SHELBURNE — Shawna Lidsky stood in front of the Vermont Teddy Bear factory in Shelburne on Monday morning, tossed her head back and laughed at the suggestion that her latest marriage was as obvious as combining chocolate and peanut butter.
“Yeah,” she said with a big bright smile. “Where were they eight years ago, right?”
The former owner of Vermont Brownie Co. is laughing and smiling a lot these days after selling her company at the end of August to the much larger Vermont Teddy Bear Co., where she’ll stay on as something of a Brownie Ambassador, and she jokes, get to buy the Dark Chocolate Chevre Brownie and Triple Chocolate Chunk Blondies she used to take home free for 50 percent off. Happily.
The 40-year-old mom and former TV sports reporter is reveling in the prospects for the company she and a partner founded almost eight years ago. She’s pumped about the fancy new brochure, a first for the company, and about the new owner’s plan to double production this holiday season to 75,000 brownies. Oh, by the way, Shawna says, did I mention my 4-year-old son’s name is Teddy?
“I just felt it was a fair deal and the right time for me. I wasn’t desperate, I wasn’t looking to sell the company, but Vermont Teddy Bear is pretty iconic and it’s right here,” Lidsky said. “It felt like the right fit for me.”
The sale will be announced to the public Tuesday. Lidsky said Vermont Teddy Bear paid her a “not life-altering” amount to buy her out. She was equally interested, she said, in staying on and being sure that two loyal, longtime employees be part of the deal. (Lidsky bought out her co-founder, Katherine Hayward, several years ago.) And she wanted to see where the much more established, high-end premium gift seller with its well-oiled marketing machine and promotions department could take the small start-up she had nurtured and raised.
“I was ready for that next step. I didn’t necessarily know I was, but they’re giving me this opportunity to learn so much,” she said. Owning a business, she said, “there were days I’d wake up and say I have the best gig on Earth and there were other days I’d say: ‘Please, someone take it away.’”
“This is the first holiday season I can breathe,” she said. “It’s not all on me anymore.”
Lidsky’s new small office is right down the hall from Vermont Teddy Bear Co. CEO William Shouldice IV, a former state commerce secretary who took the reins almost three years ago of the company started by entrepreneur John Sortino, who sold the first bears from a cart on Church Street in 1983.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” Shouldice said. The company approached Lidsky about buying her company after successfully partnering with her last Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
“She’s delightful,” Shouldice said. “She’s smart, articulate, ambitious, she knows what she knows and she knows how to fill in the gaps, like partnering with us to round out the equation.”
Lidsky was also happy with how the partnership for the holidays worked out.
“That was probably the first time I’d turned over any creative control or given my product to anyone to market or sell,” Lidsky said. “That was a big deal for me to see, to put it in their hands and they did a really good job with it. It made me comfortable.”
Lidsky said she wasn’t interested in ramping up the business by herself to the next level and is relieved to have a partner with resources.
“Their vision is so much bigger. I’m not sure I could have taken it there,” she said.
“She was stuck” if she wanted to expand significantly, Shouldice said. Lidsky agreed, saying she wasn’t interested in making the financial investment or taking on the human resources responsibility.
Sitting on a bench in front of Vermont Teddy Bear on Monday morning, Lidsky recalled the early days and some of her rookie mistakes, like when the company almost went under by offering a 50 percent off coupon and someone placed a $4,000 order. The promotion had been intended for small orders, like one of their boxes of six or a dozen brownies. (A box of six sells for $21, plus shipping.)
Lidsky also shared some of the reasons she thinks the company was successful. The most important ingredient to success – besides the Callebaut chocolate, a premium Belgian brand – was, she said, keeping the overhead low, like not baking the brownies until orders came in.
In the first two years, the company was selling roughly 10 boxes a day of brownies, baked in the back of a bagel store in South Hero, when Lidsky and her partner got their big break in 2010 when celebrity chef Bobby Flay invited them to a head-to-head competition on his Food Network television show. Their Dark Chocolate Chevre brownie beat the one baked by the world-class chef and, the day after the show aired, they had 350 orders.
The plan is to keep the two companies separate, to not have the products “cannibalize one another,” Shouldice said, and to only rarely offer a bear/brownie combo.
“The good thing about bears and brownies are that they are decidedly different,” Shouldice said, explaining customers are not likely to buy one at the expense of the other and might even buy both.
For Lidsky, it’s excitement and relief. Production will continue at the Winooski facility where Lidsky moved the baking a few years ago. More workers are likely; Shouldice says additional baking shifts are planned.
Lidsky is also grateful for the experience she had as an entrepreneur and a business owner and all those that helped her along the way, including the owner of a Montgomery Center bed and breakfast who “made the best brownies” and provided the seed of an idea she turned into a business that she said turned a profit every year.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned,” she said, “is that there’s very few things that come up that can’t be solved. I thought I was unique in my problems. Sure they’re might be problems unique to a brownie company, but all businesses have challenges and most of them can be figured out.”
As for the future, Lidsky, whose husband is an engineer, said, “I just want to dive in.” She loves the new partnership, including Brownie Day, when all the employees at the companies got to take home a box of six.
Another thing Lidsky and Shouldice share, besides enthusiasm for the future, is a love of walnut brownies.
Lidsky said, “I don’t eat as many as I used to, but put a walnut brownie in front of me, and I’m all over it.”
Said Shouldice, “The walnut one is ridiculous. It’s like this big mouthful of walnut with chocolate all mixed around.”
“The last thing I need is to eat a bunch of brownies,” he said, “but I bring a six pack home especially when the kids are around and they love them. If you’re going to ship a brownie around the world, they better be good brownies. These are awesome, awesome brownies. I’m not a cake eater, I’ll eat pies from time to time, but the brownies are excellent.”
“I like mine with walnuts, not many people in my family do,” he said. “So I usually bring a few more of those home, so they don’t get to them as quickly.”
