Sad News, Bear Maker Bakery is officially closed.

February 1, 2014

So what happened to building a bakery?

It really came down to facing some hard economic realities. The following explanation is a bit technical, but we’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible about the business.

In opening a shop like ours there is what I call the ‘Retail Paradox’. It goes like this; in order to sell enough goods, your shop must be in an area that has a large group of consumers that are willing (and able) to buy your products. As the number of potential customers increases so does the rent. Higher rent means you need to sell more product, which means you need to make more product and have more consumers.

During business planning you figure out how much space and equipment you will need, where the largest concentration of customers are, and what the cost is for commercial space in the right area. When you put that together with a few other numbers (buildout costs, ingredients, labor, etc.) you see how much money you will need to make in order for the business to become profitable.

We looked and looked for the right space but Atlanta real estate is completely crazy right now. From our planing, we could see that building out a space in the right area was going to necessitate monthly revenue numbers that were ‘ambitious’ to say the least. This meant that the scope of the business would have to be much larger than anything we had ever imagined. In the end we had to take a hard look at those numbers and decide if we wanted Bear Maker Bakery to be a behemoth bakery. We decided that isn’t the road we want to take.

So unfortunately our dream of having a neighborhood bakery is, at this point in time, still a dream. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, but that is just how things are. John and I can’t thank you all enough for your support… every bit of the hands-on help, words of support, social networking, feedback, and sales touched us greatly and helped make all of the work fun. Who knows what the future will hold? We plan to keep our website and Facebook page around so we can stay in touch. Oh, and we’ve still got all of our recipes and play the lottery regularly -let us know if you inherit a ton of money or restaurant space and want to get into the baking business!

Best Wishes to you all,
Brandon and John