Free With Love and Quiches by Susan Axelrod Page A

company had fourteen stores from the New York metro area all the way down to Maryland. For the first few months, my patient and supportive husband made the delivery run (fourteen hours!) in our shiny new truck once every other week, until the buyer put us together with his meat and produce supplier. This supplier became our very first distributor and “delivered” Irwin from his grueling ordeal!
    Just as Bonne Femme had in my garage, Love and Quiches was straining at the seams. Stuff was piled up everywhere, there was noroom for much-needed new equipment, and we had no real bakery ovens. Far worse, there wasn’t nearly as much freezer storage as we now needed in the wake of the article—and we were, after all, a frozen foods business! Although this little storefront in Hewlett had served us well, I knew I wouldn’t miss the cluttered place for a second. We were at the end of our rope, and I knew we had to get out of there—and fast!

Chapter 5
The Mini-Factory (1976–1980)
     
    Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.
—Indira Gandhi
     
    I didn’t want to move far, no more than five or ten minutes from home. Irwin, always ready to help me, was my sidekick in my search for new space. We started by driving in small concentric circles around the Hewlett location in our Chevy, zeroing in on commercial areas in nearby towns. One day we were cruising around Oceanside, two towns over and about ten minutes from our shop, when we noticed a For Rent sign that looked promising. It stood in front of a neat-looking one-story building with a brick façade. Though the building had no loading dock, it did have a wide garage door that would allow our truck to back up close to load up in the mornings. The building was on a wide boulevard, a main route to all the beaches—including Jones Beach—and we realized that this spot,if it worked out, would help us pick up a lot more retail walk-ins even as we kept our current customers, since it was so close to the old space. It was perfect!
    Irwin and I knocked on the door of the building and met my soon-to-be new landlord. He invited us in, and I was immediately struck by the vastness of the space before me. This building was five thousand square feet, but coming from our tiny shop, it might as well have been a hundred thousand. The rent that went along with the giant building—$1,200 a month—seemed a princely sum for us in 1976, but we felt we could swing it. By this point we were doing over $300,000 a year in volume, and expansion to a bigger facility was mandatory. But could we afford to outfit such a cavernous space?
    Within a week we’d decided to go for it, and we signed the lease for the Oceanside facility for five years with the right of renewal. For this move, I needed some working capital, and I managed to secure a $200,000 loan from a bank that my father, albeit grudgingly, introduced me to. Love and Quiches wasn’t yet considered bankable. My father also grudgingly put up securities as collateral, which was the only way I could secure the loan. He wasn’t very happy about that, and neither was I.
    We were, at this juncture, still a do-it-yourself organization with extremely limited resources, so we designed the shop floor ourselves with some advice from our equipment suppliers. My father-in-law, a retired plumbing contractor, did the plumbing work, and we used local electricians, carpenters, handymen, and other assorted characters to do the other necessary remodeling. We had a few mini-disasters, including one that involved a handyman named Willie and bright, raspberry-colored paint all over our sidewalks and window glass. (“I told you, I cain’t paint !” was Willie’s defense.) Finally, up went our great big Love and Quiches sign, and we were almost ready to move in.
    In Oceanside, we could handle real equipment. The secondhand bakery equipment supplier whom we had met when we bought our first piepress for the garage sold us a Middleby