We were lucky to catch up with Samantha Riley & Bethany Disque recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Samantha & Bethany, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
BITE was born in 2019 when two cousins, B + Sam, were both individually the next step professionally. A friend who was moving gave B a mini donut maker and one afternoon they decided to make 100 mini donuts just for fun. After giving away these treats to friends and co-workers, people started to ask if they could purchase them for kids birthdays or office parties. We both grew up baking with our grandmother and always loved desserts, but Sam was working in marketing and B was working in operations. This experience ended up being pivotal in the early success of BITE. We started to get busy and caught the attention of the Broadway community early on due to our easy customizations. People love our product because it’s different from other dessert options on the market and there really isn’t much like it. That first year we delivered about 10,000 mini donuts to anyone who would take them in New York City. Now in 2022, we delivered over 100,000 mini donuts to our fans in NYC and are on track to expand into shipments to the masses next year.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We make adorable mini donuts with delicious flavors! We’re run by two Queer cousins! We’re silly and creative and we work hard but don’t take ourselves too seriously! We’re the Home of The Gay Donut!
People know us and know what we believe in and they can feel our personality come through in our bakes and brand. We’re not afraid to lead with our own voices and be really candid about who we are and where we’re at. So in addition to receiving a really stunning spread of delicious mini donuts, they know they’re also supporting a small family-owned, queer run, female identifying business that’s doing some big exciting things and giving back to their community.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
When we first started in 2019, Sam was working in freelance and could immediately commit to squeezing Bite in full-time. B was working at SoulCycle and was able to quit and become a full-time business owner after 4 months. At the time, we were booming with huge catering gigs at Google, the NBA, and movie and Broadway sets.
Obviously we never anticipated that in just a few short months a pandemic would cancel all events, thus the catering economy. We were living together in Brooklyn with all of our donut stuff and had no idea what to do. So we made donuts and delivered them to our friends in our Mini Cooper. We started to develop our custom shipment boxes and our website. We ran out of money.
BITE wouldn’t have survived without our successful Kickstarter in 2021. This allowed us to print our custom boxes, hire help, grow into (reopened) events, and move into a shared kitchen space in 2022. Our entire community rallied around us and told us not to give up – to keep pushing. They believed in us when the pandemic almost took our business away and we almost lost our dream. When things are hard, we remember how much faith people put into us and our silly donut business even when things were impossible.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
We’re cousins! We’re technically cousins, roommates, business partners, and best friends (most days). We even had our Home Processors License until (VERY!) recently, so we were actually making all of our donuts out of our tiny Brooklyn apartment. Being all of these things to each other is – intense – but there’s no other person who we could trust to pull it off. It’s been a huge exercise in boundaries and communication that have allowed us both to grow as people, in general, in addition to business owners.
Contact Info:
- Website: bitebkln.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/bitebkln
- Facebook: facebook.com/bitebkln
Image Credits
@bitebkln