Page 31 - BusinessWest March 18, 2024

FRANKLIN COUNTY >>
Big Ideas
in Small
Towns
Franklin County Businesses Face Challenges, but Also Opportunity
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
When Lucy Damkoehler returned to Western Mass. after 20 years away, she opened a bakery in a town she knew well — Bernardston, to be exact, with its population of 2,000.
That was in 2018. Today, Sweet Lucy’s Bakeshop is thriving, demonstrating, like many other businesses already have, that it’s possible to succeed in a county whose 26 communities total around 71,000 residents — less than half of Springfield alone.
“It took off right away,” she said. “My prices were competitively high. I knew the cost of food was going up and the cost of labor was going up, so I priced it so I didn’t have to change my prices too often. But people didn’t complain about it, and I felt like it was doing pretty well.”
“We were getting people from Connecticut, from New York, discovering us.”
When COVID shut down much of the world, Damkoehler pivoted to a concept called Take & Bake Meals, which, at its height, was sending 50 to 60 meals out the door each day, which wound up expanding her reach and widening her exposure.
“We were getting people from Connecticut, from New York, discovering us,” she recalled, and those days partly explain why her customer base went from 90% local before 2020 to a ratio today of about 60% repeat customers — who come anywhere from every day to once a month — and 40% travelers checking out the bakery for the first time.
And Damkoehler’s success continues; she used a crowdfunded grant and a bank loan to build an addi-
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Lucy Damkoehler has developed a strong following from both within and outside Franklin County for her bakery and cooking classes.