Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Gabriella Vigoreaux. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Gabriella, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
I feel like the name of our business answers a lot of thee questions posed in these topics. When my wife was a child her family was always calling her a “Bandida” for doing things she wasn’t supposed to be doing or whenever she was being mischievous. From the day we started looking for a brick and mortar we had a lot of things fall through because people tried to tell us our concept wasn’t “complete” or didn’t make sense. All we wanted to do was make good food using seasonal ingredients that tell a story. We quickly realized that if we didn’t want to compromise our vision, then we were gong to have to do everything ourselves (with the help of family). It felt like swimming against the current, but it also felt like staying true to ourselves. Once a bandida, always a bandida I suppose.
Gabriella, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
After I graduated college from the University of Miami I moved to NYC to pursue a culinary career and attend culinary school. I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to end up, but I wanted to try out a bunch of different things and NYC felt like the best place to do that. Immediately upon moving I got hired as an intern for a group of restaurants, co-owned by Kerry Diamond. Kerry was in the middle of launching a magazine that celebrated women in the food/hospitality industry called Cherry Bombe. This internship launched my career in food media and I stayed with Kerry for a few years before I went on to work in test kitchens for Epicurious, Bon Appetit and Good Housekeeping. I found a passion for developing recipes and working in a small team, versus the hustle and bustle of a fast-paced restaurant. In the back of my mind, though, I wondered if I had what it took to have a place of my own one day. After a few more years of food media (and all the frustrations that came with corporate America), Kerry hired me back, this time as head baker for her cafe Smith Canteen. In the beginning I had no idea what I was doing. it was a complete fake it til’ you bake it situation. I wasn’t used to the hours, the physicality of it, or serving customers who provide immediate feedback. I wasn’t confident when it came to managing a team, but I was confident in my ability to write recipes and bake things. The biggest lesson I learned was to have a good team, and to hire people that know how to do things that you can’t or that scare you. You can’t do everything and you won’t succeed if you try to. I’m really proud of the bakery program my team and I developed at Smith Canteen, which sadly closed in 2019. Funny enough, Gio, who is now my wife and an owner at Bandidas, also worked at Smith Canteen for a beat. We still bake a few of those items, like the hippie scones and the whole wheat salted chocolate chunk cookies, at Bandidas. Those two pastries represent so much for us.
At Bandidas we get asked a lot what “kind of food” we make. There’s no straight answer here, since almost everything on our menu has a story much like the hippie scone and chocolate chunk cookie. Yes, we mainly bake and make sandwiches (on our delicious focaccia bread), but sometimes you’ll find foods from our childhood and respective cultures (I’m Puerto Rican and Gio is Nicaraguan). We are less interested in defining the type of food we serve and more interested in creating an atmosphere where everything is really authentic and represents us. It’s a family business at the end of the day.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I left New York in 2019 because I was really burnt out and ultimately wanted to make a leap towards doing my own thing. New York is obviously very saturated with restaurants and I didn’t have the confidence at that time to stay and do my own thing there, even though I had so much support from employers and other people I met along the way. I think something in me knew that it wouldn’t mean much if my family wasn’t there to see it and be part of the story. I’m definitely a very ambitious person, but achieving goals is much more satisfying for me when I can share all the highs and lows with someone on an equal level. People wonder how Gio and I can be life and work partners. For us, we can’t imagine it any other way.
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
We don’t have much of a marketing strategy for reaching new clients, which is one of those things everyone tells us we should have. We organically grew our client base from working local markets and word of mouth. It’s been five years of us living in Lakeland and selling our food so we genuinely feel like our customers are like family. We know their names and their kids names and we know what they like. We get holiday cards from them in the mail and we make cakes for their weddings. Maybe it’s not sustainable to know all your customers on a personal level, but this is a small town and we like to think of ourselves as a neighborhood joint. If we didn’t operate this way, there would be less joy in all of it for us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bandidasbakeshop.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bandidasbakeshop
- Facebook: /bandidasbakeshop
