Thoughts on building a cake business
When I started out as a cake maker I really lacked confidence in my creative ability. I had been a business and legal journalist for over 20 years, and couldn’t take myself seriously in a creative role. I knew I only wanted to work with buttercream, but the first few cakes I sold were pretty much copied from other cakes.
I know from conversations on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/buttercreamcakemakersuk/) that lots of cake makers follow a similar path - arriving at the job from a very different career and selling (too cheap) cakes that they don’t even like because they doubt they could charge more money for their own designs.
Well, here’s a list of five things I’ve learned:
1 Copying other folks’ cakes will get you nowhere. It’s morally iffy and does nothing for your own creative development. If someone sends you an image of a cake they like, get back to them, tell them you can do something along similar lines but in your own style, send them a sketch of your idea and make the cake way better.
Working with buttercream will enable you to forge your own style in a way that would be more difficult with fondant, because of the way you’ll develop your use of the tools and techniques required
2 Work out your costs properly - not just your ingredients, but your fuel and your time. Calculate your decorating time at a higher rate per hour than washing up and shopping. From the very beginning you should be adding 30% profit to your TOTAL costs.
3 Never offer a cheap cake. If someone says ‘I could get that for £12 in Waitrose,’ walk away. Maybe draw their attention to the shelf-life of a Waitrose cake (like 250,000 years, yuck) and the price that a national supermarket operator pays for flour, sugar and butter. This is not a repeat customer. You don’t want to grow a reputation as a cheap cake maker.
Post different angles of your work to Instagram. A close-up, further way and maybe birdseye. Your grid will look more interesting and you’ll get more posts per cake
4 Post your work on Instagram all the time. Follow other cake makers and create a list in Notes of effective hashtags that you can just copy and paste with each post. Don’t use hashtags that have been used over 100,000 times, you’ll get lost in so many posts. Look for tags in the 10,000-20,000 range and revise them often. Don’t litter your grid with pics of other things. Only your cakes. Use Stories for life stuff.
5 When it comes to wedding cakes its tempting to use offers to start building a market, but try to help couples in other memorable ways: get them in touch with a brilliant photographer or help out with styling ideas for their venue. Position yourself as an expert. This may be on a very local level if you don’t have many contacts but ‘I’ll tell you who you need to speak to there’ is a phrase often jumped on by busy couples overwhelmed with wedding planning.