The Origin Story
Me and Hattie Jane, age 3 at our soft opening
It started as a lighthearted joke, really. My daughter Hattie Jane was born in July of 2013. I was Director of Operations for my family’s restaurant group at the time, and we had opened Puckett’s on the square of Columbia, Tenn. just a few months prior. When we selected the site for the restaurant, the footprint felt too big for the small town vibe of the square. We cut out a portion of the space to later sublease to another business as the quiet square began to grow, which we saw as inevitable with the rapid growth and popularity of Nashville. When I had Hattie, my dad Andy Marshall began to banter that we just had to do something with that name... an ice cream shop perhaps. Ice cream was (and still is) our family’s favorite treat and past time. It is what we celebrated with, and what we sought out on family vacations.
We joked about it back and forth for a while, until a couple of years later the lighthearted banter started to take root and become something I began to seriously consider. The square in Columbia had started to really come alive, and it felt like the community was ready for another small business to add to the vibrant fabric of the blossoming downtown square. We already had a name and an idea, and just had to develop the concept and open up shop. Simple, right?
We knew we wanted to make ice cream from scratch using locally sourced dairy, and we hired a pastry chef to help us realize this dream. The opening was wrought with obstacles from learning how to use a commercial ice cream machine days before opening, to the dipping cases being punctured by the installers and having to use dry ice, to serving rapidly melting ice cream. The first day available to open after getting all of our permits approved was July 1, 2016, which also happened to be Hattie Jane’s 3rd birthday… and also the hottest day of the year to date. So what did we do? We threw an Elsa party at the grand opening. This was possibly one of my least sane decisions I’ve ever made. Did I mention I was 6 months pregnant with my second daughter?
But we made it through. We opened our second location in Murfreesboro just under a year later. Rhonda Schmitz joined our team at this point to run the new shop, eventually leading our retail operations and buying out a portion of Andy’s ownership. Autumn Friese, my longtime colleague and restaurant partner in crime, came on board part time a couple of years later while finishing school, and then full time in 2019, buying out the remaining ownership.
Since then, we have tweaked and retooled. I am now running Hattie Jane’s full time alongside Rhonda and Autumn. We outgrew our in-house process of making ice cream mix and now partner with Sunrise Dairy out of Crossville, Tenn. We’ve improved our ice cream mix, and narrowed our flavor focus to being distinctly Southern. In 2021, we opened our Assembly Food Hall location in downtown Nashville, giving our brand incredible exposure to people from all over the country and the world. We launched pint sales in local natural food chain Turnip Truck in 2022. We are now investing further in our hometown of Columbia as we build an expanded production facility, setting the stage for future growth. But I will never, ever, forget that first day.
The “Snow Queen,” Hattie Jane (in stripes), and her friends and cousins on her 3rd birthday / our grand opening in 2016.