Partners looking for next retail location
Christian Sullberg and Osvaldo “Ozzy” Jimenez are well-known in Healdsburg as the owners and founders of the popular Moustache Baked Goods and Noble Folk Ice Cream and Pie Bar.
The two businesses bracket the Healdsburg Plaza and cater to droves of customers, both tourists and locals; a testament to the quality of their cupcakes, macaroons, ginger yuzu ice cream and maple walnut pies. Since early this year, The Pastry Annex in Windsor joined the ranks of Sullberg’s and Jimenez’s growing businesses.
In late January, Sullberg and Jimenez opened up a 1,100 square foot production kitchen in Windsor’s Shiloh Business Park. Both Noble Folk and Moustache are in smaller spaces in downtown Healdsburg, so having more kitchen space has taken some getting used to, they said.
“Our other kitchen is 400 square feet,” Sullberg said. “It feels weird, for sure, but the amount of weddings and events and baking for both stores, manufacturing our own ice cream, wholesaling our ice cream; all of those avenues made us grow out of our kitchen.”
The new kitchen, without any retail space, allows the bakers to focus and grow, while they consider their options for a new retail location.
“We’re aggressively looking at a new location for this year, maybe in Petaluma or Santa Rosa,” Jimenez said. “We’re investing in Sonoma County. Having this kitchen here is my commitment to investing in Sonoma County. A lot of folks in my age group left Sonoma County for bigger cities because they saw more potential for value and growth, but I just think that Sonoma County has it. We have it all in terms of growth and just an awesome community.”
Meanwhile, the two entrepreneurs invested in new equipment to scale up production at the new kitchen, including a large dough sheeter, which can help them crank out up to 1,000 pies in an eight hour day.
“We have much larger ovens here than we do at Moustache, too,” Sullberg said. “The biggest thing at Moustache was waiting for oven space to open up, or fridge space.”
They had resorted to carting ingredients between the two stores in Healdsburg, said Sullberg, shaking his head. “It was just too much,” Jimenez said.
Another advantage to the new location is parking, something that can be a challenge in Healdsburg.
“I remember last summer during wedding season, I was carrying a three-tiered cake to my car four blocks away,” Sullberg said. “Here, we can just pull up right in front.”
The company’s growth has led to new hires, with 33 people now employed at Moustache, Noble Folk or the Pastry Annex.
Hannah Estrada of Windsor works in the production kitchen. When she was 14 years old she would go into Moustache with her parents after swimming practice to get a cupcake, she said, and got to know Jimenez who was working behind the counter.
“I’d endure swim practice and then afterwards I’d go get a cupcake to make me feel better,” Estrada said.
When Jimenez saw her posting about baking cakes on Instagram, he told her, “You need to come work for me.”
The pace of growth for the business has raised some eyebrows, according to Jimenez. Moustache opened in 2011, Noble Folk followed three years later and now there’s The Pastry Annex and plans for a third retail location.
“I’ve had people asking me, ‘Are you too ambitious? Are you growing the business too quickly?’ and I say were ‘We are [growing], because there’s a demand for it and because we’re being strategic about it,” Jimenez said.
Their business mentor, Dave Roberson, a Silicon Valley executive with a long track record of shepherding technology businesses, advised them that their numbers “advocated for growth,” Sullberg and Jimenez said.
The two owners are still talking about which business model they might choose for their next location. It could be ice cream or cupcakes … or even both.
“It’s an interesting conundrum, as far as picking which business model we want to go with,” Sullberg said. “We’ve talked about fusing the two together; the popular things at Moustache and the popular items at Noble Folk.”
A big part of the business model decision will come down to the new location, according to Sullberg, and he’s not ruling out locations outside of Sonoma County.
“Napa has a lot of bakeries for example, so I don’t think a Moustache would work, but a Noble Folk would.”
Jimenez said the move into Windsor, while it’s not the retail space many people have been asking him about, is a strategic move for the business.
“Windsor gets us to a point where we need to be when we’re looking forward to the next five years,” he said. “Maybe one day we’ll have a [storefront] location in Windsor, too.”
