It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, though even now, about a month later, it still seems like a good idea. I have a feeling the happy afterglow of a well-made decision will begin to fade once the holiday orders start rolling in, about mid-November. If our assumptions are correct, we could be fulfilling up to 1000 orders daily; our biggest day so far has been about 24 orders.

We've been in business since 1995, starting out as a brick-and-mortar internet coffee shop (Denver's first) called Majordomo's, on Capitol Hill. We stayed there for five years, battling a crazy landlord, meth-cooking neighbors and our ultra-married, ultra-Christian third business partner telling me he "had feelings" for my partner, until finally deciding to pull the plug and go online in 2000. Before we moved, though, we started carrying what USA Today called the best coffee cake they had ever tasted, and the line quickly became a part of our core offering. When we moved, we left coffee preparation out of the equation and decided to focus soley on selling coffee cakes, changing our name to CoffeeCakes.com, which remains our primary business. One of the people we had taken on at the store stayed on and took care of order fulfillment and managing the office, while I dealt first with being pregnant, and later with being a mom.

I worked at the coffee shop because the business had ostensensibly been set up by my partner for me, because I enjoyed the whole espresso thing. She wanted to start a business she thought I'd enjoy, and it was a toss-up between a coffee shop and a flower shop (I can't tell you haw many times since then I wished we'd chosen flowers, but I've finally made peace with our decision). We blunderd blindly into business with a guy she'd found at work who was interested in the idea (probably more in her, in hindsight), finding a place that proved the axiom "location, location, location" isn't just an axiom (it's now a tattoo shop), picking out furniture, computers, paint, espresso machines, cups, saucers, spoons, cable, printers, paper towel dispensers, carpet...lots and lots of stuff. All along I had sort of envisoned the shop as being a cozy '40's-sytle hangout that intersected tastfully with the brave new world being created by the internet. My partner had worked from college in high-tech, and was ready to tap into what she felt was the unlimited potential of "cyberspace," so it wasn't like she didn't know what she was doing. I, other the other hand, had no idea what I was doing (a place from which I still frequently find myself operating), so tried to make good decisions that in retrospect probably weren't (like buying really expensive mugs and cups and saucers because they reminded me of my grandparents). We found a flamboyant Russian designer who took my idea of warm, yellow walls and comfy, overstuffed chairs and turned them into an edgy combination of aqua and salmon (I can't quite think of how to accurately describe the colors) walls and wood/steel tables and chairs. Gone were my mellow incandescent lights, replaced by tiny, expensive and terribly stylish halogen lights. Rather than taking a stand for what I wanted, I went with the will of the many and we ended up with a place that looked pretty damn cool, was highly functional, and ultimately much doomed to failure, especially after the Christian decided he couldn't deal with his attraction and asked for the $15,000 he invested in the store back the day we opened. Seriously.

I was always painfully self-conscioius working with customers, so I pulled away from being as involved and tried to be involved in a less-visible way (like managing the drink staff), which eventually led to me pretty much pulling away from it completely. Our son was tiny and I decided to spend more time with him as my partner and our Emergency Partner Replacement (who's still with us) muddled through and managed to get things done and moving forward. We (read, they; I was back working full-time as a stockbroker and really had very little to do with the business, other than investing in it) moved into a bigger space, then into a fulfillment center in Ohio, adding more to our line, like coffee and tea accessories (mugs, presses, tea pots, etc). That place went out of business suddenly a summer ago, leaving us in the lurch; we found another center, luckily, that was close by and willing to take us on. We were with them until just recently, when we decided to take the whole operation in-house to try and help control customer service, quality and costs a little better, which brings us to where we are today: a 1500 square-foot warehouse in Littleton, Colorado, which we affectionately (for now) call Titan Palace (see picture above).