Spreading JOY with LOVE.
Sweet & Simple.
We began last year as a home-based bakeshop with a dedicated gluten free kitchen. Until we are able to find a covid-safe home in 2023 to continue to expand with a team, it’s just us - a husband and wife duo doing ALL the things. Therefore, we keep things simple. We focus on the food and family, both our little family and our Bom Family - the instagram community of foodies who follow and support our journey online as we experiment and play with flavors and shapes to continue developing delicious treats that gluten freers and non-gluten freers happily indulge in and share.
So what does that mean? That means we keep our business model simple by doing popups and pickups in central Austin near 78752 and 78757 for the time being. And for us, two people who are high-risk for covid, that works for us, and works for our fans and customers.
So for those of you who are looking for our location - we don’t have a storefront, yet. And for privacy and for our safety purposes, we do not post our home address. We do share the popup pickup locations with those who pre-order with confirmed purchases.
Family & Health First.
If you’ve read our story, you know that this bakeshop dream is 9 years in the making. We never would have imagined starting this during a pandemic, as a result of layoffs and lockdowns, but alas that was the perfect storm for this business to be birthed. We decided that we would build this business based and guided by our values - at the top putting family and health first., and oh how 2020 underscored exactly that.
We both grew up with family businesses working to the bone and sacrificing family time, relationships, sleep, and health all in financial survival to earn and have more. But we believe the formula for success we grew-up on is broken and at the very least, needed a 2020 upgrade.
And we appreciate your patience with us as work through how to scale a business on the foundation of those values. We make sure to prioritize rest and family time which means as a two person bakeshop, we don’t open every day nor through the weekend or holidays.
Prioritizing our health meant that we would not share open commissary kitchens with strangers nor hire team members to come into our home to help us.
And because we’ve been limited to working out of our home kitchen, albeit - a very large one - we have not been able to use industrial machines to make our products at scale. So our products are handmade, hand rolled, hand dipped and all made one by one with love - which means smaller batches and longer prep/make/wait times.
However, 2023, we hope to scale safely having found a more spacious commissary kitchen and locations we can partner with to do popups. We plan to hire a team to run operations with more regular service options as we continue to look for our future Bom Bakeshop storefront home.
We plan to continue scaling with Rhythms of Rest. Between keeping to our values and staying healthy as high-risk for covid, this seems essential, and we hope to build a solid unshakeable business model built to last and not be a flash in the pan.
Freedom to Flow
While JOY is at the core of the DNA of our business and mission, one other has been a huge spark for joy for us ~ creative flow. If you read our story, all of our products have been create out of curiosity, play, and a desire to create excellent and delicious gluten free goodness. It’s less about perfection and more about satisfaction.
As foodies and co-creators, having sparks of joy from our late-night or spontaneous creations, flash popups, whimsical and themed flavors and products, and cultivating joy and fun in our community have been essential for us. And that Freedom to Flow is something we want to protect so we can continue to spark joy to spread the joy through our creations and our community.
Teresa, a seasoned business growth strategist is no stranger to all that comes with scaling a business (even to 1B). And yet, with that knowledge and experience, there’s something to preserving the essence of what makes a business stand out from others. Part of that magic for us is the creative experiments and transparency to “dialogue” directly with customers over social media~ and borrowing the lean startup principles of creating loops of prototyping, testing, feedback and scaling more of that.
So we’re in no rush to simply become a rinse and repeat food manufacturer nor franchise and want to forewarn you that our business journey may look like others food business stories and also not. We’re excited about the “not” part ~ as we feel there’s lot of room for improvement in the food and beverage industry as 2020 has revealed how fragile the traditional business model has been. So get ready for lots of experiments, pivots, and trying things out to discover the iteration that works best for Bom Bakeshop and invite you to journey with us!