By the start of 2021 the hard part of Covid Times was behind us. The Victoria Park store had been open for a few months, the queue was back, and the days started long before the sun did. Somewhere in the middle of all that, in early February 2021, a small white fluffball came home with me. His name is Boi. He is a Samoyed, he has been my shadow ever since, and this is his story.

If you have ever been in one of our stores early and seen a big white dog who looks like he is smiling at you, that was him. He was smiling at you. Samoyeds do that.

A white fluffball in February

A Samoyed puppy is mostly fur with a nose attached. Boi fell asleep wherever he stopped, and he worked out very quickly that timber floorboards are both a racetrack and a bed. By the end of that first month he had the house sorted, and me with it.

Anyone who runs a bakery knows the feeling of a white box being opened and a face lighting up at what is inside. For once the box was for me.

His first visit to the counter

It did not take long before Boi came to work. On 22 February 2021, two weeks after he came home, he was at the Victoria Park store, sitting on the jarrah floor in front of the copper SINAMON letters on the counter as if he had been booked for a photo shoot, which, to be fair, he had.

The morning before, the same camera had caught him sitting in a letterbox, looking very pleased with himself and not at all interested in being posted anywhere.

Growing into the coat

Samoyeds grow fast and then they grow fluffy, and Boi did both at once. Within weeks the puppy who fitted in two hands was lying on the grass with the whole city behind him like it was his. The car stopped being a scary box that moved and became the best part of any day, especially at night, with the window down and the street lights going past.

By November he was a proper dog, long legged, big pawed and about ninety percent coat, walking the trails at Bold Park with a Samoyed friend like the two of them owned the place.

Why we walk at 3am

Samoyeds were bred to pull sleds and herd reindeer in Siberia. They carry a thick double coat built for snow, and Boi lives in Perth. A Perth summer afternoon is not a Samoyed's idea of a good time, so the best hours for a long walk are the ones when the city is at its coolest and quietest, which happen to be the ones right before a baker's day starts.

So that became our routine, and it still is. The alarm goes off around 3am, Boi is already at the door, and we walk. Empty ovals, lamp lit paths, footpaths with nobody on them but us. Then we head to the bakeries. People ask me how I get up that early every day. Honestly, I do not have a choice. He has never once let me sleep in.

Some of those walks end up at a Sinamon door before anyone else is awake, which is how Boi got to know the stores in the dark before most of our customers had seen them in daylight.

Adventures every night

People think 3am is the boring part of the day. It is the opposite. It is when the adventures happen. We have walked under floodlights on empty ovals, found our way through parks by torchlight, and watched the sky over Perth go from black to purple to orange more times than I can count. Every walk is a little different, and every one of them is his idea.

The daytime adventures count too. He has been to the beach, where the sand got far more attention than the water. He has sat with a Sinamon coffee across the river from the city like a tourist. He has done more car rides than most taxi drivers.

Boi across the stores

As Sinamon grew, so did Boi's territory. He knows the doors, he knows the floors, and he definitely knows where the buns come out.

In 2023 we posted a video of him sitting at a table under the pergola, a cinnamon bun on a plate in front of him and a coffee next to it, doing absolutely nothing except looking at the camera and being very, very good. That little video was played more than 150,000 times on Instagram. I have made a lot of videos about cinnamon buns. One of the most watched stars a dog who was not allowed to eat any of it.

And some mornings he is already inside before the day has properly started, sitting on the same jarrah floor in front of the same counter he first posed at as a puppy, only now he is a lot bigger and he brings friends.

Still the first one up

Boi is not a puppy any more. He is a big, soft, stubborn, smiling Samoyed who has walked more of Perth in the dark than most people have in the daylight. Sinamon has changed a lot since February 2021. The alarm has not. Around 3am he is at the door, and out we go.

A lot of the buns you have eaten from us over the last few years were baked by someone who had already done a walk in the dark with a white dog that morning. If you ever see him at one of our stores, say hello. He will smile back. He always does.