Lolley's Started in a Monument Kitchen. Now Downtown Colorado Springs Wants a Scoop.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
This spring, most of the business news coming out of Monument ran in one direction. In April, the town's mayor confirmed that a 225,000-square-foot shopping center called Legacy at Jackson Landing is going up on 30 acres near Baptist Road and I-25, just south of Home Depot, with Target, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Chick-fil-A and Firehouse Subs signed on as anchors. Mayor Mitch LaKind framed it as relief for residents tired of driving south for basics. One longtime resident, less enthused about the change, put it plainly: "We didn't want the Walmart. We didn't want any of it."
That's the growth story everyone in Monument already knows, because it's been the story for a decade. National retailers see the rooftops going up along the Palmer Divide and follow. What's easy to miss, buried under all that inbound traffic, is a business that went the other way. Lolley's Ice Cream, the scoop shop that opened on Monument's own Front Street, spent this spring building out a second location in downtown Colorado Springs. A homegrown Monument business, exporting itself into the bigger city instead of the other way around, is a rarer sentence than it should be.
Lolley's didn't start as a business plan. Shelley and Dustin Sapp moved to Monument in 2017 with four kids and a specific problem: Shelley had fallen for a cinnamon-flavored ice cream while the family lived in Indianapolis, and she couldn't find anything close to it after the move. "When we moved out here in 2017, I couldn't find it," she said. So she bought a small Cuisinart ice cream maker and started experimenting at home, working from a book called Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream during the stretch of the pandemic when everyone was stuck finding something to do with their hands.
The Sapps also noticed something else about their new town: there wasn't really a spot where families could hang out, get something sweet, and let the kids burn off energy without driving to Colorado Springs. That gap, as much as the missing cinnamon flavor, is what turned a hobby into a storefront on Monument's historic downtown block.
One detail says more about how Lolley's operates than any tagline could. The shop doesn't use artificial dyes or flavors in its ice cream, which means the mint flavor doesn't come out green. It comes out white, because that's the actual color of real mint without food coloring added to make it look the way people expect. The Sapps get asked about it constantly. They've also had customers request sugar-free options and haven't landed on a version they're willing to sell yet, which is its own kind of commitment in an industry where shortcuts are easy to reach for.
None of this is the kind of detail a chain rolling out its fortieth location bothers with. It's the kind of detail that only survives when the people running the shop are the same people who started experimenting in their own kitchen nine years ago.
The new Lolley's location sits at 216 N. Tejon St. in downtown Colorado Springs, in a space that used to house the offices of a Berkshire Hathaway realty brand before the Sapps took it over. Because the building isn't as deep as some of the other storefronts on that block, the build-out included a small covered seating area in back, along with indoor seating and benches out front where people can sit with a cone. The shop had a soft opening in March and its full grand opening in May, and the downtown menu runs 15 to 16 signature flavors, a slightly longer lineup than what's currently available at the original Monument shop. Lolley's joins Josh & John's among the ice cream options now clustered in downtown Colorado Springs, which tells you something about how much appetite there is for a good scoop in that part of the city.
Here's the part worth sitting with. Triview Metropolitan District, the special district that covers much of Monument's growth corridor along I-25, currently counts about 80 commercial businesses inside its boundaries, with plans for that number to grow to roughly 125 as the district builds out over the next decade. Nearly all of that projected growth follows the same pattern as Legacy at Jackson Landing: chains and franchises moving into Monument because the population is there and the retail gap is real.
Lolley's is the exception that makes the pattern visible. A business built from a home ice cream maker and a missing cinnamon flavor didn't wait for Monument to get bigger before it tried to grow. It grew by moving toward the city instead of waiting for the city to come to it. That's a different kind of confidence than "we have the customer base to support a Target," and it says something about what Monument has actually produced in its downtown corridor over the past several years, not just what's been built for it.
The original Lolley's still anchors that stretch of downtown Monument alongside a handful of other independent shops that give Second and Front Streets their character. Bair Brew Coffee, a few doors down on Front Street, has become the early-morning stop for people heading into work. Black Forest Foods, founded by chef Dragos, brings a European touch to its deli menu that's become a lunch habit for plenty of locals. Covered Treasures Bookstore has been run by the same owner, Tommie Plank, for nearly three decades in a building that's over a hundred years old.
Saturdays through the season add another layer to that rhythm. The Monument Hill Farmers Market sets up from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the St. Peter's Catholic Church lot on Jefferson Street, running from spring through October, and it's become as much a social stop as a shopping one. None of this changes because a Target is coming, and none of it changes because Lolley's now has a second address. It's the backdrop that makes a story like Lolley's make sense in the first place: a town small enough that a family experimenting with a home ice cream maker can become the shop everyone recognizes by name.
Growth headlines tend to flatten a place into square footage and store logos. The Legacy at Jackson Landing project will bring real, useful retail to Monument, and plenty of residents are looking forward to not driving south for a pair of shoes. But the more interesting measure of a town's character isn't what's moving in. It's what's strong enough to move out on its own terms. Lolley's didn't need a developer's announcement or a metro district's build-out plan to grow. It needed a recipe, a missing flavor from Indianapolis, and enough of a following in Monument to bet that Colorado Springs would want a scoop too.
If you're already living in Monument, you probably don't need convincing that this town produces things worth paying attention to. If you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts, the ones that don't show up in a listing description but tell you everything about a place's actual pulse, that instinct is exactly what makes a good long-term neighbor.
At Pulse Real Estate Group, we spend as much time following stories like this one as we do watching the market, because the two are never really separate. If you're curious what that kind of local footing is worth for your own home, our free home valuation tool is a good place to start, no obligation, just a clearer picture of where you stand.
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