Soooo…. summerrrrr. I feel like we can talk about summer in the past tense now, since a) all our weddings/festivals ended last week, and b) even as a winter-denialist, I have to agree, autumn – and our ‘quiet’ season is definitely here.
But back to summer. In some ways, this felt like our first ‘proper’ summer. We opened in November 2011, and in hindsight, we should have opened earlier than that, say around September. Not enough people knew about us to come find us at our various markets, or to pick up a Christmas pint at our kitchen, that first summer.
Not so this summer. We were lucky to be featured in local press, and having a solid year of working flat out behind us, at markets and festivals around Cape Town, meant we got to hear our favourite exclamation in the world all summer long: “Omigosh look, it’s The Creamery!!!”. It made my day, again and again,that people recognized us and were excited to see us and delighted to buy our ice cream. It totally made up for the fact I’ve had maybe three two-day weekends off since January. People, I now know what the 20-day work week feels like, and it feels… tiring. But also good, in a my-company-is-doing-so-well-that-we-are-busy-all-season-long kind of way. So no complaints here, and epic, monstrously huge thanks to all of you that bought a cone (Or two. Or three. Or ten. We don’t judge.).
And apologies to those of you who didn’t end up getting ice cream at Design Indaba, Constantia Food & Wine, or Taste of Cape Town, due to the ridiculously long queues. We’re going to figure out some ways to make things run a little faster next summer, even if that means hauling two scoop counters with us to big events.
I was particularly happy with the new flavours our overworked kitchen team developed, despite pretty much doubling production on last year, and with how strong a scoop team we assembled this summer. If I had to pick between our ice cream and our staff, I might just have to pick our staff (but please don’t tell the ice cream that).
I am sure I will write a less chirpy post in the next week or so, complaining about winter and cold weather and what it does to ice cream sales, but right now, I’m still floating on the summer buzz. We’re not resting on a laurels as cold times approach, but will be announcing a super-exciting project that will launch this winter. This is in addition to our rebrand, which is currently underway. So keep reading (and licking)….
