We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Brader. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Jennifer , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

I absolutely love to take vacations and travel with my family. I don’t get the opportunity to do so nearly as much as I would like, however. Vacations are a big challenge as a small business owner. We don’t have a large team to manage orders and take care of administrative work to enable time away from the bakery so it takes a good bit of planning. We schedule our time off many months in advance and block dates out on our calendar. While we are away, I still take some time to respond to emails and client inquiries when I get the chance, so it’s never a full fledged getaway from work, but for now, it works for us.

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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?

Zell’s Cottage Bakery is a luxury, made-from-scratch cottage food bakery based in Gainesville, GA. Not only do we create stunning showstopper tiered cakes, personalized celebration cakes, and a full array of decadent desserts, but we also create some of the coolest 3D sculpted and realistic cakes like our epic Chick-fil-a Chicken Sandwich Cake.

We’re also known for creating some very unique flavor combinations. Six years ago we hosted our first Cupcake & Beer Pairing at Downtown Drafts, a local taproom in Gainesville, GA. This blossomed into an incredible partnership with Liquid Nation Brewing (formerly Left Nut Brewing) in Gainesville, GA who we have spent the last 5 years collaborating with and have recently done the same with NoFo Brewing Co in Cumming, GA and Hits Taproom in Braselton, GA. These events have quickly become one of my favorite aspects in my baking career, allowing me fully express my creativity through fun flavor combinations. I’ve created pairings that include cupcake flavors such as Smoked Salmon, Blue Cheese & Fig, Meat & Potatoes, Hot Dog, Hot Wing, Buttered Popcorn, White Sangria and Rosemary Honey Goat Cheese. They’re completely unexpected flavors but they absolutely work and are always a big hit and bring a HUGE crowd! We look forward to expanding this concept to other breweries, wineries and distilleries in the near future.

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Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Networking, networking, networking! For years I was terrified to network. I don’t know why. I didn’t have confidence in myself. I didn’t know how to just start talking to people about my business. As much as my parents reminded me of how chatty I was in school, I never felt comfortable talking to people in line at the grocery store or going to networking events. I had to force myself to break out of that shell. It was very uncomfortable for quite some time, but it absolutely paid off. When we moved to Gainesville, I knew very few people. At our first local bridal show, another baker came to my booth and introduced herself to me. She was so welcoming and helpful. She suggested local Facebook groups to join. It was not like anything I had ever experienced. Through her, I did join several of the groups, shared my work on those pages and was invited to be a part of several photoshoots. I realized that networking with fellow vendors was key to building a successful business in our industry. Through word of mouth, social media tags and vendor referrals, my little business started to grow. Now, people know who we are. It’s crazy to think that someone walking down the street may be following our page. It’s very surreal. We have thousands of followers and our calendar is full. We are truly blessed for amazing clients and “friendors”. And that fellow baker that helped our journey begin just opened her storefront bakery and I couldn’t be more excited for her. We have truly grown on the mentality of “community over competition” and we’re sticking to it!

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Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Today’s generation resorts to social media for everything. Whether it’s to learn about the latest trends, find a new restaurant or read product/business reviews. I find myself doing the same daily. Many of our client inquiries come from instagram and Facebook and we’re here for it. Social media pages offer potential clients a peek into your product photos, community comments as well as reviews. I find it’s a lot more direct than users going through numerous websites looking for the same information. While we do our best to keep up with the demand of Facebook and instagram posts, we haven’t quite had the time to dabble with TikTok but plan to in the near future.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ZellsCottageBakery.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/ZellsCottageBakery
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/ZellsCottageBakery

Image Credits
Tags Photography (branding photos with me in them) Bonnie Blu (black cake) Applehead Design Photography (brown cake)