Test, taste, refine

Jenny Chen and Jeffrey Brown started Izola Bakery during the pandemic with zero professional baking experience.

In their most recent customer email (worth reading in its entirety), Brown describes their humble beginnings: “…we began with the croissant recipe on the side of the flour bag and worked our way to a decent croissant. We would test, taste, and refine, then test, taste, and refine some more until we finally could make a good croissant.”

Having tried their croissants, believe me when I say that to qualify their croissants as merely “good” is a massive understatement — they’re phenomenal.

Chen and Brown’s story is in many ways a wonderful distillation of how two powerful traits, when combined, can lead to great outcomes: 1) the willingness to attempt something interesting even when it’s outside of your immediate domain of expertise and 2) the patience to iterate over, and over, and over again until an optimal outcome is achieved.