Pewaukee Woman Opens Ivy Café After Eight Years Of Dreaming Over Volunteer Coffee Shifts

WAUKESHA — Ivy Café opened earlier this month in a Pewaukee strip mall anchored by the St. Vincent de Paul Society thrift store, the culmination of an eight-year path that owner Hailee Wallner, 31, said began with a single volunteer shift pulling shots at her church's coffee ministry table.

Wallner said she signed up for the volunteer rotation on a whim in 2018, expecting to spend a few Sunday mornings pouring drip coffee into paper cups before services. Instead, she said, she found herself staying an extra hour most weeks to clean the church's secondhand espresso machine and experiment with steamed milk, a habit that eventually convinced her she wanted to do it professionally.

"I remember the exact shift where it clicked," Wallner said. "It was the second Sunday of Advent, I'd made maybe 40 cappuccinos by 10 a.m., and I just thought, I would rather be doing this than my actual job. I did not say that out loud to anyone for another two years."

Seven Years Of Saving And Practicing

Wallner spent the following seven years working as a dental office scheduler by day while saving toward a lease deposit and practicing espresso technique at home on a $340 machine she bought used from a Waukesha family who'd upgraded. She said she went through an estimated 200 pounds of beans over that stretch "just failing at latte art in my kitchen," and kept a spiral notebook logging shot times and milk temperatures that she still has, water-stained, in a drawer at the new shop.

The 900-square-foot space on Ryan Street sat vacant for 14 months before Wallner signed the lease in February, she said, and required $61,000 in buildout costs, most of it going toward a three-group espresso machine and a walk-in cooler she described as "aggressively too large for how much oat milk I thought I'd be going through, and I was wrong, it is exactly the right size."

"Nothing on this menu happened by accident. I have receipts, literally, going back to 2019."

— Hailee Wallner, owner

Three Cafés Within A Mile

Ivy Café's opening puts it within a mile of three existing coffee shops, including Clocktower Coffee Bar and Grindhouse Café, a proximity local business observers have noted as unusually tight for a market Pewaukee's size. Wallner said she is aware of the competition and isn't especially worried about it, citing what she called Ivy Café's "church-rooted values" as a point of difference from chain competitors.

"We're not trying to out-caffeinate anybody," Wallner said. "I want this to feel like the coffee ministry table felt, which is that whoever walks up gets treated like they matter, whether they order a $2 drip coffee or a $6 oat milk thing with four pumps of something. That's genuinely the whole business plan."

Opening week drew a steady stream of 30 to 50 customers a day, according to Wallner, including several regulars from her old church coffee shifts who she said showed up "just to see if I actually did the thing I kept talking about for eight years." She said her mother, who drove up from Illinois for the soft opening, cried in the doorway before ordering a plain black coffee "to keep things simple."

What's Next

Wallner said she plans to introduce a loyalty punch card by mid-October and is considering hosting a monthly open mic night once she confirms the shop's amplifier won't trip the strip mall's shared electrical panel, an issue she said briefly took down power to the thrift store next door during a test run. She said she has no plans to expand to a second location "until I've proven I can run one without crying in the walk-in at least once a week, which is still happening, but less."