UPDATED — Beth Tully is taking her second step toward what she perhaps only half jokingly calls world domination.
The Cocoa Dolce Artisan Chocolates founder is opening her second store, this time in Overland Park’s Prairiefire development on West 135th Street between Nall and Lamar avenues.
“We’re going to think of Wichita as the hub and that this is the first spoke in the wheel,” Tully says.
Yes, that means she’s already thinking of other potential regional stores, though none is in the works yet.
“I think you only double the complexity of a business once, and this is it,” Tully says.
The idea, she says, is to create a template that can be reproduced.
“We’re basically going to do kind of a tweaked version of our lounge here,” Tully says of her Bradley Fair store.
Tully and her husband, Jay, opened their Wichita store in 2005 in Siena Plaza at 37th and Rock Road and then moved to Bradley Fair in 2009.
Tully says she has long thought about a second store.
“The honest truth is probably in our first year of business, way when I shouldn’t have been have been thinking of having a second location,” she says.
She knew that “as a really baby business” she couldn’t realistically do a second store then.
“We’re kind of a sophomore business now,” Tully says. “We’ve finally gotten over the hump.”