Foreign Property News | Posted by Shwe Zin Win
In 2019, Annie Park was backpacking in Southeast Asia when she received a call that changed her career.
Her mother Sarah — a former deli shop owner — was bored with retirement and had decided to open an ice cream shop in Bethesda, Maryland. But she needed Park to help for a few months to get the store off the ground.
“To be honest, at first I was like, ‘ice cream shop?’” says Park, who had recently graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in education policy and management. “I wasn’t very excited about it.”
But “it was never a question of was I going to help her or not,” says Park. “I think that comes from being an only daughter to a single mother in an immigrant family.”
(Annie Park in Washington, D.C. - CNBC Make It)
The idea wasn’t a complete surprise: Park’s mother made ice cream as a hobby, often experimenting with new flavor combinations, like apricots and pistachios, or fresh cherries with rose water.
Unlike commercial ice cream that relied on food coloring and flavored syrups, Sarah only used natural ingredients, like real strawberries instead of strawberry flavoring.
After months of preparation, the March 2019 opening of Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream was a smash success, with long lines of customers lasting until the store closed at 9 p.m. “It was something none of us ever expected,” says Park.
Park and her mother had little time to celebrate opening day, as they were up until 3 a.m. making more ice cream before the store opened again the next morning.
Within a year, Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream opened a second store in the D.C. area and currently has plans to open a third location in Potomac, Maryland, in December 2023.
Instead of helping out for a few months, Park became a full-time partner in the business, which now has 35 employees and brings in $1.86 million in annual revenue. In 2022, Park earned just over $230,000 — a salary of $118,625 and, as part of the partnership with her mother, the profits from the second store, which totaled $111,677.
Building a new life in the U.S.
Park was born in Seoul, South Korea, and emigrated to the U.S. with her mother in 2000, when she was 9 years old. Moving to Maryland provided better job prospects for Sarah, and also meant she could avoid the stigma of being a working single mother, which is looked down on in South Korean culture, Park says.
Sarch worked two to three jobs while learning a new language, only spending money on necessities. “My No. 1 lesson to Annie was material [wealth] doesn’t give you happiness,” she says. “You need to make money to a certain point, but once you chase money, it never ends.”
(Annie Park with her mother, Sarah. CNBC Make It)
In the meantime, Park went to school and studied violin. With music, language wasn’t a barrier for Park, and she took pride in winning scholarships and awards. “It pushed me to work harder,” she says.
After high school, Park attended Boston College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music and communications in 2013.
From there, she accepted a position with Teach for America teaching ESL full-time in inner-city Baltimore.
The program also allowed her to earn a master’s degree in education for free from Johns Hopkins University.
“I saw myself in a lot of my students,” says Park. “A lot of them were immigrants or had parents who didn’t speak English.”
(Annie Park at Harvard.- Annie Park.)
In 2015 , she enrolled in a one-year program at Harvard University to earn a master’s in policy and management. And despite her background in education, she found herself gravitating toward entrepreneurial projects on campus.
Park graduated from Harvard in 2016, but over the next few years, she realized she didn’t “like policy work at all.” That’s when her mother called.
Now, the original location in Bethesda brings in nearly $1.1 million in annual revenue, while the newer store in North Bethesda has annual revenue closer to $767,000.
(Annie and Sarah Park at Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream in 2020.-Annie Park.)
Ref: 32-year-old Harvard grad opened an ice cream shop with her mom—now she makes $230,000 a year (cnbc)
