We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alexandra Clark a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alexandra, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
Working with food as a medium is helpful in a way because everything you make has a shelf life. Selling is inherent in your work because the experience that you are creating and that you want someone else to experience can only last hours or days or, if you’re lucky maybe months. After that the experience becomes something else entirely – it’s lost and gross. I have a love hate relationship with this reality.
I knew for myself that I had to go all in or I would never go all in. I don’t think that’s the case for everyone but having that singular focus is really important to me and to my work. My brain will think creatively regardless and if I was “still working my dayjob” while I opened Bon Bon Bon, I would come up with creative ways to support my dog and I doing the easier work, which would not have been the work I actually wanted to do. The cognitive dissonance would have been an inherent distraction and ultimately inefficient or even fatal to the project itself.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Alexandra Clark and I am a chocolatier and (most food or food adjacent) designer that loves people and creates from a place that believes that the world is not a great place. My family used “fancy” (for the Midwest) chocolate to celebrate special things, gas station candy bars to celebrate little things and chocolate chips to enjoy the every day. My grandpa always said that my eyes were so brown because I had either eaten too much chocolate or was literally full of shit and when I learned what shit meant, I really dedicated myself to “the whole chocolate thing” and fell down a rabbit hole that left me obsessed with packaging, agricultural and value chain inefficiencies, and recipe developments that could, albeit in little ways, address some of the many (intolerable to me) issues that the chocolate industry was facing. It was the ultimate design problem and my solution was a weird little chocolate shop in the back room of a Coney Island in a weird little enclave of the incredible City of Detroit. From design, sourcing, construction and service, from raw ingrtedients to packaging, Bon Bon Bon makes the best chocolate it can for the good people of Detroit and the world ’round and what that is and how we do that is a process of continual improvement.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
This one is so random but worth it for the person who can use it. I love this website called ThomasNet.com. Their website description says, “Industrial Products & Services — Thomas for Industry. Search and Buy with The Industrial Buying Engine™. Source over 6 million industrial products, from Adhesives to Zinc. For Industrial Buyers. Top U.S. Manufacturers.” but the way I would describe it is as a directory of people who do things. Specifically the kind of people or companies that might not have incredible websites or top paid SEO. It’s been gold for finding like minded, similarly sized manufacturing companies for molds, design projects, even high quality or specially spec’d food ingredients.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Something that has really hit me is how personally some of the artists and chefs that we feature take our collaborations. For us, creating and portraying a person or a brand or their products and way of being through food comes really naturally. I imagine that it’s like writing an article about someone, but in chocolate. Many of the people that we are in awe of and adore enough to feature in a collection are honored and will describe how they want to make sure that their parents or best friends get a box and there’s something about that that really squeezes my heart a bit. We’re celebrating someone we celebrate, the way we do things best and most efficiently – the way that comes naturally and with ease and yet it has an outsized impact on someone who you would think and hope felt that celebrated already. I’ve been really taken back by that. It’s a mutual honor, a win-win, that, in reality doesn’t take much from either entity. Sometimes the things we can do feel like they have to be big, and maybe they can be easy and still be enough?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bonbonbon.com
- Instagram: @bonbonbonchocolate, @alexandwich
- Facebook: @bonbonbonchocolate
- Linkedin: alexandranclark, linkedin.com/company/bonbonbonchocolate/
- Twitter: @bonbonbonchoc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bonbonbonchocolate
- Yelp: Multiple pages depending on location?
Image Credits
Julia Johnson, Mar Manzanares-Bobadilla Brock