COLUMBIA — Piecewise Coffee Co., a Cayce-based coffee shop, will open a second location in the former space of Blūm Coffee near downtown Columbia.
Blūm, the airy coffee shop on Devine Street, closed on Jan. 12, owner Fran Knudsen announced through an Instagram story that same day. The 28-year-old, who also owns a Charleston location of the cafe, opened the coffee shop in Columbia five years ago at 2824 Devine St.
"Trying the back and forth (between Columbia and Charleston) and everything was just getting to be a little bit too much," Knudsen said on social media. She announced that Piecewise Coffee would take over Blūm's space.
Piecewise opened in 2019 on the far end of State Street, where it helped bolster a set of artistic outfits and new businesses to match the street’s more developed stretch in West Columbia. In February 2021, the coffee shop expanded its space to the next-door location, nearly doubling the amount of seats for the cafe.
Piecewise came under new ownership in the fall of 2022, when brothers Zach and Jacob Kirby stepped in to lead. The coffee shop will reopen Blūm's doors, as Piecewise Coffee, on Jan. 22, according to the Instagram post.
"I'm excited to be a part of a new neighborhood," Zach Kirby told Free Times. "Our goal, we always joke, is not to put other coffee shops out of business, but to put Starbucks out of business. We want to be local, we want to be part of the community, we want the community to continue to thrive and grow."
The move follows another coffee shop shake-up just a few blocks away in Five Points — earlier this year, longstanding cafe Drip was sold to an owner of Brickhouse Coffee, a West Columbia coffee shop.
