Cravings Cupcakery

Hi, I'm Shelley Laver with Life in Lake Ridge and we're here today with Kari from Cravings Cupcakeery. So Kari, tell me a little bit about yourself. I'm a retired Air Force officer. I served for 21 years in the Air Force and decided after baking cakes for my troops for the last probably five or six years and them lauding my efforts that it was time to figure something out what I was going to do. I retired and I thought I might bake cake and here we are 10 years later. That's amazing. So how long have you been in the lake Ridge area? So I started this out of my home in Woodbridge about 10 years ago and stayed there for five years then moved over to Lake Ridge when I decided I was going to open a storefront because I wanted to be immersed in the community. So really important for me to understand what makes Lake Ridge tick. So I bought a house on this side. I live a half a mile away. It's perfect. And I opened this store in 2017 and yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Great. So I have to ask, you've obviously made it well through COVID. What was your tips of the trade to keep things going? So we have a lot of support from the community. During COVID people were doing their best to try to keep us open and we did. We stayed open through the whole thing other than a little bit of reoutfitting our store to accommodate gelato. So we have something for s They weren't buying the big cakes. Not because they didn't want to just because there were no events to go to. We had to all shelter in place. So there were. But we had a lot of people come in and buy a four pack every once in a while just to kind of keep us going and send us their well wishes and wish us the best. Well that's great. Just goes to show how great of a community Lake Ridge really is. Absolutely. All right. So poking around the website and having tasted a few of the options myself. You have five classic flavors and eight and ninety. Ninety. Specialty flavors. So what are the top sellers? So we're always developing new flavor profiles which is kind of fun because it keeps things interesting. But top sellers probably of our classics would be red velvet or confetti. Confetti mostly for birthdays but red velvet is a very classic southern flavor that people love from here. And I'm not a big red velvet fan but I will eat our red velvet cake. It's amazing. And probably of the premi So thank you for the feedback on that. Thank you for that feedback because we love hearing the good things that we do. And also how to improve. I mean we have two flavors on our list that were developed by customers. And they're named after the customers. So we have a Tiana which is a peach-based cupcake. And then we have the big John. He walked in and explained what he wanted and I said under one condition I got to be able to name it something because if you want it again, my girls need to know how to make it. So we named it after him and he's thrilled with that. He said it's one of his bucket list things to have a cupcake named after him. So we're here to please, whatever you need, we're here. Now you mentioned the specialty cakes. Tell us a little bit more about that. So we can accommodate catering events with either cake pops, custom sugar cookies. We've colored Oreos for baby showers. We can do pretzel rods that are decorated to match everything depending on what you're doing. Cupcakes, same thing. We can accommodate you with different color icing if you want to go for something colorful. But we do custom cakes as well. Everything here is baked from scratch. So it makes it a little bit more unique and a lot more flavorful. So when you have a special event, we would definitely We can custom design just about anything you need and make it really personal and really classy. Okay. What are your timelines for people that want to come in and order those specialty items? Yeah, that's the part that we get crunched on. Sometimes we receive a lot of phone calls. I took one this morning. They wanted a cake by Friday. Custom cakes take time, people. We're not just back there whipping out flowers for whatever cake might walk through the door. I wish I could do that. I really do because I could accommodate a lot more orders. But our timeline, our lead time ideally is about a month. You don't have to be super specific at the month timeline. You can just give us a placeholder and then we'll reach out to you and kind of get more details. But it's really important to get on the calendar. That's for cakes or cupcakes. Cakes take the longer lead time. Cupcakes we can accommodate usually week of. But if it's large quantities, we need to make sure that we've got the manpower to cover the work that's involved in putting those together. Because we have a very small staff that really So making sure we've got enough people on the team to do the job. Always important. Staffing is so critical. Oh, it really is. If you want a job. Reach out to Cary. Right. So if customers want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? So you can call us. Our phone n All right, folks. Reach out. Come visit cravings cupcake.