We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cheryl & Caitlin Kohnke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cheryl & Caitlin below.

Cheryl & Caitlin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

As family business owners, we are BIG fans of them. We’ve come to find out, after thinking about expanding our employees, that one of the major positives of a family business is everyone has the same investment in and dedication to the success of the business. Folks coming into a job, strive for its success for financial gain or maybe because they do really believe in the mission, but for the members of a family business this “job” has so much more meaning and weight. But also because of this weight, comes some pitfalls. With the amount of time and energy we spend together investing in the bakery, business and our personal connection can become too intertwined. There are many stereotypes about butting heads with family members, or feeling a pressure to join an existing family business for children, and generally that there is a possibility of a business harming your relationship with loved ones when the two worlds combine. We both can agree that making this decision together, as two adults fully aware of what can happen to families that are in business together, really contributed to a healthy response to possible problems that have come up or will in the future. This business has posed an invaluable experience of being able to grow our relationship in new ways with having connected goals. There is never a guarantee to how much time you are allotted with your loved ones, and we are lucky enough to get to spend so much time (on the brink of crazy co-dependency actually) together, enjoying special, happy moments and working through challenging, scary moments.

We live in a small town, of which many of the local business are family run and owned. So the idea of working together wasn’t far-fetched in the context of our local demographic and their interest and excitement to support local, especially local families. A pushing point for us was seeing the incredible story of Kelsey Elizabeth Cakes, a bakery in the Ohio area. It is also a story of a mother/daughter duo that took a leap and opened a bakery which has grown to include multiple stores and a dedicated fanbase. We are fans all the way over in Arizona! Seeing a story like theirs, a few years further down the road but so similar in base narrative to ours, be so exciting and fruitful really gave us the push at the beginning.

Family businesses can be all-consuming sometimes, so we aren’t too sure what C & C’s will hold for future generations of our family.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Cheryl and Caitlin Kohnke, a mother and daughter first and business partners second. Cheryl has always enjoyed baking, something she did with her grandmother and mom. She never admits it, but she has always been a diversely creative person. She made our family Christmas stockings, scrapbooked all of our family’s life-events and accomplishments, she’s even made a few quilts! But baking and creating sweet treats has always been a constant through these dips into other creative outlets. Our nightly family dinners were often punctuated with a tried and true dessert from a family cookbook or something exciting and new to try.

She luckily passed this creative flare down to her daughter.

Cheryl’s incredible hand in the kitchen made room for Caitlin’s artistic eye to turn to using frosting and icings as her medium and the sweet treats started to include decorated cupcakes, cookies, and cakes.

There was a turning point when Cheryl had our close family friends whispering in her ear about actually selling the delicious cakes and cookies she would make them. She was convinced to go through the process of acquiring a business license, getting approved for cottage-food sale, and started selling to folks outside of our close circle. This pretty quickly snowballed for a few years, gaining momentum and clientele. After Caitlin returned from acquiring her undergraduate degree and the COVID-19 pandemic altered her future plans, we were presented with an opportunity to take this passion project to new heights. After just a short period of having more full-time investment into growing our combined skills, the demand for our baked goods was becoming a little too much to keep in Cheryl’s kitchen. So after some time of searching for the perfect sport for a brick-and-mortar, the building which is now home to our bakery almost fell into our laps and we’ve hit the ground running.

We now have a big enough kitchen to provide all kinds of baked goods, allowing Cheryl’s creative mind to wander. She is the master in the kitchen, baking all the treats that hit our shelves like cupcakes, bars and brownies, drop cookies, cake pops, scones, always trying recipes and seeing what new things she can tempt our customers with. Our most popular items still being decorated sugar cookies, cupcakes, and cakes custom ordered for special occasions baked by Cheryl and decorated by Caitlin.

There are many things we are proud of when it comes to C & C’s Baking Studio! Always including that folks really do love our baked goods and come back for more, but also how frequently our customers comment on how friendly and sweet they consider us. C & C’s is essentially a product of the love and care we have for each other (along with a HUGE appreciation for everything made of dough and sugar,) it’s a family place, a second home for us, so it is always fulfilling to welcome customers into our family and see them appreciate it. It has made it so we have become a part of some families a little as well, especially being located in a small town that we have lived in for over 20 years. We are lucky enough to be witnesses and small contributors to the growth of our customers families through bridal showers, weddings, baby showers, first birthdays, and beyond. When you stop into C & C’s, you are supporting two gals who just love sweets, love spending time together, and love bringing joy to other people through their creations.

Love being the foundation for C & C’s is what makes it special.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We always carry the origin of our current business starting as a hobby as a badge of honor, however the transition from having our passion turn into a source of income has taken a lot of unlearning. It has been a continued mental battle to validate the monetary value of our creativity. Being sure of what you’re creating and what value it offers to your customers can be daunting. Especially being so new, with any sort of dip or sway to the market or our customer base, it is hard not to let feelings of inadequacy seep in and take a toll on our confidence. We are unlearning the associations of our product with being “just a hobby.” There is inherent value to what we are offering to our customers, not only because of the physical resources we put in but because of the mental and creative energy each product gets. And that has a monetary value to it, often much higher than what we think we should grant ourselves.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

We often get new customers because they see our social media posts on public forums or just happen to walk by our storefront while exploring our town, word-of-mouth has always been a huge way new customers have decided to give us a shot. However, something that has recently really encouraged new faces to pop into our shop is our collaboration with a local private business that purchases gift certificates from us and sends them to their clients for their birthdays. The clients are always so appreciative of their provider doing something special for their birthday, and it gives them an excuse to stop into our shop if they’ve never been or hadn’t heard of us. We have really noticed an influx of new faces bringing in these gift certificates, this connection with an outside entity has been invaluable in growing our customer base. We would say this is true with every new connection and collaboration we make with our surrounding businesses.

Contact Info:

• Website: ccsbakingstudio.com
• Instagram: @ccsbakingstudio
• Facebook: C & C’s Baking Studio

Image Credits
Personal Photo – Capturing Butterflies Photography (Megan Grefsrud)