What began as a casual conversation a few months ago between Sonia Rose store owner Sonia Holbrook and one of her wholesalers crystallized last month into a new confectionery shop in downtown Lancaster.
Bonbonnière owner
Mary Ellen
Kauffman with
a sample bowl
of chocolate covered
freeze dried
fruit
...(more)
Containers
filled with
handmade
chocolates
from Harbor
Sweets line
a shelf at
Bonbonnière.
A ribbon turns
a cigar-shaped
Yoku Moku
confection into
an exquisite
little gift.
Chocolate Cherries from Marich are among the candies adorning the shelves at Bonbonnière.
Mary Ellen Kauffman, owner of Bonbonnière, is now a neighboring shopkeeper at 50 N. Queen St., as well as a supplier of the fabric flowers Holbrook incorporates into the purses she makes and sells.
Sonia Rose once occupied the space across the hall where Bonbonnière just opened, but moved last September to the larger space formerly occupied by Bella Boo.
Calling on Holbrook in the new space, Kauffman was curious about what would become of the old space.
"She asked me, 'What would you like to see over there?' " Holbrook recalled, pointing to her former location, "and I told her a candy store."
Something clicked in Kauffman. She likes candy — butter caramels from Minnesota, freeze-dried fruit covered with chocolate, handmade chocolates shaped like sailboats and crisp little cigar-shaped Yoku Moku confections from Japan.
"We decided to open a store with what we always bought as a family," Kauffman said. "We have brought to Lancaster candy that was a favorite in the family for years and years."
When her daughters were growing up, Kauffman recalled by way of example, the family used to pile into a motor home and drive to Marblehead, Mass., in part to buy the Harbor Sweets chocolates made there.
Now, she sells them at Bonbonnière.
Kauffman said that in the 20 years she's been attending trade shows as a wholesale representative for ribbon companies, she has been exposed to candy that other people probably have never seen.
She also lived in New York awhile, opening a showroom on Fifth Avenue.
"I've gone to all the candy stores in the city," she said.
Tired of traveling back and forth from Manhattan to spend time on weekends with her husband, Ray, who sells advertising for WDAC radio, Kauffman moved herself and her business back to Lancaster in 2005.
She said she will continue running her other wholesale business, Kauffman and Associates, from the new confectionery store.
"I can work from here like I do from my home office," she said, pointing to a computer behind Bonbonnière's cash register.
When she travels to trade shows, her daughters, Lisa and Heidi, will look after Bonbonnière, she said.
Kauffman would call her daughters when she was trying to come up with a name for the store, she said, to get their reactions to her ideas.
"Sweet Shoppe, Downtown Sweet Shoppe, that sort of thing," she recalled.
Then one day, Bonbonnière popped into her head. Looking the word up in an online dictionary, she saw the definitions "1. A small ornate box for candy. 2. A confectioner's store."
It clicked just like the idea of opening a candy store had.
"Everything we have here is right up in that name," she said.
In addition to candy, Bonbonnière carries a selection of small gift boxes that customers can fill with their own selection of candy.
It's a way to "have fun gift giving to someone," Kauffman said.
One corner of Bonbonnière is devoted to children's candy and children's gift boxes.
"We're raising the level of children's taste buds," she said. "We're giving children a chance to experience a higher quality than they're used to."
In the few days that Bonbonnière has been open, many people have stopped to look at the display in the shop's window, Kauffman said. She just wishes more of them would come into the shop to see what "a chocolate for the discriminating palate" tastes like.
"This is how I sell. You taste, you buy," Kauffman said. "There's a lot of self-gifting going on here."
It's not necessarily expensive. There are chocolate-covered graham crackers for $1, she said, caramels for 60 cents apiece.
"I don't think anything is priced exorbitantly," she said.
Across the hall at Sonia Rose, Holbrook explained that she's seen a need for a downtown candy store since Miesse closed its Queen Street shop after the fire that destroyed its factory a couple of years ago.
"Since then, a lot of people have come in here saying, 'Where do they have a nice box of candy where I can get a gift?' " Holbrook said.
Now, all she has to do is point across the hall to Bonbonnière.
Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.
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