Sounds Weird.
Well, we’ve arrived at my very least favorite time of year - the two weeks before Thanksgiving. And honestly, you would think the WEEK OF THANKSGIVING would be my least favorite, right? But here is the thing…the week of Thanksgiving is horrendously stressful and exhausting, but it is pretty clear cut - we bake the pies, we organize the pies, we sell the pies. And we try to keep our sanity, yo.
But the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving…well, there isn’t much to do but stew around about it all. We can’t make anything or really do anything except work every day like an enormous event isn’t headed our way. And since I’m the keeper of the information, like the order counts and an early sketch in my mind of how it will all play out, I mainly feel like a monster is breathing on my neck all day long. Does that sound weird?
At any rate, here are a few things worth mentioning:
Last Thursday, we participated in Holiday Mart in Jefferson City and had the most fun. We sold just around 600 tarts and an astounding amount of merchandise. Honestly, one never knows what to expect when participating in an event for the first time but we give this a solid two thumbs up. It was well organized, well attended, and generally just fun. We are definitely going next year, and you should too.
If you’ve seen the latest issue of Feast magazine, you might have noticed Jeanne’s face gracing one of the interior pages. We provided some fall pie recipes to Feast readers and their photographer stopped by and took some beautiful shots of our apple, pecan, and pumpkin pies.
Our merchandising cooler doors are still broken. We ordered the needed parts almost six weeks ago. While I knew the new parts were coming from the other side of the world, I thought the other side of the world arrived faster in late 2019. I feel like a steamship could be involved. Or maybe a camel as the primary mode of transport.
We are working on a SUPER COOL project with the Telluride Film Festival, which sounds fancy…because it is. During a brief conference call last week, we found that while we both focus on different arts - film and baking - our goals and beliefs about what we do are in complete alignment. Consider it one small step for the arts and one giant step for world pie domination.
And finally, new merchandise is arriving daily for Small Business Saturday and it is so hard to not unpack it all and show it to you immediately. Successful merchandising is a hard skill to learn because the shopping for it comes easily, but the sorting it, pricing it, and planning the debut is a learning curve. All that said, here’s a sneak peek at new dessert servers:
