This Donut Shop’s Secret To Surviving The Fall Rush? Make Everything With Love

For the team at Cloudy Donut, time to smell the coffee strikes earlier than it does for most of the city that never sleeps. By the time most New Yorkers are waking up, the team has already been at work for hours. At 4 a.m., the bakery’s production team begins making enough donuts for its two locations, in Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan. By 8, the front-of-house staff arrives to prepare for the first customers of the day.

As fall approaches and the city settles back into its routines, seasonal flavors, holiday orders, and catering requests bring another layer of complexity to the choreography. For co-founder Zewiditu Jewel, keeping multiple plates in the air is simply part of the job. “When you run a business, you kind of do everything that you never knew how to do before,” she tells Bustle. And with the work extending well beyond traditional business hours, keeping everything moving requires a solid, connected foundation. Spectrum Business Internet helps provide it.

Spectrum’s suite of Internet plans can support everything from point-of-sale and ordering systems to security tools and multiple employee devices. With 24/7 U.S.-based customer support, help is available whenever the workday happens to start — or end. Because as any small business owner knows, being prepared for the unexpected is part of the job.

Running a donut shop wasn’t something Jewel had ever imagined for herself. When she met her now-partner in both work and life, Derek Falcon, in 2018, she’d been a schoolteacher for 14 years. Falcon had previously owned a brunch restaurant and was dreaming up a new venture centered around his passion for dessert and pastry. Jewel fell for both Falcon and the idea. Within six months, she left teaching to help build Cloudy Donut, taking on everything from social media and marketing to front-of-house operations. Suddenly, there were employees and customers to manage, orders and payments to track, and countless other details demanding her attention. But amid all those moving pieces, Jewel and Falcon had something powerful keeping them going.

“Cloudy Donut is a love story,” Jewel says. That sentiment extends to the donuts themselves, which she describes simply as “made with love.” Hand-cut and hand-glazed, they are crafted in small batches from a vegan recipe the team landed on during an early period of experimentation. By providing dependable connectivity behind the scenes, Spectrum Business gives Jewel and Falcon more room to focus on the parts of the business they care about most: their craft, their customers, and growing what they’ve built. Flexible bundles also let businesses mix and match Internet, Phone, and Mobile services based on their operational needs.

That leaves more room for the kind of experimentation that keeps Cloudy Donut’s menu evolving. New flavors begin at home, where Falcon develops and tests recipes before bringing them into the shop for the team to taste. Customers sometimes get a say, too — catch Falcon experimenting in the store, Jewel says, and you might be “blessed with something off-menu to try” in exchange for your insights. Only once a flavor has made its way through this testing circuit — and received ample positive feedback — does it land on the menu.

Fall has always been a significant time of year for Cloudy Donut. After the relative quiet of summer, New Yorkers return to the city, school starts back up, and, as Jewel puts it, “people are in community.” The change of season brings both a new menu built around seasonal ingredients and a renewed opportunity to connect with the neighborhoods surrounding the shop’s two locations.

As business picks up, Spectrum Business’ Fiber-Powered Internet is designed to keep pace, supporting multiple employees, devices, transactions, and connected business tools simultaneously. Multiple speed tiers give businesses options designed around the number of users, devices, and tools they need to keep connected. For Jewel, keeping those moving pieces moving smoothly means she can focus on something as central to her business as the donuts from the kitchen: relationships. She knows her neighbors and spends hours in the shops each weekend talking with the people who come through the door.

Cloudy Donut’s online presence is an extension of the warmth that Jewel and Falcon have created in person. The music on their social channels mirrors the playlists in the stores, and the people who appear in their content are often the same ones working behind the counter. “My favorite part about social media,” says Jewel, “is being able to connect with people, and for them to feel seen.”

Keeping that conversation going — while managing flavor announcements, preorders, calls, and other day-to-day demands — means Jewel spends much of her time connected, whether she’s at the Brooklyn Heights shop or working from home. Spectrum Business Internet helps her stay connected at the shop, while Business Mobile can help owners and employees stay connected while working away from their business location. And for an owner who says she’s “on the phone all day,” Spectrum Business Phone offers 35+ premium calling features to support clear, dependable business calls. Together, those tools help Jewel focus on showing up for her customers and community.

With Spectrum Business helping keep Cloudy Donut connected through another busy fall, Jewel and Falcon can focus on the proverbial donut, and not the hole. Because in the end, what Jewel and Falcon are building isn’t just a business — it’s a vibrant community.

Learn more about Spectrum Business.