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October 13, 2017
We've Signed the Lease, Intrigue Chocolate and Coffeehouse Coming to Capitol Hill!

Exciting news, we’ve signed the lease for shop number 2! It’s official! We found a funky/cool store in the cultural hot spot neighborhood of Capitol Hill, and we'll be building a "chocolate and coffeehouse". (Corner location above.)

A couple months ago we asked for your help choosing a neighborhood to focus our search. Thank you for all the feedback! We cast a wide net, looking for a very specific set of criteria, considered each suggestion in depth (especially Columbia City, so close!), and found what we believe is the ideal spot at the right time.

Before we get into the new shop, please consider participating in our Kickstarter project that ends in about a week. Your participation will help us buy the large quantities of packaging required by print shops, and you get an equal value of chocolate for your pledge. Thank you in advance!

Ok, on to the new store.

Intrigue Chocolate & Coffeehouse

Imagine walking through the front doors of our new chocolate and coffeehouse and being greeted by the delicious smell fresh coffee, warm quick breads, and cacao beans in the mill. Imagine ordering a cup of coffee from a knowledgeable and friendly barista that suggests you try this origin chocolate from Ghana after you take your first sip, so you can experience the chocolatey and plum notes of the coffee without distraction. Imagine sitting comfortably in a tall window with your cozy mug and small chocolate next to a warm slice of banana bread, enjoying the grey Seattle light and soft rain on the skyline.

Here's a few photos of the space under construction to give you a sense of the bones:

This will be a new concept space for us. We’ve always wanted to create a comfortable environment for our customers to spend time and interact with the staff and each other with fine food and drink as the backdrop. Now we can provide such a space.

Full coffee service is a relatively new endeavor for us, so we are going to partner with a local coffee roaster Conduit Coffee. They have the specialty knowledge we need to do coffee correctly, and in exchange we’ll work and train on their equipment and serve their award winning roasted beans. (More on Conduit in another section.)

Chocolate will be the extra detail that we hope puts the experience over the top. We want to provide the best chocolate beverage experience available, from hot cocoas, to mochas, to sipping chocolate, even to serving a small piece of chocolate with each cup of coffee. Chocolate is a simple luxury; we hope to make it an enjoyable and healthy part of your daily routine.

It’s important to us that the space be inviting and friendly. We want you to spend time there, and we want to get it right. Be ready for us to ask you over and over again, “what makes a space comfortable for you?” and if you are a resident, “what do you look for on Capitol Hill”.

Physical Location

YES, THERE IS PARKING. The building has a few spots available for customers in their reasonably priced underground lot. During the day there is plenty of parking right out front, which fills up as people get off of work. Being able to drive to Intrigue was a common request for this second location, and now you can!

The new shop is on the busy street of Madison and the surprisingly small and charming 15th Avenue. The high ceilings and large glass windows are ideal for capturing as much light as possible and making the space feel generous.
It’s larger than we initially thought we’d pursue. Altogether it’s about 1900 sq ft (we were looking for around 1200 sq ft for this concept), but the way it’s laid out makes it ideal for what we want to accomplish. In addition to a café space, there is a kitchen in the back to hold the scullery and give us a few extra tables for chocolate production. It will also act as an emergency backup kitchen in case - heaven forbid - anything were to happen to our current kitchen.

Previously the space was setup as a juice bar called “Healo”. They served delicious smoothies and organic foods, but decided to move their business primarily online focusing on health supplements. That’s great news for us because the space has been largely built out already, from plumbing to electrical to HVAC and ADA accessibility. We’ll be tackling the fixtures, paint, and installations that support our retail style, but we will not have to build out infrastructure as extensively as we did for Pioneer Square even though this is a bigger space by almost five times.

Here's how it looked when Healeo was in full operation:

Partners

We’ll be working with Conduit Coffee to build and train the coffee service portion. Coffee is competitive in this city, and we want to make sure we are serving a cup of coffee that we love (because then we’ll want to share it with you, and at least some of you will agree it’s awesome… as in, have-to-have-one-every-day kind of awesome).

We’ve carried Conduit Coffee in our shop for almost 5 years, so many of you are already familiar with the brand. If you aren’t familiar, then suffice to say Conduit has won several awards recently, locally and nationally.

We aren’t sure yet who will be providing the pastries, but we’ll want to work with someone local and reputable. Any suggestions?

Capitol Hill

The neighborhood of Capitol Hill is in the middle of a massive culture shift due to the increasing density and change in demographics brought on by the expansion of our tech industry. We want to be respectful of Capitol Hill’s past by paying homage to the styles, free spiritedness, and colorful expressions found there. We also want to be a new contribution to the cultural fabric of the neighborhood by offering up a different kind of art. We are embracing the fact that people need to gather somewhere, and people tend to gather where they are invited to be. So, all are invited.

Timeline

We will probably not be open until January at the earliest. But we do hope to have some chocolate pop-up in the store for the December holiday season. We’ll keep you posted along the way! Thank you for all your support!
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September 29, 2017
Designing Our New Chocolate Bars

We are going to launch chocolate bars this year, and Kickstarter made it possible. Thank you to those that have backed us and helped exceed our initial goal!

The rest of this blog post will be about the design of the bars, but if you’d like to know more about the story of their conception check out the Kickstarter project below. There is still time to participate in the Kickstarter effort and be among the first to receive the bars. You can even take advantage of a few discounted options available to early backers.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/intriguechocolateco/pacific-northwest-inspired-chocolate-bars

Visual Design

Let’s talk first about the front of the package, which is the showpiece and where most of the design research was done. When you look at a chocolate shelf these days, it can be overwhelming, especially if you aren’t familiar with all the brands! How do you know which one you’ll like?

We have a much smaller selection of chocolate bars in our shop which we curate based on what we like and what we are excited to share with customers. We think customers appreciate this approach, even just subconsciously. When a customer asks us to help them choose, we have a different reason to recommend each one and the enthusiasm just comes naturally. From customer questions, however, we found a few things to be true:

Customers do not usually care about the company logo. This is the most common design choice of most chocolate bar companies (and for very important reasons like targeting customers already familiar with the brand or to compete in online shopping catalogues, etc). For our purposes and in our shop, we determined the logo was not how the customer made a choice of what to buy from the shelf and therefore decided to understate it on the cover.

Color is king. We’ve been wrestling with this concept for years because we really didn’t want to believe the color had so much influence on us a species in food decision making process, but it’s a fact. Packages with the same background color are usually visually scanned as being the same item without variation, whereas differing colors prompt the brain to take a closer look. Packages with multiple colors have a bonus effect of the customer deciding, “you know, why don’t I get one of each!” It’s a strange phenomenon but one we experience over and over. So for our bar designs, color is king.

Picture graphics are beautiful, but not always meaningful. “A picture speaks a thousand words” is the expression, but are all one thousand of those words what you want to say? A customer that wants to enjoy a chocolate bar may not care so much about what a cacao pod looks like just like a bottle of wine doesn’t necessarily need to remind the customer that it was made from grapes. We embraced the idea that less visual information was a courtesy to the customer, and our hope is that the negative space is more attractive.

Is the chocolate sweet or bitter? Customers who've had an unpleasant experience with dark chocolate tend to shy away from the word “dark” or the word “milk” on the box. Another customer may be specifically looking for the 60%, 70%, or 80%. While percentage is not fool-proof predictor of flavor, it does need to be stated.

Flavor seals the deal. If a package catches a customer’s eye, he or she is then tasked with making a decision which usually comes down to flavor. Our flavors are pretty wild and difficult to imagine, so we needed to demonstrate our confidence in them, that yes these are actually delicious chocolate bars, we are proud, and you will love them. Our target customer is willing to try something new and then share it with friends.

Box Design

We have made a significant change in our packaging designs by moving from an envelope to a box. Because the bars are 100g (roughly 3oz, which is 2x-3x the size of some dark chocolate bars you see in the stores today), the edges were rather thick. For an envelope to expand enough to handle this width the size of the overall packaging started to look like an 8.5”x 11” sheet of paper! Way too big.

Here’s how the new overall packaging design looks. (Note that print guidelines are included, so the yellow text / logo, the blue lines and pink text is markup, not final coloring.)

Creative Request

This new box gives more area for text on the inside of the box. In the spirit of “every flavor tells a story”, we’d like to include a short inspirational message that varies with each flavor. Do we have any creatives out there that have ideas? Post them in the comments below!

Thanks, chocolate lovers! Again, the Kickstarter is still open, so be sure to head that way if you are eager to try these new chocolate bars and help us get them launched.
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July 25, 2017
Suggested Neighborhoods for 2nd Location
Thank you for all the suggestions! Keep them coming! It builds confidence to see how people’s ideas stack up.

We tend to looks at historic areas because they are smaller spaces with charm, and usually good walking traffic because of it. We are also looking for something within a reasonable distance to our Pioneer Square kitchen. Let’s whittle down the list to hone in on what is most popular and best fit:

First Pass: Logistically Difficult

The further the store is away from the home base kitchen and admin office, the more difficult it will be to maintain a good customer experience. Staff will be harder to train and product will be harder to keep stocked up. These are fun locations; perhaps further down the road… So we’ll remove the following suggestions from the list for these reasons:
- Atlanta
- Birmingham, AL
- Chehalis
- Chicago
- Duluth
- Ellensburg
- Portsmouth, NH
- Rome, Italy
- Silverdale
- Spokane
- Norwalk, CT
Second Pass: Similar Areas

Let’s group suggestions into categories to see if there are clear standouts. We have grouped suggestions into 3 buckets:
- East Side (with parking)
- Bellevue
- Bothell
- Kirkland
- Redmond
- Snohomish
- Woodinville
- Seattle Area
- Ballard
- Belltown
- Edmonds
- Fremont
- Greenwood
- Georgetown
- Kent Station
- Lake City
- Lake Forest Park
- Mill Creek
- Queen Anne
- University Village
- Wallingford
- West Seattle
- White Center
- Columbia City
- New Cities
- Tacoma
- Puyallup
- Everett
It is so difficult to choose, but the focus and attention must be concentrated in some fashion. Here are our top contenders after soliciting everyone’s feedback.

Eastside: Woodinville

We admit to a lack of knowledge about neighborhoods and cities east of Lake Washington, however Woodinville is the one exception. For the first 7 years of the business we spent most of our time out at Woodinville wineries (Silver Lake first, then Woodhouse, then Davenport) pairing chocolate with wine. There is a lot of complimentary appeal between chocolate and wine. So for Eastside considerations, it makes sense to focus our attention on Woodinville. Per your feedback, though, it should definitely come with ample parking!

Seattle Area: Belltown, West Seattle, Columbia City

Belltown is near Pike Place Market, which is an obvious appeal. There is year round tourism, an active business and residential community, and some location prestige. However, it comes with quite a bit of competition. There are already 5 chocolate shops present in or around the market. Rent here is high, but not unreasonable.

West Seattle has the junction, which is always hopping. It’s a commercial area that seems to be served well by the residents that live in West Seattle, with a blend of walking traffic supported by fairly easy parking.

Columbia City is a new consideration for us. The area has changed so much in the past few years. There is a nice historic strip along Rainer that looks appealing with some smaller retail options available. I think this area will require some further research.

Bordering Cities: Tacoma
There are some beautiful historic areas in Tacoma, and the rent is very reasonable. We haven’t built up a lot of recognition in Tacoma, so it will be important for us to find a smaller space with good “walkability” and charm near commercial districts. That appears most likely along Pacific Ave and Commerce Street, with some historic areas along 6th Avenue.

Thank you for all the suggestions! I’ll follow up with some comparisons so you can see what is going into our consideration process. Please chime in if you see something awesome.
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July 21, 2017
Help Intrigue Chocolate Find a 2nd Location

After a great deal of research and planning, we are finally ready to pursue a second retail location for Intrigue Chocolate Co. The first location has been a big success (thank you, Pioneer Square!), but it is a lot to ask of one tiny shop to support itself, roughly 5 full time equivalent staff members, a kitchen, and a storage and admin office. A second location will allow us to reach more people and better utilize our existing kitchen capacity. The effort does come with a Costco-sized bag of excitement mixed with obstacles.

Location

Where should we look?! Areas we are already excited about would be just off of Pike Place Market, South Lake Union, or Ballard. We have considered a Bellevue focus, but we don’t know that area very well (maybe you do?). Do we open another location in the Seattle area or start looking south to Tacoma, Olympia, or even Portland? North to Everett, Woodinville, Kirkland, or Bellingham?

We always have a big winter holiday and Valentine’s Day season, which is when most of the permanent residents or office professionals in the neighborhood come to the shop. But to sustain the shop all year we have great success with first time visitors; introducing them to truffles made with fresh herbs and spices, and encouraging them to take gifts home with them. We want to focus on that ideal mix of customers for our second location.

It would also be nice if the second location were close to transportation lines, like the light rail or an easy bus route. Relying on “destination” traffic is a lot of pressure for one small chocolate shop. Activated streets - browsing walkers and day-trippers with many small store fronts - are our bread and butter.

Finances

This is always a sticky issue for a small business. We decided to work with a financial consultant to help us understand our business better, and frame the conversation correctly for the bank. Pro tip: banks are much more interested in helping you manage existing cash flow, not exactly creating new cash flow. It’s a small distinction but an enormously important lesson for us, partly because it explains our past difficulty in conversations with the bank. Instead we’ve ended up leaning heavily on social fundraising like Kickstarter and Community Sourced Capital to grow our business. Now we want to build long term bank relationships, and learn to watch cashflow (as well as all the other business’s vitals) more closely.

The Dream

We’d like this second location to be a bit more lenient about coffee and tea beverages. The Pioneer Square store is right next to a Starbucks which limits us per the lease agreements. Coffee is a complimentary medium for certain styles of experiencing flavor. For instance, a milk drink with some of our cardamom syrup can be even more appealing when the coffee is in the cup, too. Coffee is a natural extension to our in-store experience, so it makes sense to plan some room for it to expand in our new location.

So that’s the big news on that front. We’ll keep updating as we go, as we overcome hurdles, and when we finally sign that lease. Please keep your eyes open and let us know what you see out there that you think would be a good fit for Intrigue!
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July 20, 2017
No Peanuts or Gluten in this Chocolate, We Think

We are often asked if our chocolate contains any nuts or gluten. Our kitchen is not certified nut-free nor gluten-free, so for people with severe and dangerous allergies our answer needs to be complex to be clear. Here’s a bit more information for you to make an informed decision.

We do not allow nuts or flour to enter our kitchen, and we take serious care with ingredients that may be of concern. We do this because some allergies - especially nuts and gluten - are so scary (!) and we want to limit our exposure to any customer surprise reactions.

It is important to note that we use ingredients that come from a variety of sources where we do not have insight into possible cross-contamination issues. Therefore we can only say that there are no nuts and gluten as ingredients in the chocolate, with that caveat that they “may have been processed in a facility with…” For those reasons we deliberately do not make bold claims.

Truffle flavors of note regarding nuts:

Mahlab

After some research we decided it was okay to include Mahlab in our lineup, but is an uncommon spice without much information available and therefore carries with it a bit of risk. Mahlab is the seed from the inside of a cherry pit and comes from the Mediterranean. It is not listed on any of the allergen websites as a nut allergy risk, but it is part of the Prunus genus which means it is related to almond. When we do make this flavor it's the last in the day and we wash the chocolate molds immediately afterward to reduce risk of potential cross contamination, just to be extra cautious.

Liqueurs

We stopped using liqueurs that list nut flavors. We weren’t comfortable enough with that. Goodbye, Frangelico!

Many liqueurs don’t list any ingredients. Apparently it’s not required for some bizarre reason. When we have even marginal concerns, we exercise caution and clean thoroughly afterward. If you know of any hidden nut risks, please tell us!

Truffle flavors of note regarding gluten:

Stout Beer and Barley Malt

Beer are made with malts from various grains. Gluten is definitely present but containable (no dust), so we make these only once a year, last batch of the week, and clean everything thoroughly.

Bourbon, Whiskey, Scotch

Similar to the stout beer, these liqueurs are made with grains. Though the liquor is distilled and should have no gluten, some trace proteins might possibly occur. We use these, but fully disclose so that you can judge for yourself based on your individual experience.

We encourage you to ask us if you have any questions regarding ingredient intolerances! Please feel free to send us an email or ask in the shop. If we don’t know right away we’ll research for you. Happy chocolate eating!
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