“This is a long time coming for our business,” said Pause Coffee Shop co-owner, Alayne Dubord.
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While some local businesses are struggling to keep their doors open due to the fallout from the COVID pandemic, others are opening up shop.
After running his pastry business, Filigree Patisserie, out of his home for around seven years, Kent Lukey is excited that he is officially operating out of a store. He rebranded his business — which opened on Robinson Street at the end of January — to Filigree Chocolaterie, with a focus on creating chocolate.
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“It’s been going really well. I think having the home base and doing all of that stuff before really helped build a brand and made people more familiar with what I was doing,” said Lukey. “It’s been pretty good since the beginning so we’re really happy and thankful for that.”
One of the challenges of operating a home-based business was figuring out where to sell products, whether that means attending markets or finding other ways to seek out customers and wholesale clients.
“That adds another layer of the never-ending duties of an entrepreneur,” said Lukey, who added that some of the difficulties of owning a shop are staffing and needing to be open at specific hours. “But it’s also more consistent for your customer, which I think has been a huge benefit that they can come during business hours whenever they want.”
Lukey said he wasn’t actively scouting out a location for Filigree Chocolaterie until another shop, Chocolate Regina, closed its doors.
“When they closed up, it just kind of made sense and we knew we couldn’t pass up this opportunity,” he said. “It was a chocolate shop so we really didn’t have to do much. It was almost, I say, serendipitous so we just decided to take the leap and do that.”
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Pause Coffee Shop is also opening in a new location after closing its doors nearly three years ago. Co-owners Alayne and Jason Dubord have been looking forward to the opportunity to fully realize their business goals.
“This is a long time coming for our business,” Alayne Dubord said. “We’re really starting as a bootstrap small business. We’re not coming from a big pile of resources, so we’ve really been just etching away at it within our own capacity as individuals.”
The coffee shop, which sells brewing equipment and equitably sourced coffee, shared a location with HoBo Donuts from November 2020 to April 2021.
“They were at a point where they needed to decide if they really wanted to grow their business or move in a different direction and the owner there decided it wasn’t his passion for the rest of his life,” Dubord said.
“For him, it was the time to transition into something new and, for us, it wasn’t the right space to continue on our own, so we knew we needed to look for something that was a better fit.”
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Since the closure, Pause Coffee has been primarily delivering coffee beans for online orders and taking part in pop-up markets on occasion.
“It’s definitely been not a huge money maker,” she said, “but it has allowed us to be able to continue to refine our business plan and stay ready for when the right space did come up.”
The right space became available when the coffee shop Happy Hi announced it was moving to Saskatoon. Dubord said the building, located on 13th Avenue, is in a neighbourhood that is very supportive of small businesses.
“The owners of Happy Hi are people that we admire so much,” she said. “When we found out that they were deciding to transition to a new city and their space had become available, it felt like such an easy yes to pursue it.”
The coffee shop is slated to open this spring. In order to prepare, they are renovating, cleaning, setting up their operating systems, and ensuring they have their wholesale baking partnership lined up.
Dubord said the space is bigger than what they had planned for in their business strategy, which means there is potential to better utilize the space in the future. With a strong foundation to build off of, Dubord said they are trying to be modest with their renovations in order to be prepared for the unexpected.
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