We were lucky to catch up with Brittany Wohlfeil recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I started decorating cakes when I made my oldest daughter’s first birthday cake. It was a disaster. The frosting melted off the side. I cried twice. But it tasted great and I mostly had a lot of fun doing it. Friends started asking me for cakes. Then friends of friends. Then COVID hit and I found myself at home with extra time to bake and practice decorating. I was teaching at Marquette in the school of nursing at the time and our classes moved online so I was home more. It all kind of snowballed from there. My sister is also a baker and was running a home based macaron business. We decided to look for a small space we could use to make the jump to a licensed bakery. We outgrew that very quickly and are now in the process of expanding. Both my sister and I have experience teaching baking classes, so we decided we wanted to create a space that can host classes. Our new shop will have the retail bakery as well as a teaching kitchen for 18 students. I think anything that brings people together for a shared experience in our “post COVID” world is going to be popular. People want that connection and I think they understand how important those connections are in a way that maybe we had forgotten. We want to create that space for both instructors and students to come together in a way that is fun and innovative.

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?

I have always loved baking but I never intended it to be my career. It was just a fun hobby that sort of spun wildly out of control in all the best ways. I actually am a Nurse Practitioner full time, I work with patients with kidney disease. But I have always had a creative side, my first degree was actually in theatre. Now, I own a bakery because life is funny that way! We specialize in cakes, cookies, macarons, breakfast pastries…all sorts of things. My four-year-old likes to tell me I am the best baker in the city, and I think that is what I am most proud of, that my daughter’s will be able to see that I followed a passion and built something. I also am really proud of the fact that we like to live our values at Batter and Mac. We are in a more conservative part of town but that hasn’t stopped us from putting up Pride stuff in June, doing fundraisers for Stop AAPI hate, etc. I am proud of the fact that we aren’t afraid to go against the grain a bit in our community in terms of being allies to marginalized groups and that we recognize our privilege and our platform. It may make us unpopular with pockets of our immediate community but that’s okay. I think it’s more important for us to be true to ourselves and take a a stand than to stay quiet for the sake of sales. Maybe that will come back to bite us in the butt, but it’s something I am proud of and will stick by.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We signed the lease for our current shop in July of 2021. We did not open until May of 2022. We hit just road block after road block with supply chain issues due to COVID. We also dealt with some pretty blatant sexism when it came to dealing with suppliers and contractors. I come from the world of nursing, which is female dominated. In that role, I never once had someone say to me “Do you need to check with your husband first” but that was something I heard multiple times while trying to order equipment or get quotes from contractors. I had always heard that was a thing but had never experienced it. That was wild to me. Between that and trying to outfit a shop during a time of unprecedented supply chain issues, I would say I demonstrated some serious resilience. I could have thrown the towel in at any time. But I just pushed through and now here we are! Growing like crazy and building something really special.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Honestly, I got by from a little help from my friends and family. One of my best friends in the entire world gave us our first equipment loan. She and her husband believed in me and had the means to do so. We had gone to banks and they all turned us down because we were a start up. For our expansion to the new space, we are utilizing an SBA loan. I had no idea how difficult it is to get an SBA loan. Wow. You basically have to give them every piece of paper you have ever touched in your entire life. I honestly am surprised they didn’t ask for medical records, because that’s about the only thing they didn’t want. It is bonkers. You’d think the government would be trying to make things easier for small businesses but they really don’t. It feels like the deck is stacked against small business owners. We lucked out and I met a woman at a networking event who happened to the VP of business banking at a local credit union and she really went to bat for us.

Contact Info:

• Website: batterandmac.com, battermke.com
• Instagram: @battermke, @batterandmac

Image Credits
Headshot- Katrice Battle, kbattle photography