Photos courtesy of Crystal Alward
Crystal Alward’s business may be new to the community, but she certainly is not. Her newest venture, a coffee shop and bakery, is a sharp turn from her past, however.
“I stumbled into (baking). I was always baking and doing different kinds of things,” Alward says.
It’s the nostalgia of her Easy-Bake Oven and her mother’s Christmastime baking that created the allure around cakes and pastries, bringing her to her shop.
Crystal and her husband, Dan, opened Porter’s Coffee House and Bakery in Olde Pickerington Village in mid-February, just in time for spring. Though all is sweet now, the road to this point had many forks along the way.
Now Thornville residents, Alward and Dan met while attending Southwest Licking Local School District. Dan went on to pursue a career as a firefighter and Alward was a teacher for the previous decade, immersing herself in family consumer science and child/life development courses. She taught in the Whitehall School District for four years before teaching in Southwest Licking Schools for six.
She started her undergraduate education at Central Ohio Technical College and received her bachelor’s from Franklin University. She originally took an interest in photography during high school and envisioned a future in wedding photography while taking baking classes on the side. Eventually, a friend asked her to bake a cake for her wedding, and Alward fell in love. In fact, she fell so hard that she started her own baking business, Cakes Creatively, laying the initial groundwork for Porter’s.
She saw a future in education while working as a secretary in Licking Heights, and attended The Ohio State University to receive her teaching license.
“I figured if I was going to be in a school, I would like to go back and get my teaching license,” she says, “I felt it was more long term for me.”
Alongside teaching, Cakes Creatively remains close to her heart, and played an integral role in leading her to where she is today.
Alward attributes her baking success to her customer relationships. She ran Cakes Creatively out of her home kitchen for the last 13 years. Her strong customer base is evident, as she works more than 100 wedding cakes a year with specialty cakes and pastries as an addition. These relationships are what she hopes to instill in her new business at Porter’s. No matter how many goals Alward checks off her list, she always finds another toward which to work.
“No matter all the goals that I set, once you hit one, you just make another on,” she says.
Alward graciously accepts the challenges of a new business and isn’t opposed to change. One of those challenges was making the decision to open Porter’s.
After Crystal and Dan landed on the idea of a coffee shop, they knew they needed to make both a business – and life – decision that would direct the next path. They knew the coffee market had grown the last few years, and opening a coffee house felt like the next step. The couple began to visit every coffee shop in Columbus and worked to secure a positive and supportive coffee distributor. Their sights led them back to Pickerington and working with One Line Coffee.
Alward and Dan didn’t just choose to station in Pickerington because it was close to home, but because Alward grew up working jobs in Pickerington, and they enjoyed visiting the city.
“We kept coming back here. …It’s not far from home, and we have friends in Pickerington,” she says.
Like most things in life, there were challenges Alward and Dan faced during the process, but the couple finally closed on the renovated home on West Church Street in August 2018.
In addition to Dan’s firefighting career, his furniture business has also helped develop the interior of the coffee and bakery shop. Co-workers, friends, and family have all contributed to the Alward venture and is a way to capture the couple’s true essence: bright furniture colors and mixed metals layered on elements of natural wood, concrete and brick.
Alward continues to instill her personal values – uniqueness, taking risks, embracing challenges – into the business at Porter’s and, so far, it seems to be paying off.
“If you don’t take that chance, there’s no great reward without a great risk,” she says.
Kim Brown is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
