La Boite

As a former marketing technology insider in Melbourne, London and San Francisco, Victoria Davies has swapped the corporate life for French press coffee and ingeniously inventive, delicious pastries and macarons at La Boite, her café on South Lamar.

When contemplating a career shift, one of her former CEOs said, “I’m always really excited when my employees leave if they are starting their own company.”

“I really appreciated that sentiment and attitude,” Davies said.

Davies and her partner, Dan Bereczki, modeled their converted shipping container after Davies’ favorite cafes in Sydney, Australia. “In Sydney the weather is very similar to here. (The outdoor cafes) have these very fluid environments. The coffee was always really excellent,” she said. When explaining the small, back-less stools strewn beneath the café’s tent, Davies said they weren’t meant to be comfortable, but to serve as temporary seating for locals and friends to grab a coffee and snack, and share a conversation outdoors. “It really upsets me to see people here at cafes on their laptops the whole time. It’s like, come on people, socialize!” she said.

On a daily basis, Davies and her crew offer macarons flavored with pistachio, fleur de sel (caramel) and macha green tea, as well as traditional almond croissant, bacon and egg tarte, sandwiches made with cheese and produce from local farms and Fair Trade, organic coffee from the Chiapas region of Mexico.

Davies and her partner discovered the TexHealth Central Texas health benefits program while attending a City of Austin Small Business Development Program seminar. She says the options they had seen for small business health insurance were fairly limited, and that the lack of affordable health care was something that originally discouraged she and her partner from starting a business in the U.S. At the moment, Davies and her business partner are covered, and once an employee has been with them for three months, they offer to cover them as well.

In an industry with very high turnover, Davies said she thinks healthcare is something many small businesses don’t think they can afford to offer employees. “All of my employees are used to not having any insurance,” she said. Now, an employee in need can afford antibiotics to treat an illness and another could get the care she needed after a bicycle accident. “We want to be an ethical business and offering health benefits is part of that,” Davies said.