Don't Let It Happen

Sometimes I think about all the times in my pre-PJP life that I drove by 3601 Buttonwood Drive with no clue of how much significance it would later play in my life. (I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m pretty sure I have an acute case of metacognition - basically the ability to overthink most things. Don’t be jealous, yo.)

If any of you are new around here, here’s a brief peek at our current storefront on the day we first looked at it.

Gulp. Look, I can’t even tell you how crazy we must have been to stand in that mess and and say to the commercial real estate agent, “PLEASE TELL US MORE ABOUT THIS SPACE”. Or how all the way home we discussed that it was so much space and how would we ever fill it all up? Lord.

So while Jeanne was pretty quick to draft up what she envisioned would become our finished space, neither of us had any sort of clue about how this whole storefront idea would work beyond “well, we will sell some pies.” And as our opening date approached in 2014, we straight up hit some panic about what the store should ultimately look outside of the baking area. And when I say that we panicked, I’m saying that went to a horse supply store that was closing and bought a display unit for pie for $50 listed on Craigslist. I KNOW.

WOW. I cringe to even add this to the Internet, because now it exists forever…and if anything should be forgotten, it is this thing. Also, the baby pie boxes in this picture were flat packed and hand-folded by us (and apparently secured with scotch tape). I had forgotten this early misstep in the pie packaging world, but I feel that era built some serious character in us both.

And for the walls, well…we struggled. On one wall, we used hundreds of yards of burlap and countless gallons of glue to cover the walls in a burlap lattice. I DON’T KNOW, IT MADE SENSE THEN.

Unsurprisingly, it was a complete and total disaster and gave me serious disdain for burlap for well…forever. And if you wonder how long this wall lasted, it lasted until the next morning when Jeanne walked in and saw all the wrinkles in the burlap in the light of the morning sun and tore it all down. True story.

What our store would eventually become would take a sweet forever (seriously, we didn’t even have a menu board until five or six months later…people would come in and ask what kind of pie we made and we would say “um, all of them”). And even to this day, we move things around and add to our storefront as we become more comfortable creating a retail environment. And hey, it only took four years and nine months. And shockingly close to a potential move to a larger location with more floor space and more windows. Goodness.

Please don’t let us raid any more closing horse supply stores. Or rent any scissors lifts. And if you see Jeanne at Joann’s with 400 yards of burlap, DON’T LET IT HAPPEN.