We recently connected with Christy Seguin and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Christy, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
I never dreamed I’d be where I am today when I insisted, at 5 years old, that I wanted to bake & decorate ‘Santa’s Cake’. Every year my mother baked & decorated a Christmas-tree-shaped cake, & we left a piece of it for Santa on our hearth. From the time I picked up a spatula & icing bag, decorating cakes just came naturally. As I grew up, I would buy little cake tools like icing tips & work on teaching myself skills from the Wilton Yearbooks. When I graduated high school, my mother said that I was so into cake decorating that she gifted me a decorating course from a local bakery. I fell completely in LOVE!
Over the years I made many cakes for family & business occasions, getting fancier and fancier. And even though everyone who saw & tasted them said I should open a bakery, I never really seriously considered it.
Then I discovered the cake television shows. Cake Boss, of course, but the one that really inspired me was Duff Goldman with Ace of Cakes. The day I saw the episode where they created the DeLorean from Back To The Future, complete with flaming tracks, was when my ’80’s Baby’ heart just exploded, and I said to myself, “I know I can DO THAT! I want to learn how to do that!” This was when YouTube was just becoming a thing, and Facebook was new, so I sought out cake tutorials on YouTube, and joined Cake Artist groups on Facebook, where I learned so much & made many friends that are dear to me to this day & encouraged me despite my complete newbie status.
For my precious niece’s birthday in 2012, I decided I was going to create a sculpted horse cake that looked like her beautiful new palomino mare named Skye. I couldn’t find many tutorials, & when I asked for advice on the groups, most said horses were one of the most difficult cakes to sculpt & only one wonderful lady was able to help me at all. So I set out to figure it out myself. It turned out amazing! My niece & family were blown away, & without thinking much about it, I popped it up on Facebook & a few other sites, just saying ‘hey look what I made!’ To my surprise, it went viral & suddenly I was bombarded with people asking if I could do cakes for them.
I was living in Chapin, South Carolina at the time, & discovered that South Carolina had recently passed Cottage Laws, enabling bakers to sell from their homes, so I decided to take on a few orders. It just took off, & became Cakes ROCK!!!. It grew & grew to the point where I started looking for my own space to work from, because the kitchen in our home was NOT set up for a cake business & I was struggling!
One day I found the perfect place, & I came home excited to tell my husband about it. He held up his hand & stopped me in mid-sentence & said ‘before you get too excited, come look at this email.’ He had received an AMAZING offer for a career move to Austin, TX. So I looked at him & said, “Well I guess we’re moving to Austin! When we move, I really want to try to give this cake thing a try as a full-time career. Will you support me while I get it off the ground?” He said he would, & within weeks of our move to Austin, I launched Cakes ROCK!!! again in Austin, in my home kitchen. The very first week I got 4 orders, & it just took off from there. I’ve been fortunate to compete on Food Network’s Halloween Wars, Netflix Sugar Rush, and Cake Hunters on the Cooking Channel. I’ve been featured in local, national, and international magazines.
This time we were LOOKING for a home with a kitchen I could work out of, but despite that, within 3 years I needed to find a commercial kitchen. I had 3 employees in my home & things were very cramped, plus we had very little capacity & needed commercial-size ovens, mixers, etc. I first moved into a shared commercial space, & then into my very own bakery in December of 2017.
We have continued to grow tremendously, even during Covid, & I just now moved into a much larger space to expand. The former space was tiny & didn’t allow for any retail space for ready to go items, so we’re hoping to add that on very soon, in addition to expanding our custom cake capacity. Plus I now have a team of 11, so we were just on top of each other when trying to work, so we desperately needed more space for everyone to work efficiently.
Christy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I absolutely love food, and love to cook and bake.
I’ve also been a sports fanatic since I could walk. I was born in Athens Georgia and raised as a proud Georgia Bulldog. GO DAWGS! In high school I played everything but football because they wouldn’t let me. I was All-State in basketball and softball, and in my Junior and Senior years the overall Georgia high school state track champion. I was also horse crazy, and won many awards on my beautiful bay Quarter horse/Thoroughbred named “Bits Misty Bee“, including Miss Rodeo Georgia 1988 title. When I went to college, I missed playing sports tremendously, and I fell in love with bodybuilding as a substitute. I competed for years with my biggest win being the 2010 NPC Masters National Figure Champion. You can still find me almost every morning in the weight section at Gold’s Gym lifting heavy things!
It seems odd that an athlete would also be a baker, but I think it tremendously influences and helps me. I am very focused on health and fitness, and even though cake will never be healthy, it doesn’t have to be toxic! I am a huge stickler for only using the best ingredients, real butter, real organic fruits and never using any kind of shortening, mixes, chemicals, or fake flavorings. Everything is made from scratch and the quality and taste of our cakes and desserts are worth it!
My inspiration to get into cake sculpting was Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes. I would watch those TV shows and I just knew I could do that too! Little did I know that one day I would end up on television myself sculpting cakes! I’ve been fortunate to compete on Food Network’s Halloween Wars, Netflix Sugar Rush, and Cake Hunters on the Cooking Channel. I’ve been featured in local, national, and international magazines. I’ve studied under the best cake sculptors in the world, and feel so fortunate to have learned so many incredible techniques from them that I’ve combined into my own style.
A big advantage I have in cake sculpting is my background in farming and construction. My parents and grandparents had a large cattle farm and sawmill. I was the oldest and had no brothers. I just have one wonderful little sister. So guess who got to do all the farm work? They didn’t care if I was just a little girl, the farm work needed to be done! So by the time I was 5 or 6 years old I was working on the sawmill yard, and helping build fences, haul hay, drive tractors, and do all the other farm work. I absolutely loved it. I still do. And I’m so grateful that I learned that I was strong and capable of doing anything I wanted to do from the time I was a child.
I learned how to build things and I love power tools. I learned a love of gardening from my mother, and actually had my own landscaping and garden design company in Knoxville Tennessee, in the late 1900s haha, but when I moved to South Carolina in the early 2000s I realized you couldn’t ‘move’ a landscaping company, so I sold it, and I became a real estate agent and a partner in a residential construction company. Building the cake structures can be complicated. I always say the best cakes start at the hardware store! I’m fortunate to have the background that allows me to be able to figure out how to do all that. I have a BBA in accounting and an MBA in Marketing from my beloved University of Georgia, but if I’d known then what I know now I would have gotten a degree in Architectural Engineering, because who would have guessed it would come in so handy in creating cakes?
Cakes ROCK!!! has grown beyond my wildest dreams and continues to grow. From starting by myself in my own kitchen, it’s grown to a team of 11 incredible artists, bakers, and our invaluable Client Experience team. One of our biggest problems right now is that we have more orders than we can fulfill and we are forced to turn down many that we just didn’t have the physical space and bandwidth to take on. Finding this amazing larger space enables us to not only take on many more custom orders, but also add in a retail and ‘short notice’ component that we did not have room for. We are usually booked several weeks in advance, especially during the crazy busy wedding seasons of April through early June, and September through mid- December.
If there’s one thing that sets us apart, it’s that our cakes taste every bit as amazing as they look. There seems to be a myth out there that beautiful and sculpted cakes don’t taste good. That couldn’t be further from the truth!
My absolute favorite thing in the world is when our clients cut into a cake that people don’t even think is a cake, and then they are just shocked by how delicious it is! People always ask if it kills me to see our cakes cut and eaten after spending several days of work on them, and no it doesn’t! It’s my favorite part!
What we create is not just cake. It is art. When you order a cake from us, it’s much like you’re commissioning a custom sculpture or portrait. It is a work of art, custom created just for you or your loved one
Cake = love. The most momentous occasions in life have a cake as the centerpiece. And every single occasion where there is cake, it’s because someone is loved! Whether it’s a birthday, anniversary, baby shower, wedding, or even a celebration of life, the cake is a symbol of love. So I am lucky to be in the love business, and creating love every single day! And everyone on my incredible team loves it as much as I do.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I think our biggest example of resilience is when we literally almost lost our whole bakery, because the restaurant next door to us caught on fire. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2021. Nobody was in the restaurant, but an electrical issue sparked a fire in their storage room, which had lots of oil and flammable things in it, so it caught up quickly, at 4:30 in the morning. Fortunately, our wonderful groundskeeper had just arrived on site as he liked to get started early, and he saw the smoke. The fire department is only 2 minutes away so they were there immediately.
They were able to put the fire out and save the building. But the fire had come through the roof so when they put it out with the hoses, it flooded our bakery, collapsing part of the ceiling. We were very lucky that most of the damage was in the front of the bakery, where we have our office and client consultation area, and the damage in the actual kitchen part wasn’t nearly as bad. The disaster remediation company that had arrived onsite already jumped into action removing the water and starting to clean it up. The whole ceiling had to come down and be replaced. The health inspector from the city of Austin was onsite and said if we could get the ceiling replaced and our water heater fixed from where it had shorted out in the flood, then we could reopen. I ran out and bought new ceiling tiles, and the workers took down our current ceiling.
It’s an old building and oh the mess when that ceiling came down was awful. The workers put on hazmat suits that looked that they were cleaning up nuclear waste. They got the new ceiling back up and started helping us clean everything. Literally everything in the kitchen was covered in dirt and mess. Every single item had to be washed. Every single tool had to be cleaned. The remediation company helped all day on Tuesday, but on Wednesday we were just left to fend for ourselves. My team got there early and we just started cleaning like crazy! By that afternoon I was able to get the health department there to inspect it, and he gave us the go-ahead.
The front was still an absolute disaster, including the bathroom which was rendered useless, so we just sealed it off with plastic and worked in the back, and our kind landlord let us use the restroom in one of the vacant spaces for a few days. We all worked crazy hours to get the cakes done by their due dates, most of them Saturday, thank goodness. I did let a couple of the wedding planners know what had happened and kept them updated, but not one single couple even knew we had an issue. Every single wedding cake was delivered on time, and in perfect condition. The only cake we lost that week was a big crazy sculpted dummy cake that with the setbacks I could just couldn’t get it done and in the humid conditions it collapsed. I refunded that one to a very kind and understanding client, who was absolutely thrilled with the ‘real’ cake we had made for the party. So they still had a wonderful cake, just not the additional crazy sculpture that was supposed to be a decorative centerpiece.
I am SO PROUD that we pulled through without bailing on any of our clients. My team was just amazing at how they all pulled together, buckled down to work in TERRIBLE conditions, and just got it done. We get emails and phone calls almost every week from people who say their cake person has flaked on them and now they desperately need a cake in just a couple days. That always baffles me it happens so often. We didn’t bail on a single client despite a fire and flood! Our clients come first and we will move heaven and earth to ensure we deliver their cakes on time and exceed their expectations.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I absolutely love marketing! I have an MBA in Marketing from the University of Georgia, and it’s always been something I’m very interested in. But when you go through an MBA program at a college, all they are really interested in teaching you is how to work for some big corporation. They teach you the big overall principles of marketing like Reach and Frequency, and how to apply them to buying media if you’re working for say, McDonald’s and have millions of dollars in advertising budgets to spend. Also I got my MBA back in 1993 when we didn’t even HAVE internet or social media yet, so none of that was part of the curriculum!
When I moved to South Carolina in 2001, I became a real estate agent. I chose to attend a seminar by an amazing company called Hobbs and Herder. It was a life-changing event for me. They specialized in real estate agents, and taught you how to take those big grand marketing principles, and apply it to a small, one-person business on a local level, with a limited budget. What they were saying immediately resonated with me due to my background, and I took off with it. Within a couple years I was one of the top agents in the whole state and was building a team. Then the crash of 2008 hit and real estate died. At least in South Carolina, it died and stayed dead. So that’s when I opened a personal training gym, and started doing the cakes on the side for fun, not realizing what was about to happen with my cake business!
When I really got serious about my cake business after moving to Austin, I applied all of the principles I had used to grow my real estate business and found that they translated beautifully. Again, my time in real estate was before the advent of most social media, so we were forced to buy printed advertisement and spend lots of money. The internet, social media, and new real estate focused websites changed all that.
When I moved to Austin, I had never even visited the city before and didn’t know a soul. I was literally launching from Square One in a new place with no resources or connections. But I did have my previous cakes I had made while in South Carolina to leverage. So I began by posting my cakes in our neighborhood Facebook pages–VERY targeted to literally the neighborhood I lived in, which was huge and affluent so a perfect market. That took off very quickly. One of the main benefits of social media is it gives ‘social proof’ and visual credibility. I joined every Facebook page I could in the local community and built a presence there. At the time, I didn’t even have a website yet.
Being a home baker, at first I couldn’t get listed in Google Business Pages because I didn’t want to put my home address out on the internet for anyone to know, and obviously, it wasn’t a commercial address. So I focused on Facebook and Instagram. As soon as I moved to the shared commercial kitchen, I opened my Google Business Page and had a website built that focused on optimizing local search results, especially the Google Map which is invaluable for intensely local products like ours.
Instagram, for cake artists and creatives like me that produce a visual product, is by far the number one social media tool right now. Reels are becoming super important, as well as stories and posts. And Instagram is very proactive about copying other social media sites‘ successful tools and offering those tools to its users as well.
Local Google searches are by far our number one source of internet leads, with Instagram second. Facebook is still valuable but really hard to get any reach anymore.
I also cannot stress this enough. GET OUT AND NETWORK WITH REAL PEOPLE! I joined a very successful BNI group, the local chambers of commerce, and the best thing I did was join ILEA–the International Live Events Association. Because of my focus on wedding cakes, the BEST source of referrals are wedding venues and event planners, as well as other fellow event vendors, and ILEA is ALL about event vendors exclusively. You MUST create relationships with the best vendors in your area who work the same type of clients, and earn their trust and respect. Refer business to THEM every chance you get! They will remember your kindness and refer you when they have someone ask them about your service. Creating personal relationships in your industry and community is the REAL social media!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.CakesRockAustinTX.com
- Instagram: www.Instagram.com/CakesRockTX
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/CakesRock
- Twitter: @CakesRockTX
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CakesROCKAustin
Image Credits
Addison Studios