#The cupcake baker for free

If you enjoy baking the same thing over and over again, a cupcake bakery may be for you. Now though, to devise a completely new cupcake flavor is a feat of magnanimous proportions. And my Sangria & Cheese cupcakes blew my customers away. When I first started my cupcake shop, S’mores cupcakes were not yet a thing. If you’re anything like me, part of the joy in baking cupcakes is getting to be creative. It’s harder and harder to come up with unique flavors to get excited about.But due to rising costs of labor and ingredients and the lowering of the price you can charge per cupcake, it is no longer realistic to be successful at selling just cupcakes. I had zero desire to cook chicken French or pour glasses of wine (for anyone other than myself). So this isn’t a cupcake bakery, is it? When I opened my cupcake bakery I wanted to open a CUPCAKE BAKERY.

That “cupcake bakery” owner who’s holding the “how to open a successful cupcake bakery” class fails to remind her students that her “cupcake bakery” is an actual restaurant with actual meals serving actual ALCOHOL. And don’t think you can charge more for that popular-costly-to-make-chocolate-cupcake either, because you can’t. So when your most popular cupcake is a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting you’ll be spending hundreds of dollars a week on cocoa powder alone. That may not seem like a lot but if you have any self-respect, morals, or standards you’ll be making your cupcakes and frosting from scratch and you’ll go through A LOT of butter. Between the time I started in the business and the time I left, butter jumped from $1.75/lb to $2.25/lb. In addition to these rising costs, are the rising costs of butter, sugar, and cocoa powder. With the hike in minimum wage and the hike in business taxes you’ll be tearing your hair out every Friday and every end quarter. If you live in NYS please, please do not open a cupcake bakery. I’m really oversimplifying this but the point is that if you’re selling just cupcakes (as I was) you need to sell a lot of freaking cupcakes. So if I profited $2 off of every sale of a $3 cupcake I would have to sell at least 825 cupcakes a week just to cover rent and payroll expenses. Payroll for three employees averaged about $1500 a week. When I was looking for a bigger location the rents were anywhere from $1000-$4500 a month. My rent was a great bargain at $600 (but do not expect you’ll find this kind of a deal). Rent+payroll+equipment+ingredients+unforeseen costs = sell a lot of cupcakes.Unless your cupcakes are infused with gold, your customers may stray to where the prices are lower, ie. With a saturated market comes more competition and with more competition comes competitive prices. You can’t charge $3+ for a cupcake anymore.You want to open a new cupcake bakery in this market? You better do something real different to stand out.

Add to that the dozen-plus other bakeries selling cupcakes and the mastermind of Wegmans with their new cupcake-bakery-inside-a-grocery-store model and you have more cupcakes than the general public can/should eat.

There are 7 cupcake bakeries in my county of 750,000 people.

#The cupcake baker for free

So while she’s teaching you how to open your own cupcake bakery I’m going to teach you for free why you should not. I’m all about entrepreneurship and I’m all about helping people learn how to start their own things and succeed at them but let’s be realistic: if you wanted to open a cupcake bakery, you should’ve done so 5 years ago. I applaud this entrepreneur’s idea of branching out for herself and seeking ways to extend her brand and increase her income, but I think (and this is just my opinion here) that she’s doing it in a socially irresponsible way. While I was perusing the Internet the other morning I came across a successful cupcake bakery’s website with a promotion for their 2 hour $200 class that teaches people how they can open their very own cupcake bakery. Pondering on Life Unapologetically Me 7 Reasons Why You Should Not Open A Cupcake Bakery