Abby Jimenez is getting a lot of love these days. So is her cupcake business. Her success today as one of the hottest desert bakers in the country didn’t come the conventional way. When Jimenez launched Nadia Cakes, winners of the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars,” she did so in the confines of her own home. Things didn’t come as easy or as orderly as Jimenez wanted.
In fact, things were downright chaotic.
Jimenez and her husband, Carlos, had three children in three years. Their third child showed up unexpectedly. Financially, things began to get tight. Paying for childcare for three children was proving to be more of a burden than a blessing for the couple.
Jimenez had to figure out whether to commute an hour to and from work and keep her management job or figure out a way to stay at home with her young children and still be able to bring income into the household. Being on maternity leave with her third child gave her time to think about it.
“When I started the cakes it was really serious. We really needed two incomes,” Jimenez said in an interview with News4usonline.com. “I knew there was no way we could make it without my income. When I started the cakes there were people lined up to order cakes from me. There wasn’t really anybody doing what I was doing in the area at the time.”
Armed with a baker’s heart and a couple of cake decorating classes under her belt, Jimenez transferred her baking ideas into taking action. She dabbled in the baking craft by trying out a few of her finished work with friends and family. Things began to click. She made a cake and decorated it 10 times as a marketing tool to promote what she was trying to do.
She posted flyers in and around the Palmdale, California area where she and her family lived. Before she knew it, Jimenez was filling out five to seven orders weekly. It should have been a time of celebration for Jimenez. She was excited to be able to pick up something she could do at home and bring in the necessary supplemental income to her husband’s salary.
She could stay at home with her babies and didn’t have to pay an exorbitant amount of money for anyone to watch. But trying to run a bakery business with three small children tugging at her and needing her full and undivided attention was trying at times. Jimenez would work from sun up to sun down, every day of the week to get her business up and running the way she wanted it to go.
She consulted with clients on Sunday, baked cakes on Monday and Tuesday, and decorated them on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Saturday, Jimenez set out to deliver all of her orders. In the meantime, motherhood to three little ones was a call Jimenez had to answer to just about every minute of the day. The dueling roles took its toll on Jimenez.
“There were times where I would just cry,” Jimenez said. “I would take orders and phone calls from clients while sitting in the bathroom because it was the only place where people couldn’t hear kids crying in the background. I was by myself and I was trapped in the house with all of these kids …It was awful. It was chaos. I would have breakdowns. I would just cry.”
Jimenez’s stress magnified with Carlos working 12-hour shifts and commuting two hours each way to and from his place of employment. It was a rough period for the family. Something had to give, Jimenez said.
“Our quality of life at that time was not good,” Jimenez said. “He was exhausted. I was exhausted. I was working from home. I was not enjoying my kids. It would anger me when people would call me a stay-at-home mom. I was truly carrying on a full-time business and taking care of these three kids that were in diapers. There had to be a change. I knew I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.”
Jimenez received her breakthrough. Despite the weariness she felt from the balancing act she was keeping up, business grew so much so that Jimenez decided to leave her job to officially to open her bakery in 2009. Charging $100,000 on credit, Abby and Carlos opened Nadia Cakes with just $300 left to their name. The day they opened the store, Jimenez said there wasn’t enough money to put change in the cash register.
The next day at the store’s grand opening, Nadia Cakes had over 2,000 customers lined up outside its doors.
“If this bakery didn’t work out-we were going to be ruined,” Jimenez said. “We were going to lose everything. The day we opened-we had $300 available on our credit card. We were so broke I didn’t have enough change to put in the cash register.
“My husband and I looked at each other and said this is the first month we don’t pay our mortgage for the first time in our lives. But the day we opened we had lines out of the door. The day after the store opened-we sold 2,000 cupcakes. We were slammed. We were so busy the first few weeks after we opened I told my husband he had to quit his job. It was like the biggest support.”
That support has swelled since then in more ways than one. Nadia Cakes now has a staff of 17, up from the five individuals who started with Jimenez three years ago. The company, which has been featured on TLC’s “Fabulous Cakes” and has received numerous awards, now has two locations.
Thanks to delicious goodies like candied yam, triple berry, cheesecake and French toast and bacon cupcakes, Nadia Cakes will have a new location in Minnesota to partner with its California store. Jimenez is expecting the new store to open in the spring this year. And she’s pretty stoked about it. Since winning “Cupcake Wars,” Nadia Cakes has seen its business quadruple, she said.
“If you had told me five years ago that I was going to be the owner of Nadia Cakes, and that I was going to be on the Food Network, I would have thought that you were crazy,” Jimenez said. “I would have never, ever thought I’d be doing this. I was a retail manger for a clothing store. That is what I thought I’d be doing. I didn’t know I was going to be a bakery owner.”
Dennis has covered and written about politics, crime, race, sports, and entertainment. Dennis currently covers the NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA, and Olympic sports. Dennis is the editor of News4usonline.com and serves as the publisher of the Compton Bulletin newspaper. He earned a journalism degree from Howard University. Email Dennis at dfreeman@news4usonline.com