Kickstarter Story: Bringing our pizza to the Hood River waterfront
Bringing our pizza to the hood river waterfront
To this day, the Story of our Kickstarter (KS) Campaign, still gives us the chills of joy. We are eternally grateful for all those that contributed to our move to the Hood River Waterfront - the move was totally life-changing, not only for the restaurant, but for the Baumahckl’s too! We love to share our story and are amazingly flattered when we both see KS contributors share the Wall with their guests or when anyone comes up to us and asks what it’s all about.
After seven years in Bingen, WA, doing the best that we could in a venue that just couldn’t sustain us for the long haul, we decided to pack up and move our business to Hood River. In Spring 2013, the opportunity was presented to us to move to build out a brand new location at the Hood River Waterfront. We committed and signed a lease…but how were we going to do this financially?!? After being declined a conventional commercial loan and tapping out our personal savings and private investors, we found ourselves still short on the funds to move, build, and operate. It was at this point we decided upon asking for support from our community of “SolFriends”. We embarked on our Kicksarter campaign, an opportunity for our community to be involved in our move. What we were not prepared for was the intensity of KS, it’s called a campaign for a reason and takes a lot of time to create, manage and fulfill.
We embarked on a 28-day, $50,000 Kickstarter goal to fund our move! We had SO much fun creating the video - including our Friends and Family in plot. Our sons, (Jenner, 8 & Rune, 5) had key roles and provided joy and light hearted energy to the video. In hindsight, producing the video was the “easy” part. How we were going to spread the word and more importantly convert views into contributions. One of our first realizations is that we had to first educate people as to what a Kickstarter was, yikes!. It was at this point we decided to hit the streets, setting up tables at local venues including Mike’s Ice Cream and the Springhouse Ruins- we even had a Kickstarter Viewing party! Kickstarter consumed our lives! We were incessantly checking to see if anyone was responding to our online pleas. They were! People were quickly snapping up our “awards” of Pizza for a Month, private pizza parties, placard barstools, and naming rights to pizza! We soon found ourselves driving or walking around town and people were shouting at us with excitement,”what number are you at?”!
On Father’s Day 2013, our family went on an outing to Oaks Amusement Park in Portland. It was this day, while in the parking lot, we received a call from long-time Solstice fans - they called to say that they made a large contribution that sent us over the top, and we reached our goal! The four of us whooped and hollered and hugged and danced! With just a week remaining we continued to receive pledges, eventually totally over $57,000, a Kickstarter record for an Oregon restaurant!
In December 2013, we opened our doors to a long line of supporters. To this day, those same 500+ folks dine at the Cafe, share the Wall of Joy with their friends, sit at “their” bar stool, and enjoy a pizza in a space that they helped create. We greatly appreciate them and YOU for dining with us today!