Early August...
One of the advantages to documenting your entire entrepreneurial journey on the Internet for almost six years is that you have a complete archive of your company. And it might surprise you how much I delve into the blog archives to refresh my recollection of certain events, holidays, and seasons in our history. I was thinking today that just about a year ago, we were in the final home stretch of building out PJP Nifong…and then I wondered what else we were doing in early August. And since you can never erase anything from the Internet, here you:
2015: We were lamenting that often customers mistook us for a store that sells jeans, rather than pies. That is still a mystery to me because of the apostrophe in Peggy Jean’s Pies AND the rolling pin in the logo, but I’ll be the first to concede that our early exterior signage was less than obvious. On this particular August day, Jeanne took metal pie plates and painted “P””I””E””S” - one letter per pan - and mounted them in the front window in a last ditch effort to make the world know we sold pies and not pants. It 10% worked, but those pans hung there until we moved. I don’t miss them. At all.
2016: Our massively large World Pie Domination poster was delivered to PJP. I’m not sure of the dimensions, but it must be at least six feet tall. No frame available at Hobby Lobby was going to fit it, so Jeanne went home and built a frame in a single weekend. Unlike the crafty pie plates, this framed artwork made the way to PJP Nifong and is currently on the wall next to the fireplace. We can tend to move through trends pretty quickly but we recently discussed how much we still like that graphic.
2017: I posted a throwback photo to our social media, garnering hundreds likes and comments and so I reposted it to the blog. I’m pretty certain the photo is 1986-ish and forget what I’m wearing because the whole point of the story is that Jeanne is wearing a sweatshirt and she can’t remember why she would choose a sweatshirt when I’m wearing a dress. (And look, this all went down at the Holiday Inn Holidome, so sweatshirts of the least of it.
2018: Jeanne was named first-runner up in the Feast Magazine Feast 50 awards. Roll forward to 2020 and Jeanne wins this category. Check and mate.
2019: And speaking of Feast Magazine, just a year after Jeanne’s first runner up title, we were invited to Feast TV. We made a lot of new St. Louis friends and I was interviewed on a JumboTron. I still cringe. Jeanne stayed back at PJP because the new store was having electrical inspections and she would rather talk about amp load than talk on a JumboTron. I think she pre-planned that decision.
