Greetings! I love this opportunity to pause and reflect on the past month and distill what resonates as a message to share. So, thank you so much for receiving this love letter today. April felt rich in texture, as we spent the first part of the month in Hamburg & Ireland, then returned to the canyon full of wildflowers.
As we walk through May, we are nearing the touchpoint of BK making it through 15 years, which feels significant. If someone asked me today to recreate my path to get BK to where it is today, I would probably reply, "I can't". Honestly, I have no idea how to explain the winding road we traveled. I had no business plan to start (and continue not having one). Our way, especially in the early years, was like putting one of my feet in the dark, feeling it out if there was a ground to step on, and leaping a way forward a little bit at a time. Because of that, some decisions I made surprised others.
One example is our peculiar in-store opening hours. We tried many variations of opening hours in the past, but our current configuration is (most of) Sundays between 12 and 5 p.m. Our new Eagle Rock spot is closer to different LA neighborhoods, so we have enjoyed hosting a lovely flow of guests on Sunday afternoons since our relocation in March. Our customers who are surprised to encounter many analogue enthusiasts browsing the shop on those days often ask us why we don't open our storefront on more days of the week. The question makes sense. “You are doing so well as a brick & mortar. Why don’t you open more?” I received a similar kind of question last Sunday. Emil and I jokingly answered that we were just hanging out in the back for the remaining days of the week, meditating our way through the week to prepare for our Sunday afternoon. If you are here reading this story, you probably know that we tend to other aspects of the BK world on our non-opening days, such as putting love into our online orders, connecting with our virtual BK community, designing our original artifacts, to name a few. Of course, it's not impossible to imagine opening the shop on those days, parallel to tackling other tasks. However, the bigger and more important question to me has been, "Can we still open the space with the same intentionality as we currently do on Sundays if we opened more days?"
We might not be "just" hanging out in the back between Monday and Friday, but embodying the "heart-driven" culture around BK has been a driving factor in each "footstep in the dark" I have taken in the last 15 years.
You see, to me, it's important to prioritize fostering relationships amongst the BK team and with a wider community before we prioritize the monetary status quo. It's essential that we feel inspired by how we do things around BK, rather than push pure efficiency and get chronically burnt out. I want the BK team members who stand on Sunday afternoons with me (or sometimes without me) in our shop to fully show up, with their hearts feeling centered and grounded. I replied with a long answer to the customer who asked the potent question last Sunday, concluding, "Why else should BK exist?"
So, our long, winding road ahead continues, and I am grateful for that. I am here to embrace it all—beautiful rolling hills, tight turns, paths that are not yet to be seen, and who knows what else.
One thing I did learn in our humbling 15 years is very simple. - We have time.
Even though I seem never to have enough time to do it all today, there will be enough time to welcome all that I want to do (including more opening hours, "maybe" someday) and so much more if the decision is aligned with who we are. We have time.
Because look how far we have come..., together.
-wakako
always a metamorphosis in progress...
Topanga// May 8th, 2025
**This story is from the BK Love Letter for May 2025. If you would like to see the entire love letter we sent to our community, including links to featured stories and the new and updated BK artifacts, you can browse it via this link.
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