We were lucky to catch up with Andie Bryce recently and have shared our conversation below.

Andie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

My Grandma Judy started building gingerbread houses in the 70’s with her neighborhood friends! She taught my mom and my mom taught us we we’ve grown up building gingerbread houses every year! My mom was always teaching other people and I told her to start a company, and she said that didn’t sound fun and you couldn’t make any money doing it! So I started one! The idea started really small, I spent months and months writing an ebook with our recipe and instructions and I hosted a workshop! I’m not a graphic designer so the ebook was not cute but it did the job and later we hired someone to rebrand and redesign the ebook! That year I honestly felt like a failure. We sold 19 ebooks total and couldn’t even fill one workshop! Since then, it’s evolved and grown into something I honestly couldn’t have imagined when I started!

Andie, 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?

Judy’s Gingerbread does a variety of things. Our core offering at first was our digital products – ebook, gingerbread house templates, and digital course. We want to spread the tradition of building homemade gingerbread houses and creating beautiful family memories together! We also host workshops, and sell physical products like premium gingerbread house kits, icing mix, icing bags & tips, etc. A recently developed branch of the business has been creating content for companies, which has been so much fun! Not only is it lucrative, but it’s also an awesome marketing engine for us because large brands hire me to create gingerbread content, and then they basically advertise for us on their own pages! I never even considered doing this until brand started reaching out. I’m really proud of how far the brand has come and how much our goals and dreams for the company have changed and grown. We grow exponentially every year and it’s really cool to see it develop. We started with literally nothing and have hit every obstacle possible, and I’m so grateful that I never gave up! We’re all about family tradition and creating memories together and it’s so gratifying for me to share that with the world!

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

In 2022, we had found a baker that was going to bake our gingerbread for kits and workshops for us. Due to a variety of reasons, they ended up not being able to bake for us, really last minute, which was a huge issue because we had presold hundreds of workshops, and had hyped up kits a bunch. We had to give up kits for the year which was really heartbreaking because so much time and work had gone into them, and we literally didn’t know what we were going to do. My husband ended up going to a commercial kitchen with a couple people we hired to bake our gingerbread almost every night while I was hosting workshops, and we just did what we could! We worked our butts off, and honestly it probably just added to the anticipation of kits for the next year! It was really hard and pretty heartbreaking at the time but it worked out and brands ended up reaching out about content jobs so we hit our revenue goals, even without kits!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We started from nothing! It took a while for me to figure out how to create content and get proficient at it, but I am a big believer that there are no short cuts, just consistent hard work. I think the best way to build a really great audience is creating consistently great content, and really serving your followers! I’ve worked with influencers and that has helped a lot, as well! My advice for that is to not just work with anyone and everyone – really figure out who has an audience that will resonate with your company/products/mission, and focus on those relationships. Quality over quantity. And just start posting! You’ll never get better if you don’t just start. I hated video content and wasn’t good at it but I reluctantly started a TikTok anyway. I got better as I practiced more and ended up going viral many times, which is probably how large brands started finding me. So just start. Even if you suck. Do it anyway and keep practicing. You’ll get better!

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.judysgingerbread.com
• Instagram: @judys_gingerbread
• Other: TikTok – @judys_gingerbread