Born three months apart, our parents were good friends so we spent a lot of time together as little girls – much of it in an attic in Westfield, New Jersey, in front of a huge dollhouse. The hallmark of our friendship, even back then, was laughter we could not control.  Much to our chagrin, we became bi-coastal friends at age 7.  But we adapted, spent too much of our parents’ money on long-distance landline phone calls, and wrote letters on an almost daily basis. Fifty years later, we both have a stash of letters from the other, and together they are the chronicle of our early childhood days.

Paige grew up in New Jersey, doing gymnastics and ballet; Lindsay, in California, swimming and doing 4-H.  Because our parents remained close friends, there were family vacations on both coasts over the years, and we continued to laugh like we always had whenever we met up.  Our college years afforded some relative physical proximity which allowed for some more regular visits and escapades.  But as soon as Paige graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with her BFA in Photography and Lindsay graduated from Princeton University with her BA in Psychology, the friendship reverted to its bi-coastal state.

The past 35 years were busy for both of us, with work and family, and while we never lost touch, the conversations and visits were fewer and farther between.  Paige spent time in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts and in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opting for a new kind of life in Woodstock, Vermont and a job at Wild Apple Graphics managing the creative side of their business.  She and her husband Steve raised two beautiful girls who are now ‘grown and flown.’  Meanwhile, Lindsay moved back to California and embarked on a high tech recruiting career with Oracle Corporation.  Seven years later, she headed east (again) for graduate school and returned home (again) with an MBA from The Wharton School, having majored in both Human Resources and Entrepreneurial Management.  She returned to recruiting and worked in executive search, an early-stage start up, and a venture capital firm before electing to stay home and raise her four children.   

As we started winding up our Raising Kids chapters, we wondered – what next?  Prompted by Covid and an ‘empty nest’, Paige became a certified chocolatier so we wondered – why not chocolate?  There were so many reasons to do it:  Paige has been making holiday toffee for years; we both love chocolate (though Paige would admittedly take ice cream over chocolate); Lindsay has always wanted to try building a company from scratch; Paige’s artistic and photography skills and Lindsay’s operational penchant are perfect complements; we’d both be in a position to learn new things from the experience and from each other; and it would be an (ad)venture that could inspire some fun travel…

So here we are, embarking on our new Empty Nest chapters, together. We don’t really know what’s in store for us, but we decided to go for it anyway.  We intend to produce beautiful (and ‘sinfully delicious’) handmade chocolate concoctions and share them with everyone who wants some.  Our hope, of course, is that doing so translates into a wildly successful business, but even if it ends up being mildly successful, the experience of it all, the learning, and mostly the laughter will have been worth all the time and hard work.