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Sweet Epiphany
Tribune photo by Jeff Houck
The Cupcake Spot keeps several varieties on hand each day. These are Bunny Hops, made of carrot cake.
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Published: February 19, 2008
TAMPA - As midlife revelations go, Nicole Rogers had a tasty one.
Sitting on a beach in Greece, she and her boyfriend, Doug Longo, got to talking about how cupcake stores were showing up all across the United States.
Magnolia Bakery in New York City. Sprinkles in Los Angeles. Cupcakes in Chicago.
"We were wondering when someone was going to bring it to Tampa," she says. "We got tired of waiting, so we opened our own."
It wasn't like she was already in the food business. She owned her own public relations firm and had done marketing for about 18 years. But she passed her 40th birthday last year and decided a change was necessary. She had baked with her parents since she was a little girl, making souffles and baking cakes with her dad. And she won a Girl Scout bake-off in third grade with a chocolate cupcake recipe.
Rogers and her boyfriend opened The Cupcake Spot on South Dale Mabry Highway in early December. Since then, response has been mushrooming. Valentine's Day saw their tiny storefront crowded with customers looking to spend $2.75 per cupcake and $30 for a dozen.
The appeal, she says, is emotional on many levels.
"Cupcakes are a comfort food," she says. "They're versatile, they're portion-controlled, so we don't feel like we're overindulging. They're portable. You can throw away the little wrapper, and they're not messy. You don't have to have plates or knives. They're your own personal cake. You get to have your own flavor. Especially at a party, if someone has different flavors of cupcakes, you get to pick which one you like.
"One of the biggest personality traits of the cupcake is that it evokes feelings of nostalgia and happiness. I'm sitting here and I'm exposed to these things, hundreds of them each day, and I look at them and they're just so darned cute."
Rogers took a break recently from icing cupcakes to talk about what it took to get the business under way and about how she stays focused on the core product when there are so many other distractions and customer requests vying for her attention.
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When we first started this business, we were, like, this is totally different than a public relations firm, where you go out and buy desks and computers and a phone line and went out and got clients and offered them a service. Now, we're not only selling something; we're manufacturing and selling something. For me to leave a lucrative career in public relations, I wanted to do something I loved. And you have to love it because the hours are crazy. For five days a week, it's taking about 150 to 160 hours to bake, do the food preparation, make the boxes, keep the store clean, do the retail.
We try to introduce new flavors twice a week. Last week, we introduced the S'mores and sold out in an hour. Then we had someone who came in and tried one and ordered 16, so I knew we had a good thing. But there's no one favorite. The Chocolate Elvis, which is our banana cake with the peanut butter butter-cream frosting and the chocolate dollop on top has a small cult following. But so does the Berry Squared.
Some of the recipes were handed down from family and friends. My mother made the strawberry cake since before I was born. The vanilla butter-cream icing actually comes from my grandmother. It's eons that it's been made. The chocolate chip one comes from my Aunt Jenny.
Before we even opened, we got a phone call one day, and I answered, "The Cupcake Spot." The person on the other end yelled, "CUPCAKES! I NEED MY CUPCAKES!" The response has been crazy. Within the first week, we had repeat customers. That was really the most flattering thing.
There's a waitress at a restaurant in the Bay area that also sells cupcakes. She comes in almost every single day. We had a customer come in yesterday who had eaten at that restaurant and told that waitress it was her birthday. Instead of serving up one from the restaurant, the waitress served up one of ours that she had bought, and the customer came in afterward to buy some more.
We have an interesting mix of customers. We have a lot of salespeople and businesspeople who come in to purchase them to go on sales calls and to take to business meetings. We have lots of mothers who come in with small children and have one cupcake. We have adults and senior citizens. It's crazy. There's no one customer and no one flavor that sells out.
We had some people come in and tell us that they base their holiday travel on going to see cupcake stores around the U.S., and they said they had heard about us on a cupcake blog. We went on the blog, and it appears that there are about 75 freestanding cupcake-only places in the U.S., and they're cropping up really fast.
The whole thing is labor intensive. It takes about 150 hours a week to run this place. We've been selling between 600 and 800 cupcakes a day.
When we first opened, on my Web site, I put, "We do custom designs" because I know how to do that; but then I was inundated and there were only two of us. Now there are a few more of us, and we're growing. Once it gets streamlined, we'll add, then master it, add, then master. Or maybe not master it. The business plan has been modified, like, 100 times already. People are asking us for gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free. A couple moms have asked me for chocolate milk, which I think is just a double whammy on the chocolate. You can't be everything to all people.
We have a frosting that we've made that has a curry in it. It goes on a chocolate one. I think people are in their comfort zone, and they like what they like. On any given day, we generally have 14 to 16 different flavors. At first, the customers are excited, and then they're overwhelmed, and then they order chocolate or vanilla. I think that eventually they'll start venturing out and trying some of our more exotic flavors.
The same friends who gave me the recipe for our chocolate chip have a niece who is 12. She aspires to work in a cupcake store. I think she thinks that it's glamorous. I actually gave her an application to fill out.
I've already had a request from someone who said, "I'm interested in opening a cupcake store. Can I come back behind the scenes and see your oven and how things work? I told her I'd answer some of the questions, but it took me two months of intensive research to get where we are. Some of that has to be proprietary. But I would certainly tell someone where I got my boxes. That's no big deal.
We spend collectively about three hours a day putting boxes together. We use about 70 of the big ones a day. In fact, that's what I tell my friends' little niece: "Do you know what goes on behind the scenes at a cupcake store?" There's a lot of dishwashing and box-making and mopping.
The combination thing has really been the biggest challenge for us. The Better Thans, the chocolate chip ones, traditionally came with cream-cheese icing. We had a customer ask to put our chocolate icing on it, so now we sell out of it every day.
I've had a few people come in and ask, "So, did you go to culinary school?" And I've said, "I've just been baking."
Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324 or jhouck@tampatrib.com.
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