We were lucky to catch up with Jordan Rondel recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jordan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I think when the name of something is right, you know instantly that it is.

My dad is French, very French, and still speaks English with a very thick accent despite having lived in NZ for 35 years now. Back in 2010 when I was in the midst of founding my company, my dad was talking to me about how great I am at baking cakes and was encouraging me to turn this passion into a career. He was trying to say the work “cake” and “baker” in the same sentence and “Caker” (imagine in a French accent) somehow emerged. Something clicked in my brain and I just knew “The Caker” was it.

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 grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, but my obsession, and I mean obsession, for baking was born from spending my holidays in Paris with my grandparents. As I grew up the kitchen became my domain. Being completely self-taught meant I had the freedom to bend the rules and push the boundaries of traditional baking, and I developed a unique style of my own.

In 2010 when I was 21 I made a life-changing decision – I turned my passion into a career and officially became The Caker. I built a made-to-order cake business selling home-made style cakes that taste even better than they look – super moist, fudgey ones bursting with flavor. I became the go-to baker for fashion events, art gallery openings and high-end parties. I was making cakes cool again.

Eventually my sister Anouk came on as a co-owner and together, as a very dynamic duo, we became a force to be reckoned with. The bakery was (and still is) pumping out hundreds of cakes a day and I had several published books under my belt, but we wanted to provide great cakes to an even wider audience. So I spent the next few years developing a line of luxury make-at-home cake kits. Now Anouk and I live in Los Angeles, where we are continuing to expand the business.

As it turns out, I am still completely synonymous with The Caker – I am The Caker. This differentiates my brand from a lot of other food and CPG companies because there is someone behind it all to get to know, to talk to and relate to. This branding decision came very naturally but it’s perhaps the most important one and it has created its own revenue stream by way of brand partnerships, masterclasses, TV shows, public speaking events, shoots and podcasts.

Despite the success, failures, ebbs and flows over the last 13 years, I still love cake just as much as the day I first met it :)

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

​​I own The Caker with my sister, who is also my best friend, Anouk.

5 years into having started The Caker, the brand was extremely successful and revenue was growing every month, but I was also extremely burnt out from running every facet of the business – from the accounting to the marketing, to taking the trash out to innovating new products, and baking every single cake order myself. One day Anouk called me in tears. She was so over her job as a finance lawyer and asked in desperation if she could come and work with me. It was the quickest “yes” I’ve ever responded to anything.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Back in about 2017, The Caker bakery was essentially running itself and turning a great profit, but Anouk and I were hungry for more. We wanted to scale. So we began developing our line of luxury cake kits. Fast forward a couple of years and we went to market with our kits. Finally we had a way to service the whole country, not just our city, with incredible cakes. New Zealand had never seen a product like this so people were wary at first, but because The Caker brand was so incredibly strong and I was becoming a bit of a bit of a local celebrity, they eventually started selling like crazy.

So the natural progression from there was to think about international expansion. We set our sights on the USA, specifically LA.

End of 2019 Anouk and I officially got our visas and moved to LA together. We had already incorporated the LLC and had done plenty of groundwork on setting up a bakery and production for the cake kits, but we needed to be on the ground to make a lot of it happen. We only had the profits from the NZ business to use, which was quite terrifying but we had the mentality of “you gotta spend money to make money” so we did – we spent a lot of money.

Then, Covid…the world went into lock down and everything started to unravel. We couldn’t go home to check in on the NZ business so we were forced to leave the team there to their own vices and we wanted them to be comfortable and happy so we encouraged them to hire people. Meanwhile we were hurriedly trying to get the cake kits to market so at least we could have those to sell, since selling fresh cakes wasn’t an option anymore – nobody was having events or even really celebrating anything. It was such a dark time for everyone.

The NZ business began to suffer because we were majorly overstaffed and were dealing with constant and unpredictable closures and the relationship between Anouk and me was suffering too because of the immense pressure we were under. We both felt an unavoidable sense of failure – like we’d let our amazing, perfect business back home fall into ruins and our business in the US wasn’t doing anything other than act as a money pit. We both fell into a depression and took our pain out on each other. It was by far the hardest time of my life.

There were so many moments where I thought to myself, how nice would it be to just give up on the US expansion and go back home where it’s comfortable and easy and I know how to do it, where I’m respected and loved. But something deep inside me keeps pushing me to continue, because I am extremely resilient and I’m proud of that. Grit and determination is a key factor in being a successful entrepreneur and I’ve come too far to go backwards now – giving up is not an option.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.the-caker.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecaker/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-rondel/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2d7MJdXuBCbVGDAIoH3KGQ