Cake Artist's Confections Whisk Up Delicious Profits
A pastry chef starts baking cakes on the side out of necessity, then grows it into a full-time business selling more than $100,000 of wedding and custom cakes a year.
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“Make sure you have a good business partner, because there are times when you can't do it by yourself.”
Ella Stone is a pastry chef in Charlotte, North Carolina — in her words, "in the habit of turning sugar into cash." She started designing and baking cakes with no intention of building a business; working a 9-to-5, she made a few cakes on the side just to have a little more cushion. It grew slowly, almost without her noticing, until she was working 40 hours at her full-time pastry job and another 40 on Celestial Cakes and Catering.
When her son was born, she made the counterintuitive call: instead of scaling back, she quit her 9-to-5 and doubled down, rebranding the business as Celestial Cakery (a play on her middle name, Celeste). She reasoned she couldn't work two 40-hour jobs and be the kind of mom she wanted to be.
Over the years she tried nearly every kind of marketing — Instagram, Facebook, influencer, magazine, and Pinterest ads, even local flyers. But what worked best was the most obvious thing: customer reviews. With nearly 100 five-star Google reviews (the most in her city), her website now ranks at the top of organic search for "wedding cakes in Charlotte, North Carolina."
Startup costs were essentially nothing, because she began at home with her own oven, fridge, and handheld mixer, upgrading to commercial equipment only as the business grew. That slow-growth approach — buying only what she could afford and actually needed — kept her from going broke. She worked three years out of a 75-square-foot townhouse kitchen, then a 225-square-foot one, storing extra refrigerators and shelving in her son's bedroom, before finally adding an 800-square-foot kitchen.
On pricing, Ella learned to charge for the value she creates. She started making wedding cakes at $2 a serving; after 10 awards, magazine features, and hundreds of five-star reviews, she raised prices toward $6 a serving, adding a $20-per-hour design fee for more complex work. Her cakes now run from $60 for a single tier to over $1,300 for five tiers.
Today Celestial Cakery sells about $100,000 of wedding and custom cakes a year, and Ella is opening a brick-and-mortar bakery, SWIRL, that she expects to at least double that. Her lesson is a clean summary of the whole story: start where you are, invest only as you grow, serve customers well, and build an asset — and make sure you have a good partner, because there are times you can't do it alone.
