Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
When Upsize caught up with Mary Leonard in 2004, she was coming to the realization that she needed to believe in her instincts.
Leonard had started Chocolat Céleste in 2001 with the intention of serving the high-end business gift market via the Internet with an artisanal product created for a less price-conscious consumer. Along the way, as people asked where her brick-and-mortar store was, she decided to capitulate and open one.
“I got swayed,” she told Upsize Editor Beth Ewen back then. She feels even more strongly now, 15 years later, as her business expands significantly through the channel she initially signed on to serve.
“More than anything, what I’ve learned over the years, the most important thing I would do would be trust my own instincts,” she says. “Next would be that I would focus my efforts in one direction — and the direction I should have focused on the entire time I’ve been in business was the corporate customization market. That was my original plan that is what I believe I should have done the entire time.”
She still will open her doors to customers, especially around Christmas and Valentine’s Day, the times of year during which she takes in a significant amount of her revenues.
“Many business customers, their intention is they want to see it and buy it that way,” she says, adding that 65 percent of her sales come from business-to-business gifts. That’s up from between 30 percent and 40 percent back in the days when she had a storefront. At Christmas, that B-to-B focus rises to 80 percent.
The upscale product line is the reason she says her focus makes sense. Someone coming in to browse generally isn’t aware of what she’s got for sale. She sells upscale chocolates set to be boxed. There are no novelties — no gummies, no chocolate-covered Oreos or pretzels.
“It’s a different kind of customer that knows what they want to do,” she says. “The person who comes in the door generally thinks this is a candy store.”
They are looking for a different price point and a series of products that are what they would find at a different venue.
“That person is coming in to browse, and they find that when they are here, there isn’t enough here to browse,” she says. “The chocolate is specifically set to be boxed. There are gift boxes. I don’t have novelty things. I avoid anything that is novelty. … You come here when you want to buy a fine box of artisan chocolates and you enjoy that yourself because you are a connoisseur or a foodie or you are buying it for someone you want to impress.”
After coming to the realization that the corporate focus was where she should have stayed, Leonard moved Chocolat Céleste to an industrial park in St. Paul just north of Interstate 94. She stayed close to the highway in order to make it convenient for a customer who wanted to pick up their product in person, though she offers delivery through a courier service for a nominal fee.
She’s more private about the company’s financial situation than she was 15 years ago, but Leonard says business is going well. In 2004, she told Upsize her 2003 revenue was $320,000. She no longer discloses those figures, but indicates that her profits went up more than 500 percent in 2018. One of the drivers was the creation of a website in which her corporate customers could answer a series of questions about what they wanted, submit it to Chocolat Céleste and receive, in return, a personal proposal from the company. Only about 20 percent of sales come through the Internet. But many customers make their purchases after looking at the site to figure out what Chocolat Céleste offers before filling out the form and getting the quote.
“That has taken off,” she says. “People in the Twin Cities know that is what I focus on.”
That doesn’t mean her business is limited to Minnesota. She received significant publicity nationwide in 2008 when Chocolat Céleste created bonbons bearing the Republican logos and hired a political consultant to place those in media kits at the Republican National Convention when it was in St. Paul. And she has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the USA Today.
And the business continues to evolve. She created a Shopify website with some high-end photography that better shows off the product. And she’s working on creating a portal on the website where customers can go online and have a page specifically dedicated to that company’s desires. “I expect that to be developed by the end of summer so it would be available for next Christmas,” she says. “Things are going very well. This was my 18th Christmas and it was the most profitable one of all.”
Contact: Mary Leonard, owner of Chocolat Céleste: 651.644.3823;
ma**@*************te.com; www.chocolatceleste.com.
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