After NYC career, chocolatier finds a tasty niche in Amesbury
She could crunch the numbers all she wanted. But when it came time to make a dramatic career shift, Barbra Vogel kept coming back to one simple conclusion.
Who doesn't love chocolate?
After 18 years as a publishing executive, the Newburyport resident was ready for a major change. Her weekly commute to Manhattan had become a real chore, and she longed to start a business of her own.
Growing up in rural Wisconsin, she had an affection for the kind of artisan foodmakers that once defined small-town life. "Every town had a butcher, a bakery, a produce market, a confectionery store," she recalls.
A few years ago, Vogel went to Wisconsin for an extended stay with her sister, who had opened a European-style chocolate shop with her husband. By day she learned fine chocolate-making; in the evenings, she studied the industry with her brother-in-law.
On the surface, it seemed like a drastic switch for Vogel. A cartographer by training, she is the former head of mapping and geography for Encyclopedia Britannica.
"But as it turns out," she says, "chocolate is amazingly like maps. It's a fabulous blend of art and science. It's a very left-brain, right-brain kind of thing."
Vogel's four-year-old company, Ovedia Artisan Chocolates, recently celebrated its first anniversary in an old mill building in downtown Amesbury. If she has given up her globes and atlases to return to small-town America, she has undoubtedly retained some of her knack for conjuring foreign lands.
"People come in and they say, 'Oh, this is like Paris,' " she says, taking a look around her refurbished, brick-and-beam factory store on the Powow River.
On a recent weekday morning, wearing chef's whites and sipping coffee from a Green Bay Packers mug - some old habits die hard - Vogel took a break from her tempering machines to discuss her fast-growing business. She now has four employees and a backroom shipping operation that hummed almost around the clock last holiday season.
Before hanging out her shingle, she had to test her chocolateering skills. At the Newburyport home she shares with her partner, Deb Burns, she began "noodling" with recipes for chocolate barks and caramels using real cocoa butter, not the waxes and oils that mass manufacturers use. Handing samples out the window, she quickly became known in the neighborhood as "the chocolate lady."
Sufficiently satisfied, she rented kitchen space in the back of the old Bumblebee Market and set up shop. Steady sales growth in local food stores and by special order led to a search for her own space.
The Ovedia storefront and kitchen in Amesbury, named for the owner's maternal grandmother, occupies the back of a historic building on Main Street. The entrance, a few dozen yards down a hilly side street, is easy to miss, so Vogel puts out a sandwich board to make her presence known.
That, she says, is just the way she likes it.
"I love discovering little out-of-the-way places, and I think other people do, too," she says. She looks to Flatbread Pizza, the thriving organic restaurant opened a decade ago in Amesbury's then-desolate millyard, as an inspiration.
"If you have a good product," Vogel says, "I totally believe people will find you. I did not want to front onto a busy thoroughfare."
The decision to move into the hidden building did not come without some resistance from Vogel's partner, her cofounder in the business and Ovedia's sales and marketing planner.
"It took us about three years to get the boxing gloves off," Vogel jokes. "We challenge each other in very positive ways."
With Amesbury's restaurant offerings continuing to grow, anchored by Flatbread, the Powow River Grille, and the Barking Dog, Vogel's persistence seems well-founded. Developers are looking at the gutted basement below Ovedia as a potential restaurant site. With plans underway for the long-awaited Riverwalk, Vogel and Burns are hoping to open an expanded outdoor seating area.
The success of retail anchors such as Ovedia is critical to the overall health of the revitalized downtown area, says Amesbury Mayor Thatcher W. Kezer III.
"That's the way to make the downtown a success - that cluster of retail and restaurant businesses. One will feed off the other," says the mayor. "When I first met Barbra, what struck me was her enthusiasm for Amesbury. She's a good bellwether of whether we're heading in the right direction."
Downtown Amesbury, Vogel believes, is poised for a surge of activity when the economy improves. "It won't happen overnight, but there's a lot of pent-up demand, I am convinced."
In the meantime, demand for her chocolates continues to rise. In times of financial uncertainty, she points out, chocolate is an affordable indulgence.
Using New England creams and butters and locally produced natural flavors, Vogel is building a devoted following. "My gut feeling is that people are starting to become more concerned about where their food comes from."
"We get phenomenal feedback on her chocolate," says Jeremy Kirkpatrick, who operates Newburyport's Old World-style Grand Trunk Imports with wife, Angela.
"We've been carrying her stuff almost from the very beginning. People love having a local product to support, and I know they're using top-quality ingredients."
On a cooling rack at Ovedia sit chocolates shaped in the letter C, a special order for a cake company working on a wedding. The request presented a challenge - the client wanted purple chocolate with pink polka dots.
In the corner, Vogel keeps her office. From the window she has a bird's-eye view of the tumbling river that used to power all of Amesbury's considerable industry.
"This is why I took this space," she says. Even the power station that crowds the view from the other window charms her. "I like to think of it as a piece of sculpture."
You'll have to forgive her: She's on a chocolate high.
