Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Darby. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
The growth of Bloom has been a decade in the making!. Our bakery opened in 2010 as a stand along retail location in the City Market and was the only location until 2019. We had dabbled in expansion a few times with some permanent pop-up’s in the West Bottoms on First Friday weekends and some expanded wholesale with improved branding throughout KC but in 2019, we opened our second permanent location inside of a mixed-used commercial and residential building in downtown Kansas City. Since then, Bloom has opened two additional locations (in the same year)! In February of 2023, we opened a location inside of the American Airlines terminal at the new KCI airport. Just a short 10 months later in December of 2023, we opened our 4th location inside of Lighton Plaza at 7500 College Blvd in Overland Park, KS.
Unlike franchise or national brands, each of our locations has it’s own identity, purpose and clientele focus. Our original store is located in downtown KC with a good mix of locals & regulars as well as a large tourist draw during events and the farmer’s market. Each of the newer stores have more of a Café vibe with seating, expanded focus on coffee, and more savory food options (salads, wraps, smoothies). We’ve kept the branding recognizable with a color palette that is consistent throughout all stores, but our menu, decor and look & feel is really varied from location to location.
Each opportunity for expansion has come out of years of diligence to our craft, relationship building and hard work. We had not sought out any of these locations as expansion opportunities – each of them came to us organically. In fact, any previous expansion that I have sought out directly or pushed to make happen has not come to fruition. I still have a few ideas for where we want to go next and every attempt I have made to get there has turned out to be the wrong location or wrong timing. This is an ongoing lesson to me – we can’t force things that aren’t in God’s ultimate plan for us. When I’ve attempted to make things happen on my own, it’s either been unsuccessful or a dead end. These lessons have taught me that diligence in where we are now and what we are doing now will bring future opportunities when they are the right thing for us.
Growth is hard. It’s expensive. It’s stressful. It’s time consuming. It means missing family things and kids events. It means being too tired at night to do much more than the basic necessities. Opening 2 locations in a year’s time plus participating as a food vendor at the NFL draft was the max of what I/we could do in one year. We accomplished so much this past year and while I was heavily involved in the planning and execution, without our team of dedicated employees, none of these things would have happened. Planning, permitting, organizing, and designing happen in the early stages of these projects. With this past year, we weren’t far in to the execution stage before we were back at the beginning, planning to open the second location. I really felt that I was jumping from the start to the execution stage all year. Our team was able to pick up execution when I was starting back at the beginning. While nothing in life is perfect, I am really proud of both locations.!
We have a leadership team at Bloom that has been together for many years. I’m a bit of a tornado at times, kind of running through with requests and orders and ideas. They interpret these things and make them far better than I would be able to do. They lead their teams with confidence and integrity and hard work and example and care. I’m impressed by them every day and know of the incredible fortune I have to spend days with managers and staff that are inherently good people and take such good care of the business.
Growth requires a lot of thing. It requires trust. It requires faith. It requires tenacity. It requires vision. It also requires a little bit of crazy (in my opinion)!
Sarah, 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?
Thanks so much for asking! I am Sarah Darby. I’m the owner and operator of Bloom Baking Company. My path to business ownership/baking is probably not conventional. I have lived in the Kansas City area my whole life. I grew up in a food family – a meal was always the center of our get togethers or celebrations and my mom catered for many years so I was surrounded by large meals as well as all of the work that goes in to event catering from a young age. I actually went to college for nursing and business, practicing as a registered nurse and healthcare administrator in KC for 15 years before moving to the service industry. In 2015, I acquired Bloom and began working as an entrepreneur full time (and then some). I am married to my high school sweetheart, Marshall, who is also a small business owner. Marshall owns a financial services business in Lee’s Summit. We have 2 girls, Violet and Graceanne who you’ve likely met at the bakery if you come in often. Both girls have grown up working the register, helping with dishes, folding boxes and talking with customers.
Bloom really is a special place. After nearly 15 years in business, a lot has changed but at the same time, it has stayed relatively close to its roots as a bakery that specializes in European pastries, specialty breads and savory options. We work from scratch, procure ingredients from local farms and mills and use very little automation for the volume of things we produce. Between our pantry and retail options (think local honey, jams and jellies, pimento cheese, farm eggs, coffee etc) and our locally sourced fruit and veggies, eggs, flour and dairy, our bakery supports around 25 other local businesses. This community that we’ve built our business around is at the heart of what our flagship location in The City Market is about – bringing the freshest and most local ingredients together in one location. We have recently expanded into several other locations including the American Airlines Terminal and the new Kansas City International Airport and our most recent location at 7500 College Blvd in Overland Park, KS.
Each location of Bloom has its own identity and personality, but the focus on excellent product and service is the same throughout. Our City Market location at 15 E. 3rd Street in KC, MO is our retail bakery and commissary. We are open 7 days a week and have cases stocked with a large selection of items such as: croissants and artisan breads baked daily; cookies; French macarons; tarts; espresso and coffee drinks; and a lunch menu with sandwiches made on fresh bread; quiche; salads and a rotating selection of soup. Our airport location is a fast casual concept for a quick latte and croissant or a panini and cookie on your way to your flight. Our Overland Park location is our café concept with a dine-in area, smoothies and coffee, sandwiches, rotating house-made soups, and pastries. We offer catering services throughout KC as well.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
The first 10 years of business ownership seem to have included a lot of resilience. We learned we were pregnant with our second daughter about 2 weeks after I acquired Bloom-she was our bakery baby. I had traded my consistent salary in a field that I had known for 2 decades with company provided health insurance, FMLA, PTO and all the things to follow my dream of owning my own business. I was also 36 (geriatric) with my second baby so the pregnancy was physically different than my first, and I was high risk. I realized very quickly that the workload I was trying to maintain wasn’t going to allow me to stay healthy, work on the parts of the business that I was confident were the ways I was going to grow our brand and have any sort of balance. I recruited for a few key positions and promoted an employee to manage our production. I’ve been incredibly blessed to be surrounded by talented and hard working staff even from the beginning. This change to the structure has allowed me to focus on the business aspects that are strengths of mine and we’ve been able to add staff, teams and leadership roles to focus on areas of growth such as wedding cakes and caterings, corporate catering, expansion of product offerings and expansion of our footprint through new locations and new wholesale accounts.
These changes to the structure of the business years before also allowed me to temporarily return to nursing during the pandemic and serve my community while our leadership team and staff ran the bakery. Then, in early 2021, our second daughter (the bakery baby) was 5 and was diagnosed with a serious heart defect which required extensive surgery. Again, I was able to step away from the bakery on a lot of levels to take care of my family. Our team managed most aspects of production and I was able to focus on the administrative side of the business which I could do from the hospital room and later from home as she recovered.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
I’ve had stories stories where we’ve been approached about doing events that were going to push us farther than we’d ever gone before and in order to get the deal, we had to sell our brand and our concept, even if we weren’t sure how we were going to execute things. Last year in spring of 2023, within a matter of a month of each other, we opened our location at the new airport and participated as a food vendor at the NFL Draft. Both of these were the largest events/expansions (by a million miles) than we’d ever been a part of. They both also had similar stories in which Bloom had to sell what we do as something that was worthy of doing the Kansas City food scene justice. The interview processes, the paperwork, the hours of meetings, menu designs and re-designs and convincing both the airport team and the Draft organizers that a bakery with limited capacity due to space and storage, capital restrictions (hello, coming out of COVID) and limited experience in large-scale events was a great choice. I will say, I’ve never found it difficult to promote our brand and product because I truly know how special it is but both of these required me to dig in and truly highlight the things that make Bloom special. And, I will say, we pulled them both off with a lot of hard work and grit – I’m so proud of us!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bloombakingco.com
- Instagram: bloombakingco
- Facebook: bloombakingco
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-darby-16448a26?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app
Image Credits
TAP photography