Free With Love and Quiches by Susan Axelrod

more about running a business, and with Jimmy’s help, experience, and knowledge, we were really moving ahead. Love and Quiches was doing several hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume and generating a profit for the first time in its short history!
    We were gaining ground every week in our little storefront. Jimmy the Baker was turning out gorgeous desserts every night, our sizes and varieties of quiche were growing a little, and Don was maturing by the minute, taking on some management responsibilities inside the shop in addition to making deliveries a bit farther afield, from Staten Island to Brooklyn to Long Island and every place in between. Also by mid-1976, we had about seven or eight full-time employees (one or two of whom would stay with us for decades).
    Our roster of customers continued to grow, though we were still a local supplier doing “store door” deliveries in our own trucks. We had no distributors yet; I’m not sure I even knew then what a distributor could actually do for me. We still had most of our original customers—including our first, the Windmill—but we now had many more in the city, where I had concentrated my sales efforts. One of our newer customers right in Manhattan was a café opened by “society” restaurateur George Lang in the new Citicorp building. George was also theproprietor of the venerable Café Des Artistes (which has only recently closed), and his lavish apartment was famous for its spectacular green jade bathtub. George moved in rarified circles, but it didn’t stop him from beating me out of $1,700 in receivables when they folded the Citicorp Café. I was outraged, but when I protested, my only answer from his management was, “Grow up, girlie!” This turned out to be a fairly cheap education, because since then we have kept a very tight rein on our receivables.
    We were also polishing up our image with sturdier packaging and more professional labeling. The resultant improved handling provided savings in labor and also eliminated waste. We moved to printed ingredient labels, eliminating our rather childish practice of filling out our labels by hand, running them off on a copier at a local stationery shop with ink that smudged and ran, and then cutting them out one by one. How ridiculous was that? Turned out that our hand-cut labels cost us more than our new printed ones once you counted in the labor, which we were finally beginning to do.

    We retired the Silver Bullet and bought our first real freezer truck. It was hot pink this time, and printed on its side in professionally drawn white letters were our address, our telephone numbers, and our newly stylized logo. We had appropriated the lady with the rolling pin (part of our logo until recently) from an image my college roommate found for me in a children’s coloring book. Trucks are great “vehicles” for advertising! Losing my homespun style and image gave me further entrée into some larger foodservice organizations.
An Accidental Favor from Jill
    Once again, something accidental that proved pivotal precipitated our move to our first industrial space. On January 17, 1976, Jill was written up in a human interest story by the New York Times . It was an article about a woman who had started a business from scratch but decided to leave it, returning home to find a much smaller enterprise in which she could control her time, rather than the other way around.
    From that Times article I received a phone call from the foodser-vice director at Columbia University. Columbia did a tremendous amount of catering and became a very large customer of ours. As was often the case with my customers, the director and I also became good friends for many years, until he moved out of the state after accepting another position.
    The article also attracted the attention of the buyer who ran the restaurants in Bamberger’s department stores, later bought and absorbed into Macy’s. This was my first large multiunit account; the