Everyone loves a cupcake – sweet and simple. Many associate them with childhood birthday parties, but the cupcakes at Teresa Ging’s Sugar Bliss Cake Boutique are certainly something different.
Like her trademarked cupcakes, the route to her business was also unconventional. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 2000 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics, Teresa accepted a position in investment banking with Bear-Stearns and continued work in finance for six years after that at various other firms.
On a whim half rooted in her desire to travel and half in the realization that sifting flour was far less stressful than finance, Teresa headed to Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu in January of 2007 and enrolled in their intensive program. During her 6 courses a day, she learned to make everything from “brioche to cakes to croissants,” an impressive feat for someone who had never spent any time baking. For the second time in her life, the first being her experiences in finance, she found herself applying the skills she acquired at UChicago, where she often spent 80-90 hours a week studying.
Upon returning, she realized the potential for a business opportunity. After she started researching, rather than focusing on many types of desserts, Teresa headed straight for the cake, because as she puts it: “Cake is popular, cake will never go away.” She put up an ad in her gym, an idea she acknowledges as kind of silly, and had a group test two cupcakes a week for eight months. Finally, the menu was set, and she found a location, but after talks with the landlord, she realized he wanted to control too many aspects of the business she had been dreaming of.
One thing Teresa openly admits to is the difficulty in finding a location, haggling through a lease, budgeting with the contractor, choosing a name and color scheme, and finding the most efficient way to spend her personal savings without liquidating all of her assets. During her talk, she joked with the audience, “If anyone wants to open a retail space, come talk to me, just make sure that you go to therapy afterwards!”
After a year of selling cupcakes just through catering and delivery and spending the last of her money on advertising, when she had, as she puts it, “literally $20 to my name,” she decided to open the Sugar Bliss storefront. That first month, January 2009, even considering people’s New Year’s resolutions and unwillingness to be outside, Sugar Bliss sold out nearly every day. It’s apparent that her cupcake tree marketing strategy, in which the word gets passed on from person to person, was more effective than she had planned.
Despite the struggle, when Teresa talks about her business, you can hear the passion. She clearly loves her product and her employees. She considers her employees part of her family and has brought a bit of her corporate experience into her business. She meets with her employees twice a year for evaluations to talk about how they can improve their techniques, and they’ve all signed confidentiality agreements so that her recipes remain special.
Many of her employees have been there since the start. Her friends have been supportive from the start and her sister, as Teresa puts it, “was like, rock on!” Although at first her mother questioned what Teresa was doing with her life, she now hangs out at her local airport to advertise for Teresa from afar. As for her friends that stayed in finance, she estimates that only about two from her beginning class at Bear-Stearns are still in the same field.
A word of advice for the aspiring entrepreneurial female? “Just stand strong, when I was in finance, I was basically the only woman in finance a lot of the time… I think I actually act more like a guy, you just have to be strong and stand by your ideas because it is really a man’s world.” Stick to your dreams and don’t give up easily. She suggests seeking out organizations specifically built to support females and standing firm. She makes an effort to prioritize her goals every day because opening a business isn’t easy and you have to be both involved and thick-skinned. She used to spend every day in the store, but she now takes Mondays off just to spend time getting things in order away from the store front and thinking about long term goals.
From the effort she put in to get her business off the ground, to the passion baked into each cake, it’s clear that for Teresa the cupcakes she makes are indeed Sugar Bliss. Next time you’re downtown, be sure to stop by and try her favorite – dark chocolate peanut butter.