Today we’d like to introduce you to Jay & Journey Hoang.
Hi Jay & Journey, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
We are a husband and wife-owned business. We both had corporate jobs before. When the pandemic happened, I (the wife) worked from home and started baking to kill time. We learned everything from baking cookies to cake, bread, then macarons. We gave them out to neighbors, family, and friends and everyone loved them so much. One of our friends offer to buy some macarons. When everything opened back up again, we went to a farmer’s market, and we wonder if we could become a vendor on the weekends for fun. Our little business picked up faster than we thought, so here we are open a macarons shop incorporating with coffee – because we’re both huge coffee and boba lovers 🙂
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
We wouldn’t say that it’s been a smooth road, but we enjoyed learning new things every day. It started with setting up our vendor booth at farmers’ markets: buying small camping table, camping chairs, to a small display case… Opening a brick-and-mortar is so much harder than we could have imagined. We learned and did everything from scratch. We went from a normal couple having 9-5 jobs to become business owners, bakers, baristas, marketing managers, photographers, HR managers… to our small business. There were no so much of the struggles along the way because we really take our time to do our research and we put in so much love with everything we do. However, we’re still new in the industry so we thrive to do even better every day 🙂
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We are known for our special macarons first of all, but now we’re branching more into beverage industry (again, we’re coffee snobs lol). We special in high-quality coffee and boba tea. Our customers love the idea of having coffee, matcha, boba all in one. They like to have options whether they come in early in the morning or late at night. We serve a variety of handcrafted drinks from high to none caffeinated ones. Therefore, our customers often bring their friends, family, seniors, kids. Everyone is able to find a drink and a pastry item that fit their need or health concerns.
We also take pride in providing great customers service. We quitted our job to do what we love, so we definitely want to showcase to customers and also employees that we love what we do <3
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you.
I would say both in life and business. We’re lucky and happy to find each other as lifetime partner. We support each other and believe in one another. In business, even though we’re still very new and there’s still more to grow, we’re lucky to have a huge support from the community, especially in Watauga where we’re located. We believe that luck is when skill and opportunity come together, and everything just happened right when it needs to be.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.melbytx.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melby.tx/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melby.tx
Image Credits
Grace Bergstedt
Karla Lewis
