Having opened a restaurant and a catering business, it stood to reason that Michelle Wells’ next venture would be — retail?
“I’d never even worked in retail,” says Wells, who, with her husband, Ted, launched The Kitchen Collection at Events with Taste 13 months ago.
“There’s been a 100% learning curve,” she adds. “I’ve learned a lot, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Wells describes her new store as a “cute, fun kitchen store — a baby version of Williams Sonoma. I’d love to have a full-size version of Williams Sonoma.”
While the store doesn’t carry many large items like pots and pans, she says the goal is to grow into a bigger space with a test kitchen.
Such a space would hardly be a leap for Wells. This year will be the 20th anniversary of Events with Taste, the catering business she opened a few years after launching her downtown Chattanooga restaurant, The Cupboard, in 2000. She started catering out of the restaurant, then closed The Cupboard in 2008, once Events with Taste was well established.
Wells says Events with Taste reached seven-figure annual sales in 2017, but the global pandemic threatened to undo what it had taken her 12 years to achieve.
“The pandemic was devastating,” she says. “From March to May (2020), there were no large gatherings. No box lunches.”
She and her husband looked at their finances and decided they’d be okay for the short term. Their greater concern, she adds, was how to continue to pay their employees.
“That,” she says, “was when we got creative.”
Wells says she and her catering staff started making bagged breakfasts, lunches and snacks at the J.A. Henry YMCA on Dodds Avenue. She explains that, with school buildings closed and virtual learning under way, many of the kids for whom that food was intended were missing their best meals.
“We’d put the food on the buses, which ran and made the normal stops, and that’s where the food was passed out,” she says. “So those kids got breakfast, lunch and snacks, and it kept my (staff) on the clock, so they could still pay their bills.”
The other thing that was happening, Wells recalls, was that parents unused to preparing three meals a day were having to do just that. That was when she got the idea to start making and selling family-style meals.
“It was stuff you could put in a microwave — casseroles, breakfast burritos,” she says. “Simple things. We’d put menus up every week on Facebook and Instagram.
“It wasn’t profitable,” she adds, “but we didn’t lose money. It kept us going for a few months.”
Wells says that when the pandemic began to ease, her staff stopped making family meals. The problem, she says, was that “everyone still wanted them.”
“That’s how the concept for (Kitchen Collection) came together,” she says. “It was a brick-and-mortar touch point for family meals, and the only kitchen stores were Bed Bath and Beyond, Target and Home Goods — big corporate places.”
Wells says Kitchen Collection’s location at 2044 South Broad Street wasn’t exactly what she had in mind, but setting up there checked what was, for her, a pretty important box.
“I did want to be on South Broad,” she says. “I’ve got too many friends with little boutiques on the other side of the river, and our catering kitchen is half-a-block away.”
In a few years, she adds, she’d love to move Kitchen Collection to the proposed mixed-use development surrounding the new Chattanooga Lookouts baseball stadium.
“I’d tell the developers, ‘Don’t go looking for Williams Sonoma,'” Wells says. “Let it be a local store.”