We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andie Bryce a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Andie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

My grandma started building gingerbread houses in the 70’s! The tradition was passed down to my mom and on to me! Every year, the weekend after Christmas, we’d all gather together in the kitchen and build our gingerbread houses, and it was so special! The tradition is very family oriented, so it makes sense that the business I built from it would be, as well. My husband and I run the business, my little brother has baked for me, my sister and mom help run workshops, and my daughter sneaks gingerbread dough to eat! I love having a family owned business and having family work with me. I’m so grateful for their help and I think it’s really cool that we get to share our favorite tradition with so many people together as a family! There are definitely challenges to working with family but I think clear communication is so important and showing lots of appreciation! I’d love for my daughter to take over my business one day! I think it would be so special to keep it in the family and have it live on for generations! How cool is that?! I’m also constantly striving to build the business to support the life I want to live, and if I’m able to achieve that, it would be really cool to be able to provide that and pass that along to my kids as well!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My grandma started building gingerbread houses in the 70s! She taught my mom, and my mom taught us! She always had people over teaching them how to build beautiful gingerbread houses and I told her she should start a business, write a recipe book, host workshops, etc. and she wasn’t interested, so I did! We are all about family connection and traditions. We have a librar y of digital assets to help people create incredible gingerbread houses, we sell premium gingerbread house kits, we host workshops, and I create content for companies like Disney, Amazon Prime, Clash of Clans, Raising Canes, and Starbucks! It’s so much fun! It’s completely seasonal, so I work behind the scenes in the off season and then October-December is incredibly busy! And honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I was pregnant through my last gingerbread season which was a challenge in and of itself. But then in March, we lost my son. He was stillborn at 39 weeks + 2 days. It has been the hardest experience of my life. Having to continue working and learning to live with grief has been an interesting experience. Owning your own business has pros and cons when you go through a huge loss or tragedy. The pros are that I was able to completely stop working and totally focus on me and my family. I know that isn’t an option for everyone, but it was for me. But in the same breath, the con is that if I’m not working on the business, no one is. It’s all dependent on me at this point, and nothing will progress unless I’m working. Finding motivation while grieving is incredible hard. It’s hard to feel like anything really matters when you’ve experienced the worst case scenario. But I’m able to create beautiful things from the pain. I’ll be doing some special things in my company in honor of my son, Rowan, and I’ll be donating to causes near and dear to my heart that have helped us a lot through our loss.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Yes! I started the business in my free time while I was working selling engagement rings! When I had my daughter, I quite working full time and pivoted to working solely on the business. So for me, it has gone hand in hand with motherhood. The business has grown as my daughter has grown. And the skills that I’ve learned as a mother translate into things that have been helpful as an entrepreneur and vice versa! Some key milestones were investing in the business – we hired someone to rebrand and redesign the whole company, so it felt a lot more legit and less DIY. We started working with  influencers. And I got serious about TikTok, which absolutely blew up and changed a lot of things about my business!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Judysgingerbread.com
• Instagram: @judys_gingerbread
• Other: TikTok – @judys_gingerbread