Welcome to my plaid office...
Starting a development lab with fire prone neighbors and the quilting ladies.
Folks seem to be curious about me starting a business during a pandemic. Except I didn’t PLAN to start a business during a pandemic…I planned to peacefully exit my corporate career, take a month or two off over the holidays and then dig deep into startup stuff. I was going to quietly “launch” Sprinkk to the industry at Expo West 2020. …but it was canceled the day before my flight. (I was merely going to walk the show and hand out some new business cards. I lost nothing out of this.)
I ran my first development project out of my 1 bedroom condo.
The pandemic was in full swing in Chicago, so I was ordering groceries on Amazon to avoid the store, and sanitizing them all at the door before bringing them into my home. My entry hallway was barricaded with non-perishables. There were no plans to go anywhere so it was fine, and really, I was grateful for the world shutting down a bit while I needed time to hole myself up and get started.*
*I want to acknowledge the countless tragedies, struggles, and pain of the pandemic. My lighthearted comments around my situation are never made without respecting this reality.*
Grateful, until the lady upstairs started smoking.
I didn’t know my neighbors, even after living there for almost 8 years, but I met Monica (not sure of her actual name) in 2020 via cigarette butts and a sticky note. I found a lit cigarette butt on my patio one afternoon that was making it smell like someone was smoking IN my kitchen. Gross. Turns out that Monica tried to SWAT. A. FLY. while holding a cigarette, and she accidentally threw her smoke overboard onto my patio. …She told me this on a sticky note left on my door the next day with an apology. Dang flies.
It was just two days later when I was doing some gummy flavoring tests, (which means I had 10-15 small amber bottles of flavoring scattered around my electronic scale making things look really sketchy if you didn’t know I was just making candy) that Monica started her patio on FIRE by putting out her cigarette in a plastic ash tray container of sorts.
Her cool whip bowl ashtray burned, and the fire department came in full gear…with AXES...they actually used said axes to chip away burnt siding (I thought it seemed like overkill at first), and flooded her patio door frame making it rain through my ceiling. The fire alarms for the building were obnoxious enough to force us outside. I did my best to mop up the water and set out towels before I joined my neighbors across the street… Just in time to watch a man appear in MY kitchen to assess the smoldering. I can’t help but wonder what that firefighter thought as he entered my condo and had to tip-toe his way around boxes of Cheezits to get to my Breaking Bad scene kitchen. Smoke and flood gummies will never be on trend.
Now that my condo smelled like burnt plastic, I decided to pack a bag and spend some time back home with my family in Nebraska, away from city pandemic life. Would it be a week? Two weeks? No clue. I packed up my “lab” into one Rubbermaid tote and hoped for the best.
I ended up taking countless work calls from my parents’ basement that summer.
I called it my plaid office as they have a green plaid couch from the early 90s and I could sit on the floor in front of the couch and prop my computer up on some books on the coffee table for client and potential investor meetings. Really classy. But again, I like to think no one noticed because it was a pandemic and everyone was doing it!
For everyone’s sanity, I wasn’t about to do any candy work in my mom’s kitchen. Lucky for me, church services and events weren’t happening at the beginning of the pandemic, so there were perfectly suited kitchens sitting idle in town.
Sprinkk officially set up shop in the Catholic church basement kitchen!
Want a good test of explaining what your new business is? Try giving your elevator pitch to your small town church quilting ladies. It honestly was GREAT practice! Regardless of how positive the responses were of “Oh, that sounds iiiiiinnnnnnteresting…How nice!”, I could tell by their confusion that I needed to work on it. I’m dead serious that this helped.
Also, I’m mildly hesitant to even mention this yet, but I’m here to give you the good details about church basement kitchen startup life… The first project that I worked on in that kitchen was a CBD gummy. While everything that I was working with was entirely legal in all states…I was SUPER nervous about the smell of some of the ingredients with the quilting crew 20 meters away, so I would spritz lemon flavoring around the kitchen after I was done. If there would be anyone in a small town to start an “exaggerated story”, the quilting ladies could be the ones to do it!
Now that I’m well past that stage of my business, another story that occurred in that basement can be hilarious (It was really rough at the time though). I’ll maybe tell more on that later to paid subscribers.
Overall, I did a lot of foundation building for Sprinkk in the church lab and plaid office. I wasn’t there for long, but I developed some really great client formulas, re-discovered Nebraska’s surprising elevation impact on boiling temperatures, and created an entire brand together with my grandma who lives across the street (more on that later too). I eventually sold my condo, moved to Omaha that year, and set up a lab in my apartment second bedroom before finally moving into the commercial space that I have now in the Millard area.
Note: My parents were (and still are) big cheerleaders of Sprinkk. I never, in a MILLION years, imagined I’d ever be back in my parents’ basement longer than a weekend as a professional adult, but man am I grateful that they had a place for me to camp out that summer to get away from Monica! (Also verrrrry grateful that Apple came out with noise cancelling Airpods for vacuuming days.)
Sweet fact:
Most jelly bean centers (the chewy part) are all the same flavor…unflavored. The different flavors get added when the candy shell is put on the outside. Gourmet jelly beans like Jelly Belly are “gourmet” becuase both the candy shell AND the center have flavoring. Such fancy pants beans!
Have a candy you want to learn more about? Let me know!