Budding Businesses

Have

BY JENNY COMITA

Truescoops

KELLY WILLIAMSON AND SHELLY MARSHALL met as students at Penn State, but if you’re picturing two teens giggling in a dorm room or gossiping their way through sorority rush, think again. “It was ice cream college!” Kelly (pictured far left) says with a laugh. “Isn’t that the best thing ever?”

For more than a century, she explains, the university has hosted a weeklong intensive course in January for professionals interested in learning about commercial ice cream production. In 2015, both women enrolled and checked in at the same hotel. “We met at the breakfast buffet,” Kelly says. “And we ended up sitting together in class and sharing rides to campus all week.”

In the years that followed, Shelly, who was born and raised in Trinidad, opened Island Pops in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, selling ice cream infused with Caribbean flavors, like soursop and nutmeg. Kelly launched a small-batch ice cream company in her native Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she ran for a few years before deciding to return to her former career in advertising. Meanwhile, they stayed close. “We’re part of this little ice cream circle with our friends from the course,” Kelly says. “So I always had a tether to that world, even after I shut my own business.”

In 2019, encouraged by a business mentor, Shelly, who’d had a successful career in corporate risk management before opening Island Pops, began thinking bigger. “I realized I wanted to start a brand that was more than just a mom-and-pop shop,” she says. “I wanted to create a product that would compete against the Betty Crockers of the world.”

She landed on the idea of a powder (like cake mix but for ice cream) that gets whisked with half-and-half, frozen in cubes, and whirred in a blender. No ice cream maker required! The only thing missing: the bandwidth to pursue her dream. With two young children and a laborintensive small business to run, she needed a partner, so Kelly came in. “I’d just been laid off and was sitting on the couch watching Netflix when Shelly called me,” Kelly says. “I took it as a sign from the universe that it was time to get back to ice cream! It felt like something new but familiar.”

After refining the recipe and working on branding, the two launched True Scoops in 2021. Their vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry mixes— which can be customized with fruit or candy—are now available at gourmet shops around the country as well as through their website and on Amazon. They also offer hot fudge and salted butterscotch sauce mixes.

Living in different cities (Shelly is still in Brooklyn and Kelly is in Beverly, Massachusetts), with different professional backgrounds and schedules, they’ve taken a divideand-conquer approach to growing their brand. “We were very lucky that our strengths and weaknesses are so different,” Kelly says. “Shelly is very numbers- and strategydriven, whereas I’m creative and very detail-oriented. When you’re working together, it’s great to be like-minded, but there’s definitely an advantage to some yin and yang.”

OUR BEST ADVICE “There has to be a line between the business and the friendship,” Shelly says. “Money is involved. I have two children. Kelly wants to buy a house. You can’t say, ‘I’m going into this business with a friend, so it’s going to be so much fun!’ You’re entering a professional and financial arrangement with a business partner who happens to be a friend. There’s a difference.”

GINA ESPOSITO AND SHEENA

MEEKINS are longtime besties, former roommates, and co-owners of the New York City–based photo studio Anée Atelier. “There’s a very special bubble that is our friendship,” Sheena (right) says. “It almost doesn’t make sense to us how well it works. I think most people wouldn’t be able to handle all the time spent, all the shared everything.”

For several years, Gina says, taking pictures with Sheena was “a form of creative escape.” She was running a successful wedding-photography business, while Sheena, a hobbyist photographer, worked in marketing.

“I was traveling around for all these corporate events,” Sheena says.

“I’d say, ‘Hey, Gina, I have to go to Phoenix. Do you want to come with me and we’ll drive to the Grand Canyon and shoot some stuff out there?’”

In 2014, Gina brought Sheena with her to shoot a destination wedding in Florida. “She was just like, ‘I trust you—you got this! Go do it!’” Sheena recalls. “And I immediately realized how amazing it felt to put blood, sweat, and tears into capturing a wedding rather than a marketing campaign that’s not going to matter in six months. You’re preserving people’s memories and pouring yourself out to capture their story.”

Sheena started joining Gina on photo shoots whenever she could, and after two years, Gina convinced her friend to leave the corporate world behind and make their business partnership official.

Six years later, Anée Atelier thrives. (“Anée” is an inversion of their nickname, the “Eenas,” based on their rhyming first names.) “The bulk of our business is shooting multiday destination events,” Gina says.

“They’re usually four- or five-day experiences—a wedding, a birthday, a milestone.” They’ve documented a three-day multicity wedding event in Israel and a five-day fete that shut down a Caribbean island. “Both of us shoot every event we do,” Gina says. “People have said so many times that we could make more money—double our income!— if we split up and shot separately. But that’s not for us. We, the two of us together, are our brand.”

OUR BEST ADVICE “If you’re going into business with a friend, make it official,” Sheena says. “You have to write it all out, almost like a constitution for your business, so you can be clear on how things are going to operate.” Don’t put it off, Gina adds. “When people are friends, you can think, ‘Oh, we’ll just work it out.’ But you need to have the hard conversations early on, before you get into the weeds on projects.”