About Three Twins
Neal shows us his favorite flavors
Three Twins Ice Cream produces certified organic ice cream at its San Rafael and Napa stores. We also sell wholesale tubs to restaurants, pints at grocery stores and various sizes at the Berkeley Farmers' Market.
In addition to producing inconceivably delicious organic ice cream, Three Twins tries to operate in a sustainable manner. We use organic ingredients, offset our emissions, use compostable serving dishes, compost our waste, and are proud members of One Percent For the Planet.
Three Twins Story
Neal Gottlieb, Three Twins Ice Cream's founder, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the old city of Taroudant Morocco from 2002 – 2003. His tenure in Morocco was cut short when the war in Iraq led to the evacuation of the program.
Upon returning the States, Neal traveled around a bit before returning to his beloved San Francisco Bay Area. Neal's twin brother, Carl, and Carl's fiancé, Liz, invited Neal to stay with them for a few weeks. After the first human-powered climb of Mount Shasta from sea level (Neal rode his bike from San Rafael to the mountain), Neal took Carl and Liz up on their offer.
Three Twins Ice Cream Booth
Neal soon found a job at Levi Strauss's corporate headquarters and offered to move out. However, the three were having a good time living together and Carl and Liz were saving money to buy a house, so the rent that Neal was paying came in handy. So, Liz and Carl invited Neal to stay.
During this time, Neal formulated a plan. He would apply to business school while working at Levi's, then he would spend two years in business school focused on entrepreneurship and would start his own sustainable business upon graduating.
Some plans are not meant to be followed.
Though he was accepted to business school, Neal was not awarded the fellowship that he had hoped to receive. Instead of receiving a full ride to go through business school, Neal would have to pay in excess of $110,000 to earn his MBA. With this in mind, Neal decided that this money could be better spent by going out into the world and starting a green business, rather than spending two years cloistered in academia talking about starting a green business.
And thus the work on Three Twins Ice Cream was started.
The easiest part of starting Three Twins Ice Cream was the name. Well into their second year living with his twin brother and his wife, who is also a twin, Neal was already calling their house "three twins." Neal never had a doubt about what to call his ice cream company.
Getting the company going was the hard part.
After taking a business planning class at the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center in San Francisco to guide him along in writing his business plan, Neal set out looking for a location for the first Three Twins.
After searching for months, Neal came to realize that finding a space to convert into an ice cream shop would be no easy task. He found that there were few, if any, retail spaces zoned for food service available to the bootstrapping entrepreneur. To most landlords, he had too little money and too little experience to be taken seriously. Furthermore, many ideal retail locations were only available by buying a failing business, which was not an option with Neal's limited resources.
Neal got a break when a friend mentioned a vacant storefront that he had seen in Terra Linda, a district in San Rafael. Though he had lived in San Rafael for almost two years, Neal had never been to Terra Linda. The available store, a former taqueria in disastrous condition, was in a tucked away location without much foot traffic. However, it was mid-April and time was running out if Three Twins Organic Ice Cream was going to be open in time for summer. Knowing that this location would present serious challenges, Neal decided to sign the lease rather than wait around in hopes of finding a better location.
The design and construction of the new store that Neal thought would take 2 months, took almost 4.5 months. It proved to be a frustrating summer for Neal as the hot days rolled by and the shop remained a construction site. Finally, in the early morning hours of a late August , Neal, along with the help of his twin brother, Carl, and older brother, Mark, put the finishing touches on the shop.
Three Twins Organic Ice Cream opened for business a few minutes after noon on August 27, 2005. That first day remains a blur for Neal, as he was exhausted from less than four hours of sleep the night before.
In the beginning, Neal did not have a single employee. He would make ice cream in the morning, run the shop all day, clean the shop at night and do paperwork afterwards. It was a challenging schedule, but it was exhilarating to finally be in business and witness the enjoyment that our new customers received from Three Twins Ice Cream.
While we never did host a grand opening event, we started a tradition of giving to environmental nonprofits when we hosted a "Name your own price" event to benefit the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to help repair the environmental damage brought on by Hurricane Katrina. Customers paid whatever that felt like paying that day in early September and we gave every single cent away. Through the generosity of our customers, we were able to give away approximately $1,500.
Opening in late August afforded Three Twins just one week of summer before school resumed. The turning season coupled with the remoteness of the San Rafael store, made business very challenging. If it wasn't for the fact that there was no payroll, and Neal had no clue about just how dismal the initial sales were, the store never would have made it through the first winter. Though we don't typically release sales figures, you might find it comical to know that the worst day of sales in the history of Three Twins was a cold, rainy Monday during which we sold a measly $49 worth of ice cream.
Seeing that Three Twins was not going to work as simply an ice cream shop, Neal decided to launch the wholesale side of the business. This required an additional round of construction, so Neal would work with a contractor for 7am until 2pm, then ran the shop into the afternoon for the month of February.
Three Twins Ice Cream was certified organic in April 2006, joined One Percent For The Planet and picked up its first restaurant account, when Rose's Café ordered a couple tubs of Madagascar Vanilla Ice Cream. Three Twins also started selling at the Berkeley Farmers' Market that spring and launched pints for supermarkets in the fall.
As of November 2007, Three Twins Ice Cream can be found in more than 30 different locations and is working on opening its second store this December in Napa's Oxbow Public Market. As far as we know, the opening of this store will make Three Twins Ice Cream the first chain of organic ice cream shops in the world.
