In the first days of March 2020 we were posting the Sinamon Cakes Project: triple hazelnut, apple custard, red velvet and devil's food, the kind of thing you do when business is good and the biggest problem in your life is which cake to make next. The last post before the silence went up on 14 March, while we were still in Sweden. Then, for three weeks, nothing.

We were still inside our fortnight of home isolation from the Sweden trip when the rules changed for every cafe in the country. From midday on Monday 23 March 2020, restaurants and cafes could only do takeaway. No tables, no lingering, no queue snaking past the window on a Saturday morning. For a ten square metre bakery that had spent 2019 living off exactly that queue, it was a strange thing to watch on a phone from the couch.

By the time we were allowed out of the house, Perth had gone quiet. The regional borders had closed on 1 April, the state border followed on 5 April, and a city that had queued for cinnamon buns twelve months earlier was mostly indoors, working out how to cut its own hair. This is the story of what we did with those months, and how a shop with nobody in it turned into the reason we ended up with a headquarters on Albany Highway.

A shop with nobody in it

Sinamon in early 2020 was still owner operated for the most part. There were no departments to close and no layers to cut. It was us, a small team, one oven and a shopfront that suddenly had no reason to be open for long. Takeaway coffee and a bun through a doorway keeps the lights on for a cafe with a car park. It does not do much for a bakery that people used to drive across town for, in a city where nobody was driving anywhere.

So we stopped waiting for people to come to us. Production went onto a pre-order basis, which sounds like a business term and really just meant baking exactly what had been ordered and nothing more. Orders came in, the dough was made to match, the boxes were packed, and then we drove. We did the deliveries ourselves.

The first test was Easter. On Sunday 5 April we broke the silence on Instagram with an Easter alert: we were back, and from the Monday until Easter Tuesday we would take a limited number of orders through the website, by text and by email. Everything was contactless. You paid remotely, the box came out of our oven and went straight to your address, it was carried by our own team and not a third party, and it was left at your front door by someone in full PPE. Nine days later we posted the thank you. More than 170 people had ordered, the bakers had made over a thousand buns in four days, and we had kept a tradition we care about, which is being there for people on every holiday, even a holiday nobody was allowed to have.

Perth's first Covid delivery cafe

As far as we could tell, nobody else in Perth hospitality had done it yet, so we did. Sinamon became a delivery cafe for the whole city, not a suburb or two. If you lived between Rockingham in the south and Joondalup in the north, we would bring cinnamon buns to your door. That is most of Perth, and on some days it felt like we saw most of it, one driveway at a time.

After Easter the messages kept coming. By the end of April we had counted more than a hundred requests across Instagram, Facebook and the website asking us to open again or run another event. We answered with a giveaway first, a box of cream cheese, almond, pistachio and walnut buns drawn from the comments, and then with the real thing. On 30 April we posted that the business was open for business: from 6pm on Friday 1 May, pre-orders for pick up were back on the website, and the delivery service was ours, not an app's, run the same way as Easter. Mother's Day followed a week later with mini boxes of six in five variations, chocolate, nuts and dried rose among them, ordered between the 5th and the 9th and delivered right up to the Sunday.

The boxes became the whole business for a while. White boxes, stacked in the car, a knock, a step back to the required one and a half metres. People who had never made it to the shop found out what a Sinamon roll was because it arrived on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing else was arriving. People who had queued outside the shop in 2019 got to have it at home in their tracksuit pants. Both groups told their friends, because there was not much else to talk about.

That was the part we did not plan and the part we remember most. A box of buns at the door, or a creme brulee if you knew what was good for you, was a small excuse to feel normal while everything else was cancelled, and we got to be the excuse.

Keeping people entertained

The other half of the job was online. With everyone at home and scrolling, we ran little events and activities on social media to give people something to do that was not the news, the kind of thing that only works when a whole city is bored at the same time. It kept the brand alive while the shop door was mostly shut, and it kept us sane, because baking to order and driving to Rockingham does not leave a lot of room for a social life.

The restrictions eased in phases. From 27 April you could gather in groups of ten, although cafes were still takeaway only. From 18 May cafes could seat twenty people with a meal under the four square metre rule. From 6 June that became a hundred per venue and two square metres, and from 27 June the gathering limits went altogether, with only the two square metre rule left. The state border stayed shut until November, so for most of 2020 Perth sat inside a state of two and a half million square kilometres that nobody could leave. It turned out that was good for cinnamon buns.

We used every step. On 22 May we launched the cardamom bun, the kardemummabulle we had learnt to make in Stockholm two months earlier, and gave away twenty of them from 6pm that night and the next. On 28 May a new Sanremo F18 coffee machine arrived at the Walcott Street shop, and on 29 May we posted the line we had been waiting two months to write: The Return of the Dine-In.

Then came the nightly drops. Through June and July almost every evening had a post that started with "See you tonight" and a flavour: tiramisu one night, s'mores hot chocolate with cardamom buns another, cereal flavours in the middle of July, Nutella and black sesame a few days later. With a two square metre rule inside and a lot of people who wanted a seat, the stairs beside the shop turned into the overflow. On 17 June we posted a photo of them with the caption "More people hang out on these stairs than on tables", and it was true.

The boom

It showed up twice. The first time was in the delivery orders, which grew until the pre-order list was doing what the queue used to do, only spread across a whole city. The second time was when the doors could open again. Everyone who had only known Sinamon as a box on their doorstep wanted to see the place in person, and everyone who had missed the queue wanted the queue back. They came, and they brought the people they had shared boxes with.

A bakery that had been a Mount Lawley thing was suddenly a Perth thing. We had customers in suburbs we had never advertised in, because we had driven there with a box in the passenger seat. The storm of 2019 had been queues. The Covid version was addresses, more of them than a shopfront could ever have reached, and addresses do not go away when the restrictions do.

The window I had been looking at since 2019

There is a shop at 732 Albany Highway in East Victoria Park that I had wanted since 2019. Heritage brick front, timber doors, jarrah boards, a big open room with room for a real kitchen, a deck out the back and a car park. It had been sitting vacant with a leasing sign in the window, and every conversation with the landlord had ended the same way: the terms were the terms, and they were not for us.

Then Covid happened, and I went back. The conversation was very different this time. The landlord said "Name the terms and we can sign today." So we did. On Sunday 12 July 2020 we walked through it with the leased sticker already slapped across the sign in the window, and a delivery business that had started as a way to survive had just paid its way into a shop eighteen times the size of the one we had.

Drawing it before building it

Three weeks later the whole shop existed on a laptop. We modelled it in SketchUp before a single wall was painted: the counter, the pendant lights, the clock, the tables, and our lady with the bun on the front wall where everyone on Albany Highway would see her. The crowd of little 3D people milling around outside was wishful thinking at the time. It stopped being wishful thinking fairly quickly.

Ladders, drop sheets and a lady with a bun

August was the fit-out, and it went the way everything at Sinamon goes: fast, hands-on and mostly on ladders. The red tiles on the old counter went black. Drop sheets went down over the jarrah and the walls went from landlord white to charcoal, one wall at a time. The pendant lights went up. The counter got its new skin. The green feature wall went in behind where the coffee machine would live. It was seven weeks from the day we walked in to the night the sign lit up, and most of those days ended in paint.

In the middle of it, on 11 August, we posted that we were hiring. Applications by 20 August, interviews that same week, orientation from the 25th, training through the first half of September. A ten square metre shop had never needed a training program. This one did.

Then she went up. Our lady with the bun, the same illustrated woman who has watched over the Walcott Street shop since 2018, went up the side wall of 732 on 26 August 2020, as tall as the wall itself, holding a cinnamon roll out to the traffic on Albany Highway.

That same afternoon we finally told Instagram what we had been up to. The post was called The Notorious S.I.N., and it gave an address, 732 Albany Highway, East Victoria Park, and a date: opening 23 September, 5pm. The photo was the awning sign going up with the installer still on the ladder, an opening soon sign out the front, the timber frame of the front deck taking shape where the tables would go, and the lady with the bun already watching over all of it. The next night the awning sign came on for the first time.

September 2020: doors open

September was a countdown. On the 8th we revealed the coffee machine for the new store. On the 11th we started the Sinamon Drop, a hundred buns for a hundred people over ten rounds of competitions, to celebrate our third birthday and the new store at the same time. The first round alone drew close to nine hundred comments. On the 16th we posted the grand opening announcement: a hundred Sinamon flavours on the night, Butter Beer on tap (no beer in it, for the record), the debut of our own coffee beans, The Sinamon Blend, and an official open date of 23 September 2020, from 5pm until sold out.

It sold out. The post on the night said "Hello Vic Park", and the one a week later said five days and five nights of sold out. We opened the Victoria Park store exactly six months after the day cafes went takeaway only. A lot of the people who walked in had first met Sinamon as a box on their doorstep, and now that they were allowed out they wanted to see the place in person. Suburbs we had only ever driven to discovered that Albany Highway is on the way to everywhere. And the queue, the actual physical queue that the whole business had been built on, came back, this time outside a shop with room to hold it.

The state border was still shut. It stayed shut until 14 November 2020, when the controlled border opened and Perth was allowed to have visitors again. So the crowd that filled 732 that spring was entirely local, a city that had spent half a year at home and had decided that a headquarters for cinnamon buns was a perfectly good reason to go out. We promised them a garden out the back and an outdoor hangout out the front, threw a Halloween bash at the end of October, and by December the lady on the wall was wearing a Santa hat and the coffee machine had a wreath on it. Covid Times, for us, had turned into a boom.

What Covid Times left behind

It taught us to bake to order and to deliver it ourselves. It left us a customer base that stretches from Rockingham to Joondalup and was built one doorstep at a time. It left us the cardamom bun, the nightly flavour drop and the habit of making our own entertainment online when the world goes quiet. And it left us a headquarters at 732 Albany Highway that a landlord had refused to talk to us about a year earlier.

The strange part, looking back, is that the hardest months were also the ones that made everything after them possible. A ten square metre shop with no queue could have been the end of the story. Instead we put the buns in boxes, put the boxes in the car and drove. If you were one of the doors we knocked on in 2020, thank you. You paid for the paint.