What a first year.

It was a year ago that Monica Moyer and her family took a leap of faith and bought Archdale Bakery. Two weeks in, the state was shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. But they’re still here, celebrating their first anniversary and that is worth a party, in Moyer’s view.

“Just surviving through this part – I was so hopeful when I came in with it and business was booming and then, all of a sudden,” she said. “But the community has really helped us, social media has really helped us. There are a few takeout Facebook pages and things of that sort that have really helped.”

Before she left the corporate world to open the bakery, Moyer worked for Bank of America in their bankruptcy division so her knowledge of what can happen to a business was far better than most people’s. That weighed heavily on her.

“I worked for a major corporation, they worried about the salaries of their employees. Now, it’s on my shoulders,” Moyer said.

She credits much of her success to being a neighborhood business – local, not a chain. She thinks people respond to that and her homemade recipes.

“The community has really helped us, social media has really helped us,” she said.

See which social media pages were key to her survival over her first year in this edition of Project 2021.