Tinder Matched Couple Swipes Right to Sell Cupcakes

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

So I wanted to call this episode the $20 Cupcake. As you may be aware, cupcakes are a thing. I mean, they are a delicious thing, but they're also a thing in the world of business, lifestyle, food, culture, and so on. I was actually shocked when looking through the archives, doing some research for this episode, to notice that we haven't featured someone with a cupcake hustle until now. We have done ice pops, we have done custom cookies, we have done troll cakes that someone bakes with the abusive comments of Facebook trolls and then mails to that person.

That was a fun story, along with many other confections. But here we are on day 655 of side hustle school, and we're exploring the world of cupcakes for the first time, crazy. Well, we may be late to the party, but we're starting with a high standard, because there are cupcakes and there are next level cupcakes. The ones I'm gonna tell you about today are some next level cupcakes, and in fact, they can cost $20 each. No kidding, the $20 cupcake, you might be thinking, what has the world come to?

But wait, these cupcakes are a work of art. They are designed and baked with a custom image of yourself, perhaps a selfie of yourself, which is a picture of yourself, or the image of a celebrity or a brand. Now, if that's not interesting enough on its own, a $20 cupcake that people are actually paying for, the couple that runs this project met on Tinder. They swiped right to a selfie cupcake success, and their tagline is, "We're not New York's typical cupcake bakery." Indeed, they're not. They've landed clients such as Nike, Adidas, and many celebrities.

It is a profitable business, as you might guess from the price point, and they're still doing it part time, with a lot of room for growth. So this was a sweet one and a fun one. Here is a thank you to our sponsor. Really appreciate them. They allow the show to be free to you.

And then I'll tell you about the $20 cupcake and the Tinder match couple that adds butter and love. [Music]

Side hustles come in all shapes and sizes. And now, thanks to Carolina Wang and Benny Lena, they come in different cupcake flavors too. Carolina, a Manhattan-based activewear designer, loved the sense of unbridled potential with fashion and design. Colors, patterns, shapes, and textures all had their own meaning, just waiting to be harnessed for a purpose.

She started making her own costumes at the age of 12. Her passions segued into a bachelor's degree in textiles, and then a career as a technical designer, working for brands like Under Armour, SoulCycle, and Kenneth Cole. Her work was, and still is, fulfilling. But Carolina craved another outlet for her creativity, where she could have even more fun with color and texture, something a little sweeter than her day-to-day life. She eventually found it, thanks to a fateful Tinder swipe that matched her with her now boyfriend, Benny.

After a few dates and long walks through Central Park, he told Carolina about his vision to create a brand that combined food, art, fashion, and pop culture into one sweet package. Carolina and Benny then started with a selfie cupcake, where they used icing and some clever printing techniques to bake cupcakes with faces of celebrities on them. Not only did those cupcakes taste good, but they looked great on their Instagram feeds. Posting images there was free, easy, and most important of all, their target audience spent a lot of time on it too. They called it Eat Good, and it took them about four months of making selfie cupcakes, along with a moment of great timing, before they saw the more savory side of success.

Since they were putting celebrity faces on their cupcakes, it made sense to try to get one of their products spotted in the hands of those celebrities. This turned out to be easier said than done, since apparently you're not supposed to just mail random food to random strangers. But Carolina had heard that Cara Delevingne, her model and actress, was at a nearby Sephora. She quickly iced up her nearest cupcake with Cara's image, and Benny ran uptown, dodging cabs and pedestrians, to try to get it to her. One celebrity selfie amidst a massive paparazzi later, and Eat Good was a viral success.

Three years later, Carolina and Benny have grown their side hustle into one of New York City's most unique bakeries, with features by Vogue, The New Yorker, and more. Their clients include Nike, Adidas, and Madison Square Garden. But let's slow down. How did one Tinder match, a few months of after-work side hustling, and hundreds of cupcakes become a business, with almost 13,000 Instagram followers, even making a batch of cupcakes for Beyonce's birthday? Well, it took those three years, an industrial strength kitchen, and lots of hard work and determination.

Carolina and Benny started with just two to three orders per week. They're now receiving three to four orders a day. Cupcakes are their bread and butter, also frosting, and they aren't cheap. They cost customers anywhere between $60 for a dozen to $180 a dozen for their specialty three-dimensional designs. And if you're buying fewer than a dozen of the specialty ones, they do indeed cost $20 each.

They're currently selling about 300 high-end cupcakes a week, with cookies, a new product, coming in hot as their second bestseller, moving around 100 to 200 a week. Every sale is delivered to the New York City area from the commercial kitchen they rent. Their delivery radius is a challenge because it means, even though New York City is big, they can only expand so much with their current model. Their other challenge is this being a two-person side hustle when both people have nine to five jobs. Because the products are so design-oriented, Carolina applied a design principle to her pricing as well.

She said, "When we were thinking about how much to charge, we thought about the amount of time we spent designing them and the daily rates of artists. We hand-sculpt everything without any molds, so we definitely think of ourselves as creating art, which is what we always set out to do. It helps that customers come to them looking for more than just an average cupcake, which is also how they can maintain that pricing structure." EatGood took about $5,000 to get started. It covered their website, logo design, bulk baking materials, including flour, sugar, cupcake liners, and sugar sheet printers. It also includes daily rental costs for a commercial kitchen, which runs about $300 a day.

They only use that kitchen on a per-need basis, which is great in some ways because they only pay on days they bake, but they also don't get a better rate the more they rent it. It took Carolina and Benny about six months to recoup their initial costs and another few months to really start rolling in the sugar. Above all, she says they wouldn't have had any of their success if they didn't understand their competition and what else was available in the market. Cupcakes aren't unique, especially these days, but selfies, sneakers, and art designs on cupcakes are, and that's what their customers love them for. In today's visual culture, food isn't just for eating and art isn't just for museums.

Carolina and Benny combine the best of both for their super-sweet side hustle, and now the sky's the limit for their next move. They're dipping into hard candy, mooncakes, and whatever else they dream up. Carolina knows their next product probably won't be traditional, but it will look amazing in photos. So the next logical step when a project reaches this point is they have to make some decisions. They're in a really good place.

They can grow this if they want to, and it seems like they do, but they're also still working their full-time jobs. Right now, they don't ship their cupcakes beyond the New York City area. So one question is, are they gonna figure out how to do that or not? And I can see pros and cons arguments both ways for that. Obviously, it's going to expand the number of customers they can serve, but then it's also not a small thing to figure out how to ship cupcakes in a way in which they're still gonna arrive fresh and looking amazing, which is a key part of the value they provide as artists, as cupcake designers.

So I'm guessing that for now, they're probably not gonna do that. But still, I wonder, like I looked at their website, and on the website, there's not much online ordering, or at least the online ordering is very limited. A lot of what you have to do is custom, which makes sense in terms of baking cupcakes for Beyonce's birthday or a commission for Nike or something. But just in terms of selling to the public, like the general public who wants to buy a couple dozen cupcakes for their friend's party or something, which I'll come back to in a moment, I do think there's a way that if they can figure that out and make that process a little bit more streamlined, they could definitely have a lot more orders. So again, that's why they have to make some decisions because they may not want a lot more orders right now.

It really just depends on what their goals are, but personally, I can't imagine how complicated the back and forth would be for each individual order if you have to fill out a contact form and then have a phone call and so on and so forth. Like creating a good online ordering system can go a long way. Also, in terms of the price point, this is a great gift. I was thinking about this and I was like, "I'm not gonna pay $20 a cupcake just for myself, but for a party or a social gathering for the right kind of event, I would consider spending $100 on five of them or $200 on the dozen or whatever it costs for friends, perhaps to celebrate somebody's birthday or a big accomplishment." So that's really what it's about. It's not just that they are delicious cupcakes, like I'm sure they are delicious, but really the aesthetic, the design, the presentation is really what goes a long way here.

So of course you have to see these for yourself. We're gonna link up the Instagram and the website for these guys who can take a look at it on the show notes page. And as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/655. That's episode 655.

I wanna give a quick shout out to my friend Jill Schlesinger. She has a new book coming in the spring called "The Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money." Jill is a certified financial planner and a longtime commentator for CBS News. I had the privilege of being on her show once and I was thrilled when I got an advanced copy of this book. You can pre-order that book now. Again, it's called "The Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money." Thanks so much for listening.

Do come back tomorrow. Be sure you subscribe, tell your friends. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.