Running a small business from the country
Cricket Creek Enterprises doesn't operate from a warehouse park or a suburban strip mall. The business runs from a property along a county road, surrounded by fields, a few head of cattle on the neighbour's land, and the kind of quiet that makes it possible to concentrate on packing orders without the constant noise of traffic. There's a creek — the one in the name — running along the back boundary, and when the windows are open in summer you can hear it from the shipping room.
This isn't an accident. Running a supply business from a rural property is a deliberate choice, and it shapes everything from our hours to our shipping schedule to the way we relate to the community of makers and small-business bakers who buy from us.
How it started
The short version: a hobby outgrew the kitchen. The founder made hard candy as a seasonal thing — peppermint sticks at Christmas, lemon drops through the summer — and kept running out of LorAnn flavour oils between trips to the nearest craft store, which was forty minutes away. Ordering a case at a time and splitting it with a few friends turned into keeping a small stock in the pantry. The pantry stock turned into a spare-room inventory. The spare room turned into the outbuilding that's now the main workspace.
That progression took about three years. Along the way, a few things became clear: the candy-making community wanted a reliable mail-order source for LorAnn oils and related supplies; the same people who made candy also made soap and bath bombs; and running this kind of business from a rural property had real advantages over leasing retail space in town.
The advantages of rural
Space is the obvious one. A small-town or suburban retail lease might give you 800 square feet of combined showroom and storage. Out here, the workspace is large enough to store full pallets of stock, run a proper packing bench, and keep the shipping supplies organised without everything being stacked on top of everything else. There's room to expand into seasonal overflow when the Christmas rush hits.
Cost is the second. Rural property costs a fraction of commercial retail space per square foot, and that saving passes directly into pricing. We're able to keep our margins modest because the overhead is modest.
The third advantage is less tangible: pace. There's no foot traffic to manage, no storefront hours to keep, no constant interruption from walk-in browsing. Orders come in by email and through the website, get packed in batches, and ship on a regular schedule. The work has a rhythm to it that suits the rural setting — steady, predictable, and uninterrupted.
A typical day
The morning starts with order processing. Emails that came in overnight, website orders queued up, and the occasional phone call from a regular wholesale customer placing a monthly reorder. By mid-morning the day's orders are printed and the packing begins.
Packing is the core physical work of the day. LorAnn oils need careful packaging — the dram bottles are glass and the flavour oils are concentrated enough that a leak would scent an entire shipment. Each bottle gets wrapped individually, the boxes are sized to minimise movement, and fragile stickers go on everything glass. A typical day's shipment is 15 to 30 packages in the off-season, climbing to 60 or more per day in November and December.
USPS pickup happens mid-afternoon. After that, the day shifts to inventory work — checking stock levels against the reorder list, unpacking supplier deliveries, shelving new stock, and updating the website with anything that's come back into stock or gone temporarily out.
Seasonal rhythms
The business has a strong seasonal curve. Candy-making peaks from October through December — Halloween candy, Thanksgiving entertaining, and the big Christmas rush. January is quiet. Spring picks up again as soap-makers and bath-bomb sellers gear up for spring markets. Summer is steady but modest. Then autumn brings the candy cycle around again.
The rural setting makes these swings manageable. There's no lease payment scaled to peak-season revenue. When January is slow, the overhead stays low. When December is frantic, there's space to bring in extra stock and run longer packing days without feeling cramped.
Community and customers
Most of our customers are scattered across the country — we ship to all 50 states. But a surprising number are relatively local: home bakers and candy-makers within a couple of hours' drive who prefer to pick up orders rather than pay shipping. We accommodate that with a simple pickup arrangement — email when you'd like to come by, and we'll have your order boxed and ready.
The local craft-fair circuit is another connection point. Several of our wholesale customers sell at the same county and regional fairs, and we occasionally set up a booth ourselves — partly to sell retail, partly to stay connected to the community of makers who use our products.
What's next
The business isn't trying to become a warehouse operation or a national retailer. The goal is to stay small enough that every order gets personal attention, broad enough in catalogue that our regulars can get everything they need from one source, and rural enough that the overhead stays sensible and the pace stays human. Cricket Creek is a creek, after all — not a river.
Questions about our products or interested in wholesale pricing? Email [email protected] and we'll get back to you within a working day.