A move from working in a pub to printing messages on chocolates has given Sandie Stanley a more flexible life, writes MICHELLE MCDONAGH
CHOCOLATE FACTORIES come in all shapes and sizes from industrial dimensions that are named after planets to the Willy Wonka varieties you get on the silver screen.
There are even cottage industries that use keyhole surgery to slip liqueurs, whiskies or prunes in through secret doorways to sensationalise the humble truffle. And now, upstairs in the spare room over The Boomerang Bar, in Bray, Co Wicklow, Print Delicious – The Creative Chocolate Printing Company – is tapping into chocolography, an edible chocolate messaging system, fraternising a love of chocolate with a desire to communicate.
Print Delicious is run by Sandie Stanley who had some free time, an upstairs spare room – that was occasionally used by the bar’s golfing society and writing club, over the pub she runs with her husband Derek – and a desire to do more with her life, so she decided to look for a new business to improve her lifestyle.
Her search led to the internet where she found chocolography technology (essentially, the wherewithal to print on chocolate with edible ink), a system that prints icing messages or images on milk or Belgian chocolate that you can order just like a business card, only in this case you can also eat it.
Clients include corporates like 3Mobile, Kinahan Vibe Training and Macra na Feírme, all eager to pass on contact details or marketing messages; and enlightened wedding planners who want to send chocolate wedding invitations or use chocolate place-settings to welcome guests.
The technology can also be used to print photographs on lollipops for children’s birthday parties.
Not that it’s always been chocolates and layers of icing for Stanley. Her story goes back to the last recession and has a resonance for anyone starting a business or a new life in the current economic environment.
“The late 1980s, when Derek and I had jobs that were barely paying us a decent wage, were a difficult time for a couple starting out. In fact, we looked for a mortgage in Bray for a £24,000 house in 1990 and we were laughed at, and told ‘no way’.
“So, like everybody else, we got on a plane and went to London. We worked in Mulligan’s in Mayfair, which was a fantastic upmarket restaurant and oyster bar, where the owner saw some potential in us and offered us his new flagship Welsh pub, Mulligan’s of Cardiff, to run, and we accepted.
“Luckily, there was no Irish pub in Cardiff, the city was going through rejuvenation, and the pub was a phenomenon and a huge success,” she says.
“We worked all the hours God sent us. We lived upstairs in the pub, with no living expenses, and got very good commission and so were able to save a deposit for our own pub.
“Five years later we came home to start a family, and eventually bought The Boomerang Bar, where we’ve been for the last 11 years.”
Having said that, during the last decade or so, Sandie Stanley’s priorities changed. “Trying to juggle family and pub life is not easy, and so over the last few years I took some time off from the pub to be with our twins, Sean and Róisín, taking a back seat, just doing the books and bits and pieces while Derek has been there full-time and more. “However the twins are now nine years old, more independent, free-spirited little people and are old enough to go to the after-school club so I don’t feel total and utter guilt that they are little babies I’m handing over to someone else. I was itching to go back to work full-time.
“I needed it for my sanity and, much as I love our customers, I’ve done my stint in pubs. I really wanted to do something for myself that would allow, not necessarily less working hours, but certainly more family orientated hours, where I could take weekends or late nights off.
“Initially, I went through the Golden Pages from A to Z and everything else in between and on the internet looking for something different with a challenge. I also looked for something I wanted to do and something I could do. Eventually, on the web, I came across a company in New York called The Chocolate Printing Company which created chocolography and, thinking there was nothing like it in Ireland, my stomach flipped.
“It was just brilliant – a business that utilises chocolate – particularly as Irish people are the third-highest consumers of chocolate in the world, after the Swiss and Austrians.
“Finally, after a lot of research and a trip to see how a similar system works in London, we went to New York for a closer look and liked what we saw and decided to take the plunge.”
And so, late last year with a new $42,000 chocolography system – it looks like an awkward photocopier – installed over the pub, some computer software, exclusive rights to chocolography in Ireland, the firm was up and running, save for a name.
The conundrum gave Stanley sleepless nights until one of her children, Sean, when asked for his opinion, immediately responded “it’s delicious”, a war-cry that her other twin, Róisín, chanted repeatedly.
In jig time Print Delicious was up and running, set, you could say, in chocolate.
So, what’s different about life now for Stanley? “My working day has changed in that I find the production end of my day very soothing and definitely much less stressful than my previous job in the pub, where you’re constantly on show, having to put your best face forward, putting together five cheese sandwiches and 20 pints down in one corner, while you’re trying to juggle 10 pints up the other end. In that respect, my new job is much calmer and I really love it.
“Also, if I need to be with my children during the day I can just take time off and make it up later, whereas the pub must always open at designated hours.”
Little successes have been encouraging. In March, Print Delicious won a Small Firms Association award for Best New Emerging Business and Stanley says that, so far, she is breaking even, and is happier for it.
“People have told me I’m mad starting a company at the moment, but with a new idea, an emerging company, and starting right at the beginning of a horrendous recession, it’s a lifestyle change that’s going onwards and upwards, and it’s certainly improved my quality of life.
“I really love what I do, and I get to work with chocolate and play with pictures. What more can I say but ‘Happy Days’.”