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It has been a long and painful journey over the past 12 years. From online only, to 2 different iBurn physical hot sauce shops, back to online only, and we're FINALLY back and ready to rock! 

I should probably explain how we went from borderline bankruptcy to one of the most feature-filled and advanced sites I've ever seen, let alone help design. It's quite the story.....

The road to rebuilding started when we realized that after moving from our original storefront on Bellaire to the smaller Hillcroft location, that we weren't going to be able to replicate the success we once enjoyed. Partly due to the new tenants at our old Bellaire location. The owners of the short-lived daquiri store decided that they should remove everything we put in place to let people know we relocated, even though they wouldn't open for almost 4 months. The landlord also demanded that we remove the address change from the letterboard in front of Liberty Armory, which led to the majority of Houstonians thinking we had gone out of business.

Honestly, it wouldn't have mattered if everyone followed us to the new location. Losing our flagship location made me lose my desire to continue with a physical storefront. If I had it to do all over again there's nothing that could've been done to that would have us end up anywhere but here. We were forced to renew the lease at the Bellaire location after Hurricane Harvey even though we knew we couldn't afford it. We estimated that the damage from the hurricane displaced the majority of our neighborhood customers, and Volusion (our old e-commerce platform) was spiraling towards bankruptcy.

The final nail in the hot sauce shop coffin was the 2020 lockdown during the pandemic. Although we qualified as an essential business and took every precaution possible, it changed the way consumers shopped for food products online and in person. Gourmet condiments became either unnecessary (and people would buy cheaper options at the grocery store), or customers turned to Amazon for lower cost and greater convenience. After almost 5 years of consistent initial growth, our sales dropped 80% almost overnight and never recovered. We had hoped my newfound social media success and 2 different promotions with Mountain Dew would make a difference. It didn't. 

Deep down we knew the original location was doomed. I started asking our in-store customers if we should move to a new location as they slowly started coming back. 100% of them said we should keep our storefront and they would follow us anywhere, so we decided to move to the smaller location on Hillcroft. If I had to guess how many of those 100% actually showed up it would probably be less than 10%.

The Hillcroft location isn't even worth talking about EXCEPT that it helped me realize that online only was the only way to keep the dream alive. We shut down our brick and mortar location for good on June 15th 2024. Shortly after that I started researching new e-commerce providers. During that time I was approached by BigCommerce and Shopify about collaborating with them. Ultimately I chose BigCommerce for a number of reasons that I'll talk about on our socials over the coming months, and they help to continue the story for me at the link below. Take a look and WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE! 

Our website, online store and blog are powered by Bigcommerce ecommerce software. It includes everything you need to run a beautiful online store including ecommerce website templates, ecommerce hosting, an online shopping cart and more.