In mid-February 2017 Grace and I went on a vacation with my family to the Caribbean. After a day of drinking on the beach I was convinced of two things:
We were going to get a Goldendoodle one day and her name would be Bucket, and
I was going to drive down to Philadelphia the next week and get a bottle of wine tattooed on my bicep. Why not?
I had been missing Philadelphia since moving to Brooklyn after finishing college and it felt like a nice excuse to visit the city. After getting the tattoo I met up with my friend and colleague Joe Marro at ReAnimator in Fishtown to catch up. Joe and I had worked with each other on and off for a few years across management and record label projects.
Joe mentioned that he and Ben Walsh from Tigers Jaw had been discussing either starting a travel agency for bands or opening a local donut shop. I wasn’t sure if he was joking. I said, also not sure if I was joking, that I’d love to open a donut shop. How hard could it be?
Three months later to the day, on May 24th, we held a Friends & Family tasting party at a different ReAnimator location. It was a Wednesday and Grace and I skipped work. Tiago, our chef we found on Craigslist, and Grace spent the entire day baking. I managed to fit in a haircut at Sulimay’s. All of a sudden it was real.
The early days of Hello Donuts were very different. At one point we had as many as six or seven partners in the business before reality set in for some that this was not a joke after all. Eventually, Joe, Ben, myself, Frich Warwick, and ReAnimator became the five partners in Hello. We spent the next year doing pop-ups until signing a lease at 2557 Amber St. in February of 2018 and expected to open later that summer. Little did we know it’d take 18 full months, until August 2019, to open our doors.
Grace and I became engaged, bought a house, moved back to Philadelphia, got a Goldendoodle named Bucket, changed jobs, and planned an entire wedding in between the time we signed our lease and opened up shop. It felt like it was never going to happen, and then it did.
My two canned remarks anytime someone asks me about the donut shop for the first time are:
It kind of started as a joke and we thought how hard could it be? Hard, it turns out. And,
The most gratifying aspect about Hello to me has been watching individuals become regulars and for those regulars to become married and to have kids and then to have been open long enough for those kids to be able to come in and eat the same donuts. Being part of a physical community, in stark contrast to my work in music, has been one of the best work experiences I’ve ever had.
The first few months of Hello Donuts + Coffee being open were an exciting challenge. Grace quit her “normal” job in Center City to become the GM of the business. A quasi-childhood dream for her and a gift for the shop. We were really, really busy in August, September, October, and November of 2019. Then we experienced what most businesses do: A slow winter. The partners each had to invest a little bit more money into the shop in January 2020 to maintain cash flow. What no business had experienced before was COVID-19, which hit exactly six months after we opened. In some ways, COVID was a very successful time for Hello. We were open 2 or 3 days a week through 2020 and had fantastic numbers. Our staff was able to get paid for work and receive stimulus checks. Everyone was really happy. We had no staff turnover for nearly two full years from opening the shop through “peak” COVID. Cash flow was much better.
The hard times came once we reopened for business seven days a week. Our neighborhood, Kensington, had changed. When we signed our lease there was a promise of plentiful development in our growing neighborhood of large apartment complexes. Once a month we’d read an article about a new 500-unit complex set to break ground within a 5 block radius of the business. Those dreams died. The heroin turned fentanyl epidemic just minutes from the shop grew worse and became more noticeable around us. Our stuff, once so stable, started to naturally scatter following the easing of COVID concerns and the desire to try something new. The prices of dairy products like milk, eggs, and butter rose by more than 4x, but the price of a donut couldn’t scale with those costs. My day job became much busier and Grace went back into a different line of work. The business started to stall and the partners started looking for ways to shake it up again.
The original goal was to have multiple Hello Donuts + Coffee shops scattered around Philadelphia. It was a primary reason why ReAnimator was interested in partnering with us. They had plenty of experience, we had none. They had coffee, we had donuts. They were going to max out on how many shops they could open under their name, we had a new name to offer. It felt like a strong pairing. I was a real fan of the environment ReAnimator had created and loved their now-closed restaurant called Res Ipsa. We felt really lucky to be guided by them. 2557 Amber St. would have never opened without their help, resources, and relationships. I thought ReAnimator’s approach to building other businesses was really interesting. Res Ipsa, Hello, and eventually Eeva and Wim were all partnerships from ReAnimator and another outside partner that seemed set up to succeed.
It was May 2021, four years after our F&F event and nearly two years after our grand opening that Joe, Ben, and myself raised our hand for help. We wanted 2557 Amber St. to keep growing and were not ready to say goodbye to our dreams of expanding. ReAnimator approached us with a solution: They were going to take over running daily operations of the shop and work with us to kickstart our wholesale operation again plus start thinking seriously about future locations. The kicker in the deal was that the Hello was truly going to become a brand that ReAnimator ran and controlled, and because of that the other partners would have a much smaller share in future expansion and little to no say in that direction. It was a reasonable proposal. We weren’t cut out to do the work necessary to realize our original goals. They were, and they had a proven track record at doing it. It was the only solution to the problem, or so we thought.
In some ways it was nice to become a more silent partner, especially in exchange for the growth we dreamed about. At the same time, Joe started pretty seriously talking about moving to Europe and Ben’s band had a steady touring schedule. This change wasn’t what we originally wanted on paper, but it was okay until it wasn’t. Over the next 12 months, it became clear that ReAnimator didn’t have the interest or drive to expand Hello. Very little happened, from the idea of restarting wholesale or finding a second location to grow into. I became disengaged as it was clear one of the owners of ReAnimator didn’t want my voice heard in running the business. And then one day ReAnimator told us that they changed their mind and wanted to get out of the Hello business entirely. They weren’t up for it. There were many reasons this was disappointing, but ultimately it really put the shop in a dangerous position. The other partners, myself included, had been sort of lulled asleep as we had been slowly taken out of the day to day operations of the business. And all of a sudden we were faced with having to close the shop or jump all the way back in. The early-summer of 2022 became fraught for us.
ReAnimator made different, but similar, choices with Res Ipsa, Eeva, and Wim as they did Hello. Three out of the four no longer exist, and the fourth is without the company’s ongoing involvement.
We decided to keep going. Tiago, our first and amazing chef, had moved to New York which had left a real staffing crisis on our kitchen. It was another reason we were struggling. I proposed bringing back Jess Barlow, our second hire after Tiago, back to Hello to run the kitchen and become a partner in the business. Jess used to literally live above the shop, but had moved to a different part of the neighborhood and gone to work at a different bake shop after COVID. Over a margarita at Loco Pez, Jess was back. I was excited. We were also really fortunate to have Casey, our new Lead Barista, step up to take control of FOH at the shop. One thing we did take away from ReAnimator was not having a primary owner-operator in the business made things difficult. Empowering Jess and Casey to be in the shop most days and to be the bosses of their domains enabled things to run smoother and for Joe, Ben, and myself to have more realistic roles.
Things were looking up during the back-half of 2022 and most of 2023. We started to get our groove again. We set aside ideas of expansion and instead wanted to just have the best neighborhood donut and coffee shop you could ask for. Something that was never going to make anyone rich, or even return our investments, but be a fixture of Kensington. Something to be proud of.
We started to see a downturn in our business at the beginning of this year. In addition to the neighborhood changes, or lack there of, mentioned above there was one other looming threat: Competition. Hello went from the only “hip” coffee shop in the area to be being flooded with new entrants. Forin (two locations), Fiore, Vessel, Valerio, Almost Home, Sit Stay Coffee, Cake & Joe, Encanto, American Grammar, and Rowhome have all opened within 1 to 15 minutes of 2557 Amber St. over the last 18 months. It clearly started to chip away at our business and our bank account started to slim. And life kept happening. Ben and his lovely wife were pregnant and Joe was indeed going to part-time move to Europe. The partners started to discuss closing Hello in the late-Spring and we fully agreed to shutter the business by the start of August. Not only were our sales still decreasing month over month from previous years, but our lease was up for renewal and we got word our landlords were going to sell the building. It didn’t feel right, but it felt necessary.
The most important thing to me in closing was being able to go out with our head held high. Four of the five owners of the shop come from the music industry. We know how to market an anniversary and an ending. I pitched the idea of The Hello Donuts Farewell Tour. It was a real hit that enabled us to downsize our business from seven to four days a week and to rotate in and out our best flavors to keep customers coming in for three months until we closed on December 1st. I’m really proud of the work everyone did to make The Farewell Tour such a success. And we were extremely lucky to get amazing art for it from Russell Edling. Here’s my original sketch to Russell’s reality.
We announced to our staff at the end of August that we’d be closing on December 1st. We were braced for some employees to quit due to needing to find another full time job. The thing that makes Hello special is our team. Not one of our back or front of house employees quit. We rode this out together the right way. It’s something that I’ll always remember with a smile. Thank you Aubrey, Gabriella, Casey, Lauren, Ivey, Michael, Meg. We were so lucky to be able to be on this ride with you for so long. And a special thank you to Tiago, Talisa, Ryanne, Maeve, Kristen, Sommer, Callie, Andy, V, and anyone else who impacted the shop over the years from making donuts to pouring lattes.
The entirety of Grace and my adult lives in Philadelphia has revolved around Hello Donuts being on Amber St., a 5 minute walk from our house. It hasn’t set in how it will feel for it to not be there, or for it to be replaced by another coffee shop one day, or how confusing it will be for Bucket to not walk up the ramp and see Casey or Lauren there. Despite all of the frustration, it has been one of the real successes of my life.
Thank you to all my family and friends who supported us on this sweet journey.
Thank you to Grace, who I told in our Brooklyn apartment when I was 23 that I wanted to invest thousands of dollars that we barely had to “get a college education in food and physical spaces,” for always saying yes.
Thank you to Joe, Ben, Frich, and Jess for always piecing the puzzle together.
This is the autopsy of a donut shop.
All donuts go to Heaven.
