Episode #218: Pashmina De Shon — Why Friction Is The Moat In Craft Chocolate
How a bootstrapped founder built a $3M+ craft chocolate marketplace by owning the operational pain everyone else outsources.
For e-commerce operators, bootstrapped founders, and brands weighing the jump from DTC to physical retail.
Pashmina De Shon is the founder of Bar and Cocoa, a curated marketplace for craft chocolate featuring 1,200 SKUs from 60 makers across 30 countries. After a decade running the business purely online, she recently opened a physical store in Greensboro, North Carolina. In this conversation, she breaks down why she runs her own warehouse instead of using a 3PL, how owning fulfillment keeps her waste rate at 2% versus industry norms of 10-12%, why the subscription model forced early clarity on curation, and what actually changes in the P&L when you move from DTC to brick and mortar.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– Why “even Amazon doesn’t ship chocolate” became both the warning and the opportunity
– How owning fulfillment, FDA compliance, and temperature-sensitive shipping creates a moat competitors can’t copy
– The plateau that hit at scale — and the boring, decisive fixes that got Bar and Cocoa past it
– How to think about retail economics as a marketing and retention channel, not just a sales channel
