"Hello" from Baum-kuchen / June 2021

Hello from Baum-kuchen. I hope you are doing well. At BK, we are moving through the season of many changes, so I am here to share some updates with you. 

First and foremost, thank you so much for letting us take part in your life through 2020 and 2021. I have received so many beautiful letters, emails, and messages from you, letting us know how the presence of BK was helpful in some ways to get through the challenging time during the last 15 months. 

I also like you to know that you played a significant part in inspiring BK to keep going. To be honest, some parts of the last 15 months are a blur in my memory. At the beginning of the pandemic, Frido and I needed to make rapid and drastic decisions to help BK stay afloat, followed by a long season full of uncertainties and unknowns. During challenging moments, hearing from you about how our parcel brought a smile and made a difference in your day, even a tiny difference, lifted our spirits. So thank you, thank you, and thank you.

I am so grateful that some uplifting news is slowly trickling into the daily feed here in California. Of course, by now, I am trained to be constantly “cautiously optimistic” instead of blindly believing everything will be okay. But even with the cautious filter, listening to the local health guideline, which lifted some of the Covid restriction, has been like a breath of fresh air.

With the updated health guideline, we are starting to receive inquiries about our opening hours. Thank you so much for keeping BK in your mind as a place to source your analogue essentials. Perhaps some companies can bounce right back to the working situation of March 2020 and move forward. But as you probably already know, BK is a little different. We like to take things slow and make sure that what we do is proportional to who we are.  

For now, we are holding back from jumping into opening the physical shop regularly in Altadena. I am hesitant to over-stretch ourselves because if we are going to do something, we should always do it well with our best intentions. I also want to hold a space for our team to get reacquainted with one another. We have been working together as a team but mainly in a rotating shift for the last 15 months. So it’s nice to finally see each other more in person and have a meaningful and spontaneous conversation together. 

Additionally, I want to leave space for us to reimagine the path forward. Maybe our way forward will look similar to how it looked before, but still, I want to be intentional. 

For our local customers, our curbside pickup is available on most Sundays by appointment. I also plan to share more photos and videos from the in-studio moments so you can see what we are up to!  Please know that you will be the first one to hear from us when we have more updates about our shop. Meanwhile, our team and I are sending many warm thoughts to you!

- Wakako