Last May, I had dinner with a friend in Brooklyn who asked our waiter for the check forty-five minutes into the meal. It was 8:30pm and our movie didn’t start for another hour.
“What is going on?” I asked her. My friend stood up and pushed her chair into the table. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I just need to pick something up.”
It was weird. But I didn’t have time to ask more questions.
Instead I focused on keeping up with her as she paced down Cumberland Street, turned right on Lafayette Ave. and left on South Elliott Place.
When she stopped, we were out of breath. She was beaming.
“We’re here” she said.
I followed her gaze across the street, to a brightly lit candy store on the corner of Fulton.
That is when, dear reader, I first laid eyes on CANDOR.
As I entered the store, I was struck by the contrast between the playfulness of its products (gummies, gumballs, hard candies, chocolates, pretzels, chocolate covered pretzels….) and the poise of its atmosphere. I’d never seen red velvet curtains and cherry blossom branches in a candy store, but I liked it. Candor immediately felt more soothing than my overstimulating experiences under towering acrylic lollipops at Dylan’s Candy Bar, as a preteen.
If anything, Candor is an evolved version of Dylan’s. One that spent the last two decades doing the Work and now peacefully coexists with her inner child.
In the past year or so, I’ve been trying to notice what I consider to be the brave, resilient flowers that grow in a concrete world: the small businesses of New York.
The more soulless chain stores open around me, the more I want to know about the humans that make physical space for their vision.
After my friend and I eventually reasoned that our respective candy bags were full enough for the night and, later, as I chewed on sour worms in the theater, I became obsessed with meeting Candor’s maker(s). I don’t even remember the movie.
In the following weeks, I consumed more candy, and most of Cat’s public content.
The more I learned about Candor, the more questions I had.
What’s behind a person’s decision to quit their job to open a candy store, and how obsessed with candy does one need to be?
What is the process of opening an independent store in the city today?
How does one even find empty space in Fort Greene anymore?
How do you source candy?
What are the lessons a first-time business owner needs to learn the hard way?
Cat could have just been a successful first-time founder who brings delight into the world. She’s not; she’s also a kind, warm and generous person who responds to Substack messages from strangers (hi).
Last month, Cat and I got on the phone.
From the outsider’s perspective, Cat's decision to open a candy store in Fort Greene might look impulsive. Before she opened Candor, she was the Head of Ops at a healthcare incubator and, before that, she held consultancy and operational jobs in healthcare. She’d never started a business in her life.
But after years of climbing the ladder, Cat started to wonder if she still wanted that life.
It’s the common malaise of the millennial generation (and the following), the pull between practicality and idealism that many carry around but few have the courage to act on.
Another, more intimate reason behind Candor, is that Cat and her husband, Farhan, don’t want children. That can be an isolating life choice if you’re surrounded by friends who do. It becomes all the more isolating when those friends pull the trigger and leave the city for houses and a yard.
“Everyone’s in that phase of life,” Cat said. “And it’s not a phase that is coming at us. So there was also a social piece of like what the hell are we gonna do for the next ten years to meet people, to get to know our neighbors? Cause, it’s not going to happen in the playground.”
So, Cat built her own playground.
Cat and Farhan moved to Fort Greene in 2016. In the span of ten years, she saw the neighborhood and the larger Downtown Brooklyn area be transformed. “I've watched no fewer than 30 high rises go up […] between downtown Brooklyn and then Vanderbilt Avenue right behind Barclays,” Cat said.
As a millennial who moved to New York 15 years ago, Cat said she was already “trained by the millennial algorithm” to seek out and get excited about “shoppy shops”. Emily Sundberg wrote about these shops GrubStreet; they’re the ones that display Maldon salt between Marvis toothpaste and Fishwife sardines, and sell the chunkiest #cookies in the city.
But as Cat spearheaded the launch of a brick-and-mortar wellness business in Georgia in her most recent corporate position, she developed a new appreciation for the beloved shoppy shops, and physical businesses in general.
“I remember when I first started thinking about it,” Cat told me, “all of a sudden I was in every single business just looking around being like how many people are working here and what is the product?”
She was also “shocked that trendy candy stores like BonBon and Little Sweet Treat had never made their way down here.” (the stores are mostly in Manhattan and North Brooklyn, ndlr1)
Cat’s idea of opening a shop turned into a practical plan to start her own business.
So, she started to budget. She played around with sales and numbers and prepared for every plausible business scenario. “Like how many people are going to walk in on a week?” she asked herself. “If I think a hundred people will walk in on an average day, what would it look like if 60 people came in"?”
Cat told me that “at a certain point, you just have to put a number in the air.”
As she did, she found that she could open a business that sold candy, drinks, fancy packaged goods, events and catering.
That’s Candor’s business model.
—
After a few weeks of back and forth with the space’s landlord in the summer of 2025, Cat and Farhan signed a lease at 664 Fulton Street in mid-October. They were handed the keys on December 1st and worked with a designer and a contractor on the interior. As they got closer to their launch, they improvised a soft opening. Cat said they “casually opened the door because people kept looking in and we wanted to test.”
Candor opened late March 2026.
From a business perspective, Candor’s location is perfect. It’s one block away from the largest public school in NY, a sizable park, event spaces, and a stadium. It also happens to be located in a historical brownstone with floor to ceiling windows in Fort Greene.
When it came to choosing a physical space for Candor, Cat knew she didn’t need more than 750 square feet. She knew she wanted to open a store in a neighborhood where lifers, kids, young professionals, parents, business owners, and New York Liberty fans share a sidewalk.
She was open to Park Slope and Prospect Heights, but she wanted to be in as diverse a neighborhood as possible, “meeting people who’ve lived here for generations, young people, young professionals, young families, like the mix…”
“I don't want to be in Cobble Hill hanging out with like Emily Blunt's nanny every day.”
Cat’s values are reflected through Candor’s commitments, and I was excited to hear from her about Candor’s partnership with local food banks.
“I’m a white lady starting a candy shop in a historically non-white neighborhood,” Cat said. “I can’t just roll up and open a visibly fancy place and not give back.”
Cat and her team write about it in Candor’s Substack short 'n sweet. They even made a cute logo for the partnership:
Candor donates $1 for every Instagram follower, Substack subscription, and Google review the store receives. The donations go to local food banks that directly support New Yorkers facing food insecurity. They’ve partnered with City Harvest, CHIPS and Food Bank For NYC.
As of today, Candor has donated a total of $4,500.
In case you were still deciding whether to like and follow Candor’s journey, there’s your sign.
Last time we spoke, Cat asked:
- So, you know that really famous Toni Morrison quote? “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else”?
- Yes?, I said.
- Do you know what the last line of that quote is?
- What?
- “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” How crazy is that?
Including ndlr makes me feel important.