01/19/2026
I know that being transparent can be useful to other small businesses and also because I’m sort of shocked and proud that it even happened, Kunja and I, without employees and only occasional babysitting help during crisis (like his freak accident or being really sick-thank goodness for extended family!) and pre-orders, managed to generate 175k in sales with a toddler underfoot. (This is gross sales, NOT net) For some tangible sense of what that looks like with our average cost per item that works out to approximately 42k individual items being made, baked or cooked and then packaged, delivered and cleaned up after! Or 883 products per work week.
This was a tough year from a COGs standpoint. Yes we nearly removed our overhead by not having to pay rent, but our ingredients and packaging costs went up significantly due to tariffs and it took a year of being separated out from the cafe sales to finally ascertain where our profit margins were and weren’t. It was a sobering exercise as in truth I had never properly tracked the wholesale versus retail for the lifespan of the cafe. This meant I was only vaguely sure of our margins on any given item and how it all played into the larger picture. It was a bit discouraging to realize that our wholesale items were not priced appropriately but I couldn’t raise prices, reasonably, anymore or else price our customers out. We decided, ruefully, instead to drop some of our organic ingredients and find other ways to cut costs and generate sales. It worked, mostly but it’s not something I’ve rested easy on.
This year we are adding baby #2 in May and fully expect all sorts of chaos to ensue but we are wildly more prepared this time around and look forward to sharing our continued journey 💕
