Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Korin Hollinshead. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Korin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
This is sort of a two part answer, as we have our popsicle company llc and now a restaurant that we operate under the llc dba Black Napkin.
My husband (long term boyfriend at the time) wrote Any Colour You Like down on a dry erase board we had up in our kitchen. He wanted that to be the name of whatever business we decided to start together. It is an instrumental song off of a Pink Floyd album that we both love, we actually got married to that song, too.
We thought the name fit great, in that we were making popsicles with all sorts of flavors, colored from the real ingredients of food instead of food coloring, and they’re beautiful.
A side note: so the story behind the name of that song is funny if you ever look it up, the gist how Roger Waters told it is a man in Cambridge was frequently selling different wares out of a back of a truck and had sets of china that were all the same color and he’d say “you can have any colour you like, they’re all blue.”
Anyhow, we decided to try and find a storefront after 5 years of pop making and vending and this little corner spot in our neighborhood was going to be available. We had to put a restaurant in there, in addition to our storefront for pops because our area needed one. We’d been living around the corner for a decade and know the neighborhood and people in it well. So we took a huge leap, quit our jobs, and went all in. We decided to call it Black Napkin. This is based on an instrumental song by Frank Zappa, Black Napkins. It is also a comment on the food service industry: It used to be the only places to get thoughtful, proper prepared meals was going out to a swanky restaurant in a larger city like NYC. It was of the highest tier if you were wearing dark colored clothing and the staff traded your white linen napkin out for a black one, to not lint up your nice clothes. Anyhow, we thought it was funny that we were opening a take out fast food style spot with top notch ingredients, killer taste profiles, executed as perfect as possible with a crew that’s been in the industry forever who have worked at the fine dining establishments, but we give you your food in a paper bag with single use napkins. And oh my god, no, they are not black. They’re brown, black napkins are wicked expensive, ha, every new comer asks why they aren’t black.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My husband and I had always wanted to build something of our own together but weren’t quite sure what. We are both creatives- I went to Kendall College of Art & Design for fine art, specifically printmaking and had worked as a server since I was 16. Jason was a snowboard bum in Montana for awhile after he graduated high school. He moved back and started going to culinary school while working in a restaurant, but quit pretty quickly, realizing he could learn on the job and get payed for it, and has worked in kitchens ever since, always rising to a kitchen manager, then chef. He’s great at savory dishes and really enjoyed making desserts. We’ve both been in the service industry for over 20 years.
Jason found a tri-cycle with a cooler on the front on craigslist and thought we should purchase it and make ice cream to sell out of it, as he was great as a pastry chef. It turns out scooping ice cream from a cooler with dry ice doesn’t work well.. he found some popsicle molds on eBay from a company in California that went out of business so he bought them and we learned how to hand craft popsicles.
There was a pretty big learning curve with the pop making gig. We both worked full time at our other jobs while we figured it out, slowly purchased the equipment needed and utilized a commissary kitchen to get certified by MDARD so we could start vending at our local farmers market. Jason of course made the batters and I helped during production days. I took on the business end with paperwork and such (that I absolutely despised but someone had to do it). I put together a website and hired a friend to help with our label/graphic design. My art background came in handy to put together our aesthetic for our little pop cart/vending booth. We got accepted to vend at our first music festival and kind of fell into that circuit of bluegrass/folk festivals around Michigan in the summer. We started wholesaling to local restaurants after that and decided we wanted to open a storefront in our neighborhood and go full time on this thing.
What sets us apart from other frozen treats- we are obsessive about quality (almost to a fault) and make sure both flavors and textures of our pops are as perfect as we can make them. We wanted to make a treat without a bunch of industrialized, processed fake stuff in it so that’s what we did. We utilize as much local ingredients as possible and source everything else from around the world as responsible as possible. We sweeten with raw, organic cane sugar, pure Michigan maple syrup or agave. Our flavor combos are unlike others you’ll find on a shelf. For example, a few flagships: Maple Chaga Fudgesicle, Berry Lavender Lemonade, Banana Dragon Fruit Sherbet, Orange Saffron Cinnamon.
When we decided to start up a restaurant with a pop storefront, we went the same route with our hot food/house made sodas. Our buns come from a local bakery, our beef from Michigan Craft Beef (they are grass fed, but call themselves beyond grass fed, using spent grains, cherries from Traverse City and spent apples after they grass feed) and the highest quality ingredients we can while still keeping prices reasonable. Our chicken sandos and burgers have similar interesting flavor combos. We have a few easy (safe, if you will) options, like the Big Malcolm (RIP Mac Miller) is built like a big mac, the Fussy Hussy is an olive burger. Le College Dropout is probably our best seller next to the Big Malcolm- tomato peppercorn jam, dry aged Grand Cru cheese, herb de provence mayo and arugula. Our french fries are super popular as well. You can get just salted. We also have a “Custy Dust” (short for custom dust) option where we use freeze dried food that’s made into a powder to toss our fries in, Kimchi & Parmesan, Salt n Red Wine Vinegar or Smoked Serrano Chili and Cheddar Cheese. All incredible.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We were very grassroots as far as social media goes with Any Colour You Like. We didn’t advertise at all, purely word of mouth. We found we had a very loyal following who either understood our mission and how we craft our product or they just knew the quality was high and the end product is killer. When we decided to open up Black Napkin, we did the same. We didn’t really know what to expect with the process of building out an entire space and did it completely different than any other place. Our contractors were difficult and slow, it was during the end of covid so our hood system took months to finally ship, etc. We had just put up an insta page and linked it to our ACYL account announcing our new venture. We got our signage installed on the building way earlier than we should have because our quote of how long it was going to take to be able to open was so far off, like months and months. Jason quit his job about a year too early so he took on a prep cook job that he also probably quit a bit early again but it gave him more time to focus on pops that season. Anyway, we had this unintentional buzz and mystique around Black Napkin because nobody really knew what was going on with it besides our friends in the restaurant industry telling others or our ACYL followers, so it was very very much word of mouth before we opened by people who really know us.
Since we’ve opened we have had a very loyal following right off the bat. Over 80% of customers are there daily or weekly and that’s how we’ve been growing. Very recently there have been a couple local articles about us that have started to really grow who knows about us but I think we are still considered a hidden gem at this point. Which is great actually, we are doing about 300% more in sales than we expected and have a very small, but badass crew. We want to grow slow and make sure everything we put out is top notch, and won’t hire just anyone to make it work. So for now, there is Jason and myself, one other guy on the line with us and two counter people. We all work really hard, have a lot of fun and can pay our crew very well.
So I guess as far as advice, be real. We post how we speak, we don’t polish it up and people have responded well to that. We don’t hunt for followers, 10k followers aren’t really going to do much for you if you have a brick and mortar and they aren’t coming in to support you so I don’t really care much about high numbers of followers. I do think it’s a great tool to let our neighborhood know what we might be sold out of by the end of the day or what new features we are running. It’s also rad to see so many followers post our grub that they enjoy in their stories, that’s the best way to grow in my opinion. Real people sharing what they like with no incentive behind it.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
As far as pivoting, we went from thinking we’d open a storefront to opening a storefront/take out spot that we figured Jason and I would work and maybe one other person to help. We figured take out was a good choice, because trying to staff an entire full service restaurant these days is crazy hard. Plus, our space is about 800 sq feet, so if we installed a public restroom there’s really no space for a lot of seats. We still have a few tables folks will sit at and eat and that’s cool. We didn’t realize how big the demand is for what we’re doing. Jason and I both are having to learn to loosen our reigns a lot. He has been in management for other companies before, but it’s a lot different when it’s yours. Our obsessiveness of perfection and attention to detail and hustle until now has just been on our own shoulders growing our pop biz, but now we have a team- and of course not everyone working for someone else sees through owners’ eyes. So we are learning to be more flexible, looking into the not so distant future, we will have to be there less to keep up on pops this next season. It’s difficult to have put everything we have into this for the past 5 years, sacrificing free time and all our savings/taking out a loc to get this thing going fully and then realize we need a bigger team. It’s good personal growth to learn to trust others and guide them. Luckily we have the best crew who works as hard as us and believes in what we’re building. They are amazing, I can’t believe how incredible everyone is at their job/working together/as human beings in general.
It’s also good to learn to let go of what I like to do vs what is needed from me for the business to succeed. Your ego is not your amigo. Personally, I anticipated making the soda syrups, working the counter, and still running the business on the administrative end. I am more needed in the kitchen on the line now, and that was a huge pivot for me, I’ve always been FOH and being BOH was a big move. Soon we’ll get the right fit in there and I won’t really be needed in person at the restaurant so much, I was fighting that but now am in a mind space of stoke to see where we’ll be in a year and what I’ll need to learn to do next.
Contact Info:
- Website: blacknapkingr.com anycolourpops.com
- Instagram: @blacknapkingr @anycolour_you_like
Image Credits
Le College Dropout, J & Korin Open sign + Hot Sweet n Sticky: Adam Quiring Popsicles: Aly Kuch