us feel so loved. We have wonderful neighbors who put up with endless evenings of construction noise before we opened and now days of customer traffic - and they never complain a bit. Sometimes shitty things happen to make way for amazing things. We are where we are supposed to be.
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| Freshly delivered and set at my house, Kady and her daddy were discussing something vitally important I'm sure. |
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| We were so happy! |
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| We all became sheetrock pros by the time we were done. |
April 2024: We were finally finished with construction and got the ball rolling with the health department. We scheduled a time for the inspector to come out, meet us, see the place, get us on a path to get ready for inspection. Turns out he inspected us and approved us that very day! We were shocked, but also really proud that we had done the work and well enough we skipped a step or seven. We added a second building (that actually arrived on our lot before the actual bakery got moved over) that was originally going to be our retail space, but in reality that just didn't turn out to be feasible. It's now our giant pantry and storage, which frees up a lot of space in the actual bakery which is pretty small.
April 2025: We have grown our little business by leaps and bounds just in the last year. We have added catering to our repertoire and are doing some decently sized events here and there, our name is getting out to larger companies and businesses, we have our loyal customers (some who followed us from The Beestro) and seem to gather in new ones every week. We don't have "open hours" and display cases. Our location doesn't really lend to a ton of traffic, so we operate on a mostly order-ahead basis. Some days we get crazy and bake just to see what will sell, but that's always a gamble to see if the public is in the mood for whatever we've made. We have done some pop-ups here and there - cruise nights, food truck lots, tulip festivals, etc. and we love them, but being a bakery we are limited on when we can do them based on the Midwest's weather. It's less than ideal to have your cookies melting in the blazing Oklahoma sun. We love what we do, even on the days we are trying to find more surfaces to stack cookies and cupcakes in our tiny little pink dream and we're tripping over each other because we greatly underestimated our square footage needs. But we are both looking to the future and a bigger space someday.
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| Us just last week at a local tulip farm selling cookies and cinnamon rolls like it was our job! |
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