YOU CAN’T BREAK US

February, 18 2021

This is the newest of our front doors, at the newest of our Summit cafés. I snapped this on my way out of our NoDa store this morning, after spending a few hours cleaning up broken glass, patching new holes with cardboard, and talking with crime scene investigators. I just love every last thing that it says.

The entirety of the door is shattered — hundreds of thousands of tiny cracks, splintering from three (failed) attempts to break through this door with a rock. 

Yet our brand icon — our longstanding mountain logo — is undisturbed. “SUMMIT CO  EE” is still moderately in tact. My favorite part, though, is our “Open” sign, still hanging on the door with a piece of masking tape.

Today begins the 12th month, to the day, that we’ve been fighting against/through/in spite of Covid. And this picture just about sums it up.

We’re Open.

Today, after getting the early-morning call that our NoDa café was broken into overnight, I felt super sad for a moment. But we assessed the situation, made sure the staff was OK, and then we did what we do best — we opened.

In spite of every last damn obstacle this year — a global pandemic, disappearing revenues, threatening voicemails over Summit’s “Black Lives Matter” posters, a February where it has done.nothing.but.rain — we’re still open. Not only that, we started a pandemic with three stores, and now we’re about to open our sixth.

So yes, there are hundreds of thousands of cracks in the glass frame around us. There are shards of glass showing up in random corners of our store. It feels super violating to have this happen. We waited months and months for this custom garage door to be installed, and it’s destroyed before we even got to enjoy warm weather.

All this after opening a small business during the hardest year for small businesses there’s been in my lifetime.

I’m sure later tonight I will sober up from this day of adrenaline and start to feel sad again. But for now, I am choosing to feel proud. We teamed together this morning to rewrite the narrative, after doing it countless times these past 12 months.

At this point, it’s part of our ethos. It’s part of being Summit. When things get bad, you find new opportunities. When things feel shitty, you find the optimism. When you feel violated, you take back the narrative.

And when someone takes a rock and throws it 6 times into your building, your staff shows up, your neighbors show up, you clean up the glass, and you hang the “Open” sign even if it takes a piece of blue masking tape and looks ridiculous.

Allow me to quote the great Hercules Mulligan from “Hamilton” — “When you knock me down I get the f*ck back up again.”