Today we’d like to introduce you to Cindy Mallahan.
Hi Cindy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
At the age of 20, I had just graduated with an associate degree as a legal secretary and realized that I truly did not like this field. While attending college, I got a job as a cake decorator, with no previous experience, at Big Bear. I immediately fell in love with this line of work and quickly moved up to the head cake decorating position, working full-time. After 15 years of working 40 hours and the birth of my second child, who was born with disabilities, I felt the need to be at home more with her. So, I quit my job and started an in-home bakery very slowly. I have been in business for 35 years. My business quickly grew, and I hired on 3 more employees, including my husband, Allen, all still working from home, which continued on for 27 years. After my third child graduated high school, Allen and I decided it was time to move this booming bakery from our house to a brick-and-mortar. We purchased the old post office building at the corner of Warrior Drive and St. Rt. 550…it was a great move! We are very busy, with wedding cakes and birthday cakes being the bulk of our production, as well as cookies, pepperoni rolls, and doughnuts. On many weekends, we are creating and delivering as many as four wedding cakes! During the holidays, we sell thousands of our famous frosted sugar cookies! We now employ six fabulous people, and my husband is still hands-on in the business and opens the bakery every morning for me, as well as does all of the buying for the shop. I still thoroughly enjoy this career and love working with the public and this community! We absolutely have the best area for small business support, and I am so very blessed to be here.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
For the most part, it has been a pretty smooth road. The challenges of the business growing so much while still working from home were probably some of the most trying times, as we live down a half-mile gravel road, which during the winter months was tricky to navigate. The second most difficult time was, of course, working through covid shutdowns. Stocking supplies, deliveries and now the rapid increase in inflation costs are still very challenging. We have survived 35 in years in business, so I guess we are doing something right!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Our bakery specializes in custom wedding cakes with our famous buttercream frosting. We are currently making the majority of the wedding cakes in our area, and we pride ourselves on our great revues about them. Our frosted sugar cookies, as well as our “cake tops,” which are simply the tops of the cake cut off, frosted, and boxed in a takeout container, have been our most popular selling items. The one thing that I pride myself on is growing this business from scratch to the thriving business that it is today, and it makes me so happy to have one of our cakes be the center of a happy celebration! Our dedication to make sure that every item that leaves our store is exactly what the customer wanted is what we strive for.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
Success, in my opinion, is having a career that you love doing, and the people you work with make you happy, and keeping the customers that you serve satisfied so that they return!
Contact Info:
- Website: villagecakery.com
- Facebook: Village Cakery LLC
