When I told my mom that I was going to be a baker, she said, another baker from
France, that's the last thing we need.
I sent you to a good school to be an engineer.
So to her it was very going backward for me to be a baker.
Welcome to L'Appartement 4F, our little bakery in the heart of Brooklyn.
My name is Gautier Coiffard and I'm 34 years old.
My name is Ashley C and I am 33 years old.
I quit my engineering job to open a French bakery in New York City.
Gautier eats croissants every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.
But that's become an issue because I had my blood work done and now I have high
cholesterol, so I can't eat butter anymore.
So it's very sad.
Our bakery brings in up to $128,000 a month.
I'm completely full time at the bakery.
In my heart, I'm full time.
But I am still working as a school nurse.
The way I see our responsibility at the bakery is I bake and she sells.
Almost everything in the bakery is vintage or second hand, literally things
that we found on the street, some of them, like these old chairs.
So the butter and the chocolate are coming from France.
The butter is the most expensive ingredient.
Definitely more expensive than if we would buy it from a place here.
But I really think it adds to the taste and should not be changed.
Before we opened the bakery, I was a software engineer in a French company
here in New York City.
I was in school to be a nurse and working at a mortgage company.
We never thought in our wildest dreams that we would become business owners.
Since I was a kid, I was always interested in trying to make croissant.
I was missing bread and croissant from France.
It took me a while to perfect the croissant recipe.
The first croissant you ever made was very dense and thick, but very buttery.
Definitely not as light and airy as it is now.
When I finally got the croissant right, I was very excited.
That was it to me. That was just the goal was to make a good croissant, but
Ashley had other goals.
Americans are just missing good, easy, delicious, warm bread and pastries the
way that it's so accessible in France.
It started out because I just wanted to literally share his bread and croissants
with everyone.
Right away, people started ordering from us.
People just kept posting and tagging and sharing and word of mouth quickly
grew. And then slowly, the apartment started becoming a bakery.
We took a step back and said, wow, this is really something serious.
We analyzed our numbers and decided, let's take this out of the apartment.
We started fundraising just after we signed the lease.
The first one was Kickstarter.
We raised 62K.
Then we met with the neighborhood and five people lent us money.
And then we got another $49,000 in bank loans.
Then we still needed to put some on credit cards.
We have had investors reach out to us, but we really wanted to try our best not
to have any because we have such a strong vision and we also are so
connected to our community.
We still have 100% equity in the business.
We were very naive to what it actually takes to open a business.
We decided Gautier needs to quit his job so he can really focus on the
bakery. When we
realized that we were going to be full fledged bakery owners, we were shocked.
We did not expect the support that we received and we had a line out the door
from the moment we opened hours and hours later until the very last
croissant that was sold.
We definitely want to keep growing.
We want to keep our eyes open for a second location.
We also want to grow very slowly and organically, and we just want to make
sure that everything we do is sustainable and also servicing the
community that built us.