We were lucky to catch up with Michael & Amanda Joyner recently and have shared our conversation below.

Michael & Amanda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The first seeds of Bowler Man Confection were born on a couch in Austin, Texas. Back then it was called Bowler Man, it was Retro Bizzaro. Me and my wife watched an episode of No Reservation with Anthony Bourdan where he visited a snack cake factory that had been closed down years earlier. Anthony found some cream filling that had spilled on the floor and discussed that even after all the years the factory had been down the local vermin hadn’t eaten it. From that moment we started our first company Retro Bizzaro. A small bakery that only sold at farmers markets. We specialized in making old-school lunch box treats that were made using local ingredients and no preservatives. Flash forward a few years, a couple more kiddos we wanted to bring back the feeling of having our own company again. We didn’t have the money years ago to open a bakery, but what we could do was make our own chocolate and sell it at local markets. This was back in 2013. On and off over the next few years we made our own chocolate from bean to bar and sold it at markets. During this time I was working my way up through the ranks at the local casino (four Winds Casino). By the time I made it Pastry Chef for the casino and instructor for Ivy Tech I didn’t have extra time to keep up with the original version of Bowler Man Confections.
Flash forward again to the pandemic. When the world shut down, so did the casino. We were all laid off like so many others and sat at home for the next few months. August rolled around I was informed that the casino wanted to put me on a one year call waitlist to get my Pastry Chef job back. With four kids I couldn’t sit around longer and wait, so I found a chef job in the area and began working a new job. This place also closed down due to the pandemic. For the second time in a year and a half I was forced to think about what I was gonna do. Me and amanda talked and decided that we would try and rekindle Bowler Man one more time. The idea was we would open in a small location she knew about nex to her business and we would turn this space into a small confectionery. The place had once been used for a coffee shop and had a dish and hand wash sink. We planned on doing mostly chocolate work and would need to use the oven too much.
We were going to open for just the summer, three months, and use that time to hopefully make a little money and give me time to find a new job. With hardly any money, since most was used up surviving during the pandemic, we opened a small shop to sell confections.
The same heart that was in the first business was still alive in Bowler Man. Small batch, handmade, local ingredients when possible, and most importantly “Flavor First.”

Michael & Amanda, 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?

Mike–Every since I was in middle school I loved to cook. I would lay on the livingroom floor and watch PBS cooking shows. I would then make dinner for my parents, who would eat what i made even if it wasn’t good, and continued to do this for many years. I thought about going to culinary school when I was 18 but was talked out of it with some people telling me that I would lose the love of it if I did it for a living. So I continued to cook for my self for the next ten years. I went Purdue University in my late twenties for Fine Arts and Computer Graphic Design. During my third year there a friend of my that was working on her Master’s degree pulled me aside and talked to me about how my art work was good but the pastries I had been bringing into class that year where some of the best she ever had, and that got me thinking about pursuing a career in cooking again. I ended up moving to Austin, Texas to attend Texas Culinary Academy for baking and pastries. I was in class there where I met my wife, Amanda. After school I worked in Austin Texas at local restaurants as a pastry chef and that is where we started Retro Bizzaro. Our son got sick and we moved up north to my hometown, Michigan City. I started working at Fourwinds casino as a supervisor. During the next few years I also worked at Omni Hotels as a pastry chef and was the director of baking for Als grocery store before going back to the casino and becoming the pastry chef there and instructing at Ivy Tech.
Working at these many placed taught me the skill and leadership need to run Bowler Man. It also taught me the what I din’t want our bakery to be. I knew that we couldn’t use box cake mixes and canned fruit fillings. Everything needed to be hand made and use only real ingredients.
Bowler Man is a true mash up of all things that make up me and my wife. From the skills I have learned in the kitchen, running a bakery, graphic design, to Amands’s creative eye for detail and design. Her ability to make beautiful cakes, spray paint a chair, and sensitive palate.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Working in the kitchen or owning your own business is all about being resilenced each and every day. In the kitchen you are challenged every day with either being short-staffed, not having all the ingredients, or simple machine breakdowns. You learn early in your career that the issues that stand before you can’t be the reason you didn’t complete your task. Maybe you are making a dessert that calls for mango but the shipment was short mangos, what do you do? You can take peaches and apricots and create a flavor that is very similar. If you have a severe shortage one night from staff call-offs you don’t close the doors, you trim down your menu a bit so that you can run the kitchen with fewer cooks. I can remember working at a restaurant during the pandemic and everyone had called off one night except me. It would have been completely acceptable to close the restaurant down that night but the owner and I decided to close the most popular station that required multiple people and run the two simple ones that night. We had a successful night and each of the customers completely understood and was appreciative that we did what we could for them that night.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One lesson that I have had to unlearn since opening the shop was being more attentive to cost control. it wasn’t that I didn’t understand cost control, especially since I had taught the class in college. It was more fact that I had recently come from working years in the casino world and had developed a less than frugal mindset. Over the years there had occasions where the garnish placed on the dessert cost more than the dessert itself. And it wasn’t that we didn’t pay attention to cost at the casino it was they wanted a particular look for certain occasions and cost wasn’t an issue. When you are running your own confectionary/bakery cost is always part of the solution. We don’t skimp on ingredients we use but always look for ways to keep costs down and ultimately price down for the customer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bowlermanconfections.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bowlermanconfections/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BowlerManConfections

Image Credits
photography by, Cat Macdonald photography