Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kelly Welk. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kelly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
9 years ago I was sitting in a gathering, listening to the reality of s*x trafficking. I could not help but think about the what if’s. What if it was me? What if it were our daughters? The magnitude of the evil can force our eyes away from the reality, but that night I could not shake the thought that we had to do something, anything to help.
As I was driving home I had a crazy idea, ‘What if we invite our friends for dinner and ask them to pay for their seats?’ It felt so silly. Who asks their friends to pay to eat at their house? We started right there, with that one crazy thought, with one invitation to a dinner on our deck…it felt too simple to be anything important. And that is where I was wrong, that dinner changed everything.
Truly we had no idea what we were starting, what we thought was going to be one dinner turned into us hosting them on a regular basis. Everyone was a volunteer, everything was donated and our community and friends were all gathering around this simple desire to do what we love to fight the injustice of s*x slavery and trafficking. The guests that were joining us started coming from further and further outside our immediate circle of friends and then guests started asking if they could hire us to design their weddings and private events.
Our business quite literally grew out of our heart for gathering people at our table. Creating beautiful community and designing experiences and events that welcome people in continues to drive everything we do. The simple heart desire to gather friends is now reaching beyond our table and community and has become more than a small idea and is now what our family does full time.
Kelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We are the owners of Ciderpress Lane, a local business, tucked into a little town across the water from Seattle WA. My husband, Aaron, and I have always loved filling our table with friends and delicious food. From the first year we were married we’ve found ways to garden and host in every community we’ve lived in. I don’t think we ever thought we’d own our own business, it wasn’t what we set out to do, instead our continual goal has been to create community. To invite people in, to welcome poeple to our table, to share our home and garden. We dearly love being connected to the seasons and dreamed about having a property one day with a big garden and fruit trees.
When we found our home and realized the property included an established orchard, we knew right away this was the property we were dreaming of. The hitch was that the house was locked up in short sale. It took the bank nearly a year to release to us to purchase and in that year of waiting we decided to name the property Ciderpress Lane. We were naming it out of belief that it would be ours. When we finally got the keys to the house we simply called it Ciderpress Lane because that’s what we’d been calling it in the waiting. When we started hosting the Freedom Dinners, we actually called them Dinners at Ciderpress Lane. As the business took shape and more requests were coming in to design weddings and private events it was only natural that our name continued as it started.
Today we continue to host Freedom Dinners under our apple trees, plus we design community workshops and classes, wedding florals at local venues and private estates, private dinners, cooking classes and garden events. I wrote our first book, a cookbook called Dinner Changes Everything, to tell the story of the freedom dinners with hosting tips and recipes to help you host your own.
My second book, Dream Catcher, is a conversation, written straight from my heart to empower other women to dream over their every day. Along with the book, I created an Ebook Masterclass that goes even deeper into the book’s themes with 12 sessions to offer even more encouragement for any woman setting out to live a life of intention and meaning.
And our latest EBooks dive into even more fun where we share our Family Favorite Baked Good Recipes called Red Tin Treats, and our latest EBook is our full garden planning guide!
Our hope is that through gathering at our table, joining a Dinner or workshop, or joining us online via facebook and instagram that you’ll find the joy in life, family, hosting and homemaking. We love sharing all the beauty that continues to grow from our table, garden and home.
You can join the community at www.ciderpresslane.com , @kellywelk or @ciderpresslane and find them on facebook as CiderPress Lane
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When our business first began we said yes to pretty much every job that came along. It felt necessary as we were building our portfolio, plus I loved having so many different opportunities to create beauty from weddings to non profit fundraisers, baby showers and back yard celebrations. I said yes to all opportunities. As the business grew and became more established we were consistently filling our calendar with weddings. I loved them but something felt off in my heart. It took awhile to put my finger on what was missing. It took time to be able to articulate what my heart was feeling. Our kids were getting older and I was having to miss out on so much summer life together. Plus the more our calendar filled with weddings the less time we had to host Dinners and gather our community.
So I started writing out what it was I was hoping to do more of :
– host dinners
– create beautiful events that were open to our community
– share more recipes
– teach more workshops to help others find the joy in gardening and cooking
– but I didn’t want to say goodby to weddings completely….
It was a massive shift which took a whole lot of courage the fall we decided to put our own events, cooking classes and workshops onto the calendar FIRST before we ever said yes to a wedding or private event. It’s no small endeavor to shift what you offer but what we found is a community of people who had been watching all of the freedom dinners, seeing photos of the weddings and private events and they responded with such kindness and enthusiasm to our new offerings.
The hardest part was trusting our gut. Knowing that if we put our energy and focus behind the things that filled our own lives with joy, business would follow. We now spend time each January blocking out dates for our own Ciderpress Lane events, workshops, classes and offerings. Then, we entertain requests to design florals for weddings or give time to design, host and create private events.
Pivoting and Shifting should be expected! The only way we could clearly have found our sweet spot was in trying so many different options in the event world. If we had waited to start until we knew our hearts completely, we never would have began. So take the pressure off yourself to know the exact direction. The longer you run your business the clearer and more narrow your focus will become and you’ll feel so confident about it because you will have answered all the what ifs that led you there.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Our business only exists because of our willingess to find the loopholes. The business was almost stopped before it ever started by 1 individuals phone call to our local health department. We had been hosting the Freedom Dinners for about a year when I got a call from the health department telling me that they were shutting down our establishment. I was completely confused by it, because we didn’t have an establishment. At that point we hadn’t even started our business. Thankfully the gal that called was very kind, I think she could hear the confusion in my voice and the fear that I was actually doing something wrong. I explained the details to her of how we host the Freedom Dinners, that it’s friends of friends of friends coming for dinner and that we weren’t a restaurant. This one phone call started a long, sometimes tear filled days, of trying to find a way to continue to do what was on our heart. We had to shift how we were promoting the dinners, we had to change the words we were using, we had to stand up for ourselves and not let a few bullies stop us from moving forward.
What we found is that our business never will fit into any clear parameter that the local departments or even federal guidelines set out AND it doesn’t have to. It took lots of questions, meeting with local officials and being completely open and honest in order for us to find our niche in the loopholes. It isn’t because we’re doing anything wrong, it’s because our business doesn’t fit in any of their categories! We aren’t a restaurant, we aren’t a caterer …. we create Potluck style community dinners, we host hands on cooking classes, we teach gardening and floral design, we design wedding florals and offer our homemade cottage kitchen baked goods at our events. We are private chefs & potluck hosts who design beautiful experiences for our community and best of all, we set up the business to be able to donate 10% of all of our profits to Atlas Free.
All of the work to be true to ourselves and find our niche was worth it. Don’t be afraid to be outside the box, there is space for you to create the exact business that reflects your heart!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ciderpresslane.com/
- Instagram: @ciderpresslane and @kellywelk
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CiderPressLane
- Linkedin: kelly welk
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKRVI0qxfgBuz7Eu234-kSw
Image Credits
Keeley Erickson of Odet, Devon Michelle Photography