We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Emily Franklin and Krystle Pacay. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Emily Franklin below.
Emily and Krystle, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
As best friends, we always knew we wanted to do something together since college. We just had no idea we would end up creating Phatty Girl Spreads.
Even though we are a charcuterie catering company our overall goal is to highlight the ability to remain your authentic self in spaces you may not see yourself in. The world of cheese & wine overall lacks representation for people of color in general. So here we are your local cheese plug ladies!
During this journey we have learned from our Phatty Friends that so many women and men who look like us want to explore the world of cheese & wine in a place without losing their sense of style & grace. Shout out to Biggie Smalls for the inspiration.
Our culture & up bringing is a big part of our paring style and its been a complete joy knowing its been well received by so many people.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Phatty Girl, LLC is a business/brand founded by two best friends. Emily Franklin & Krystle Pacay.
Emily started making spreads for friends, family and herself in college just for fun based on a random love for cheese and wine.
Krystle has always been into music and party planning. So the combination for two passions just blended into Phatty Girl Spreads.
We started Phatty Girl in March of 2021 still very much in a pandemic and we had no idea what we were doing. We just started following pages that inspired us and thankfully connected with some amazing women who provided us with lots of guidance on pricing, materials etc.
We’re most proud of remaining true to ourselves and offering the “spread the good times” energy. If you don’t know now you know.
Planning & Hosting any event from small to large can be a bit stressful. So to aid our Phatty Friends in that process by creating beautiful full of flavor spreads satisfies our souls. Feeding someone is a love language, we both know so well. Remember the days as a kid when your grandmother was always trying to feed you, even if you weren’t hungry and it just felt like pure love.
That is how we feel when making orders for our customers. We have this whole process of how to make money but we always end up adding a bit more which is bad business but it’s the Phatty Girl way. We’re a work in progress.
How’d you meet your business partner?
We went to the same high school but we didn’t really hang out in high school. We knew of each other & had mutual friends but we didn’t really start that friendship bonding until we got into college.
There’s a group of six of us who have all been friends for almost 15+ years. That’s the base of Phatty Girl, the friendship, good times, laughter, dancing to oldies, eating good food with people you love.
We both went to commuter colleges. Emily went to Cal Poly Pomona and Krystle went to Cal State Fullerton. Were were young corporate boss babes who felt like at the time on top of the world. Mind you we were in our 20’s but now we’re in our 30’s and the vibe is a bit different.
So much life happened from then to now and we acted on our idea to one day own a business together. At a restaurant eating lunch and drinking Tequila Shots & Michelada’s.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We manage our social media ourselves and its been quite the learning process. We had no idea what we were doing but we did know what we liked. We love music, especially oldies, 90’s hip hop & r n b…even rock.
Krystle is very colorful and Emily’s into motivational words of wisdom. So we just took all of those things and created an Instagram page.
As millennials its a bit challenging for us to expand onto Tik Tok, so we really focus on Instagram. One day we do hope to have a website.
We have an inside joke that we, “act a fool on Instagram” because that’s how we are in real life.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: phattygirlspreads