For many, an ice cream shop is a place of simple joy, but for the founders of Edmonton’s Kind Ice Cream, it’s also a platform for deep-seated values and community building. What began as a conversation about creating a family-friendly gathering space has blossomed into a thriving multi-location business led by a trio of women—each bringing a unique background, from occupational therapy to hospitality. In this interview, we go behind the scenes with one of the owners to discuss the “beautiful chaos” of entrepreneurship, the importance of being a vocally queer-owned business, and why they aren’t afraid to let their values lead the way.
Walk me through, what is a day in the life of a small business owner and an ice-cream shop owner like?
It’s different every day, which is why I was drawn to it. I was an occupational therapist for about six years before we opened Kind and there was a lot of sitting at your desk and checking all the boxes. Owning a business, you’re putting out fires, and you don’t know what every day holds. I love that.
Myself and my wife, Nicole, and Candyce, we each have pretty different roles. What I do is our social media, photography, the website, as well as our financial planning. So in a day, I might go to one of the shops to take some photos, do a little bit of number crunching or preparation for a new flavor launch, and make new signage that we need. We don’t have a maintenance person, and so if there’s a plumbing issue, I’ll just be on YouTube, trying to figure out how to fix [it].
My wife, Nicole, does a lot of our operational work. It’s the least glorified part of the job, but she does a lot of our systems planning, our guidebooks, anything where the strings that need to be pulled behind the scenes, basically.
Candyce has a background in hospitality, and so she is our human resources person. She works closely with our team, especially our management team, and helps them problem solve, and make sure that everything is working on the people-side of things.
What inspired you to start Kind and to move from occupational therapy into this new world?
For years, we had been chit-chatting about how we wanted something like Kind to exist in Edmonton. We have young families, and we wanted a place where we could take our babies, meet up with a friend for a quick visit, rather than needing to go out for a full blown dinner and hire a babysitter. We wanted something that was just truly a gathering place for everybody.
What’s it been like over seven years, growing from one location in Richie to now three and a pop-up location?
It’s been exciting and kind of exhilarating to have something big to chew on in terms of growth. A lot of it has been unplanned to some extent. But it’s been fun. We’ve always wanted to exist in more than one neighborhood, and it’s been really fun to grow faster than we expected.
How do you balance those competing areas of running a business while being open and advocating for what you believe in?
It’s a really good question, and it is interesting, because I feel like the last five, six years, the world has been a little bit of a powder keg. And so it feels like we’re in a time where it’s easier to just stay quiet and take the path of least resistance.
When we opened, we knew that we wanted to be a values-driven business, and in particular, we wanted to make it known that we’re a queer and a women-owned business. My sister-in-law, Candace, is Indigenous, and that’s a big focus for us and for her, as well. And so it follows that we are open about those things and that we champion those causes. We’re okay if that means that certain people don’t want to be our customers. Those are things that we’re not willing to compromise on.
As you said, it’s very important to be open, especially for queer people. So, how do those values translate to your work with your staff and your customers on a day-to-day basis?
For me, one of the things that I’m the most proud of with Kind, is that by being a vocally queer-owned business, we’ve communicated to our team that we are actively trying to create a safe space. We’ve had a lot of our staff who have come out while they work at Kind because they are in this supportive environment with their peers for the first time.
We feel so proud to act as this safe space for people, and I will say that our management team plays a huge role in that. We have an awesome team of managers, and they carry our values and communicate those with our team, and they do a good job protecting our team.
What would you like to see, either in the business community or in other organizations that you would like to partner with in the future?
I would like to see even more businesses be very values-driven. Everybody has values, and it can be daunting as an entrepreneur, as it’s often a really fine line that you walk between success and failure. It feels scary sometimes to take a risk and put your values out there. But I love to see it when businesses take a risk. And I feel like it does pay off to be vocal about what you care about.
If you were to have a conversation with a new entrepreneur just getting started, especially a young queer entrepreneur, what advice would you give them?
I would say that the dream that you have is yours for the taking. If there’s a dream that you have or something that you want to exist, or something that you’ve always wanted to do, it is available to you. There’s always been this idea that being an entrepreneur is for somebody else, it’s for some guy who went to business school. And really it is available to anybody.
In our process of starting Kind, we looked to other business owners for help, and found that people were willing to share. We reached out to different businesses that had something similar to what we were going for. A coffee shop that had similar values, or an ice cream shop in Vancouver that knew how to make great ice cream. I think that people are willing to help you achieve what you’re setting out to do, you just need to take the step to ask for it.
*This interview has been edited for length.
