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With all due respect to Forrest Gump, Alexandra Clark has a bone to pick with the catchphrase.
When Clark opened her chocolate business, Bon Bon Bon, in Detroit during the summer of 2014, she did so not because it was a passion and a lifelong dream (though it was) and not because so many people had told her it would never work that she was intent on proving them wrong (though they had, and she did). For Clark, opening the Motor City’s first artisan chocolate shop in 40 years boiled down to a desire to break confectionery dogma that no longer made any sense.
“Why keep using the same recipe for cream fillings if nobody eats them? We even have that phrase, ‘life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get,’” she says. “It’s like hi, how about we just label our chocolate? How hard is this?”
Clark makes it seem easy. The 29-year-old landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016, less than two full years after first opening up shop. She’s since purchased a 5,000-sq foot factory, expanded Bon Bon Bon to a second retail location, launched nationwide shipping and even teamed up with Shake Shack on a custom shake for the chain’s inaugural Detroit location.
It helps that, rather than serve as a hindrance, the tenets which formed the foundation of her business — there should be no such thing as “nasty” chocolate, packaging should cost less than the chocolate itself, “bons” should be labeled and customers should be able to walk in and buy any number of “bons” they wish, even a single serving — have differentiated Clark from the Jacques Torres and Max Brenners of the world.
Which isn’t to say that Bon Bon Bon doesn’t match the quality of those other chocolatiers. It does, many times over. Clark imports chocolate from Peru and Ecuador and other cocoa capitals. She then mixes in hyper-local ingredients from nearby farmers in Michigan, and the result is an array of sweets that ranges from the conventional (like the #5, fresh raspberry) to the fun (the #47, Birthday Cake, has a birthday cake-flavored ganache, buttercream frosting and sprinkles) and offbeat (the #16, Bacon & Eggs, contains Italian meringue, custard ganache, and shaved coppa).
The bons boast culinary industry bonafides: they’ve won plaudits at Martha Stewart’s American Made awards, the Forbes Under 30 Summit, and were named by Bloomberg Pursuits as some of the world’s best chocolate.
It’s a level of success that confounds her, she says. And were it not for a few fateful turns — including one that ended in a taxi-cab accident — Bon Bon Bon and its whimsical treats might not even exist.
“We started Bon Bon Bon on $32,000 that I had gotten from a taxi accident on the way home from a chocolate show. To me it was dirty money; I wish that accident had never happened,” she says. And, because of that, she was willing to be really risky with it.
“When you have a whole bunch of smart, rich, old white dudes tell you your idea is not good, you’re kind of like, ‘Okay, I’ll try it anyway,” she says.
After an outside investor balked at Clark’s plans to open in Detroit — he wanted her in a major market; she, after traveling to 16 countries in eight years to study chocolate, was ready to be home, near family — Clark bootstrapped the business, and planned to make it wholesale, selling to hotels and businesses in Michigan.
But then, after she opened, neighbors starting coming by for some chocolate. Clark, of course, would oblige. Then they’d bring their friends. And then one day that summer, she opened the doors of the shop to a line of people stretching around the corner.
“We ended up selling everything we expected to sell for retail that day. People kept showing up and we didn't want to say no. It’s been pretty much like that ever since,” she says.
It’s also part of why Clark doesn’t dream of leaving her home base in Hamtramck (a subset of Detroit).
“Hamtramck is like a starter community. Once people find success they leave and they’ll go to northern suburbs or someplace that has a lot of money,” she explains. “We are not going to do that. It’s the community that raised us. We joke, it takes a village to raise a chocolate shop… Our neighbors come and bring us spaghetti during busy season.”
Clark modestly refers to Bon Bon Bon a “tiny” shop in a “small” town. And in some ways, it is. But in other ways — the ways that have become increasingly important in the environment that is 2017 — it’s much more.
“Being a chocolatier is kind of funny; on the spectrum of bartender to jeweler you’re somewhere in the middle. You have these really personal ties to your customers because you’re there for moments in their life that are uniquely important to them,” she says. “You’re there from the first date to doing their wedding to helping them say they’re sorry. It’s a really cool role to get to play in a community and it’s even more interesting when you get to play it with a large community like with the rest of the country.”
