Coming Soon: Store Refresh!
Anyone out there a fan of home makeover shows? Well, we are! Watching the magical transformation that can take place in such a short time period is always fun to watch. And, in just a few weeks, we will be living out our very own makeover when we do a pretty big interior design refresh at the shop.
-----
What this means for you, our valued customers, is a couple of things. First, the bad news. We will be closed from December 31 - January 9th while we undergo our transformation. So, you might want to plan ahead and stock up a little bit to make sure you have enough chocolate and other goodies to get you through!
The good news for you is that when we re-open you will once again have full access to all the delicious Leonidas Belgian Chocolates and other European confections that we have always had in the store. And you will get the added bonus of walking into a bright, shiny new welcoming space! A place that is well-lit, and one that displays all the chocolate that you love in a much easier to see and access way.
-----
Like any good interior design project we started with a Vision Board, and a really good partner. Maria Mrasek who lives and works in Walnut Creek and whose daughter goes to school with my daughter, is an expert interior designer and visual merchandiser. You can learn more about her work as a designer and photographer here. I am so excited that she agreed to help me with this project! She's super fun to work with and we are having a great time planning out ways to make the most of our small space. Here are some pictures from our Vision Board so that you can see our design inspiration:
-----
-----
Please don't expect that it will look quite this perfect! Honestly, there is only so much we can do in the small square footage that we have. But our goal is to get as close to this kind of look and feel as we possibly can. You can ignore the chairs in these pictures -- we have no room for seating in our little shop! But the main inspiration here is the color scheme. We really want to embrace our logo colors of Navy, White and Gold, so you will see a lot of that in the new look. Here are some of our samples that reflect the new color scheme:
-----
-----
So pretty!
-----
One of the biggest changes you will notice once the refresh is complete is a brand new chocolate counter. We will be changing out the current chocolate display counters and replacing them with a counter that will allow us to display all the chocolates on one flat surface. This will mean no more bending over or squatting to try to see all the chocolates! We think this will be a much better (and less awkward!) experience for our customers! Not to mention for those of us on the other side of the counter too!
We have found an awesome carpenter to build our new chocolate counter. It's in process right now and we are super excited with how it is coming along. Here we are in his workshop making sure the counter is going to work for us super tall people!
------
-----
All in all everything is coming along nicely and we are very excited to be upgrading the look and feel of our store. Most of you probably don't know this, but Cafe Leonidas was about 30 days from shutting down completely before we made our life-changing decision to buy it. The previous owner was ready to retire and she had had the store on the market for almost a year with very little interest.
She told us that if she hadn't found a buyer by December of last year, she was going to shut the doors on Dec 31. We found out about the opportunity in November, and luckily were ready to make our move. We ultimately took over ownership on March 1, 2017 (Kent's birthday!)
-----
So, we are super excited that we were able to save the store from closure and we are really hoping that by investing more in the store (new window design, new look in the store, and regularly bringing in more products) we can help revitalize a part of downtown Walnut Creek that we all love so much.
-----
Thank you all in advance for putting up with us being closed for a week or so. We hope you will be happy with the outcome, and no matter what, the best news is that you will continue to have access to some of the world's finest chocolates - hopefully for many years to come!
