History
Fran Bigelow was born and raised in Seattle and trained as an accountant. [6] She graduated from the University of Washington in 1965 with a degree in business administration and travelled to France with her husband about five years later. [7] Her husband was a hospital administrator, and his career required them to move to San Francisco. [6] Bigelow enrolled in professional cooking classes at California Culinary Academy, where she apprenticed with a Swiss pastry chef. [6] [8] [9] In 1980, they returned to Seattle, and in 1982 she began selling chocolate truffles and desserts from a small shop in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood. [8] [9] There were two employees at the original shop and the truffles were originally priced at 35 cents each. [7] Eventually, she developed the store's signature Gold Bars because she wanted a candy that was not as perishable as the truffles. The Gold Bars quickly became a customer favorite, and by 1996 she was selling nearly 500,000 Gold Bars a year. [6] In 1986, Bigelow began making caramels. [7]
In 1998, she began adding gray salt to the caramels. [3] [10] [11] By 2006, the caramels made up seventy-five percent of the company's sales, and by 2008 the caramels were the bestseller, partly due to publicity from former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. [3] [12] In 2006, Fran's was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and the company consequently reached a record $4.5 million sales for the year. [4] [7] By 2007, Fran's had forty employees, and Bigelow's daughter, Andrina, joined the company. [7] [13] In 2008, Fran's opened a location in Downtown Seattle in the Four Seasons hotel. [14] The Downtown location would take over as the flagship store. [14]
In 2014, the company moved its headquarters from the Capitol Hill neighborhood to the historic Rainier Brewing Company building in the Georgetown neighborhood. [15] At the time, the company had 67 employees and was making 30,000 pieces of chocolate per day and shipping regularly across the United States and to Japan. [15] In 2018, she was inducted into the Specialty Food Association Hall of Fame for "sparking the artisan chocolate renaissance in the United States". [16] In 2021, Food & Wine named Fran's one of the top 50 chocolate shops in the United States. [17]
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