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

Melinda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

The craziest thing that started happening with my business were the “attacks” on my bakery variety boxes that we call “Trinity Treat Boxes!” We were shipping out variety boxes in quantities of 9, 12, 15 and 24 piece dessert boxes and we were proudly displayed our NEWEST logo stickers on the top o the boxes. The next thing we knew, as they grew to be wildly popular, they started coming up MISSING! Our customers were complaining that their orders were being tampered with i.e., some of the desserts missing from the box itself, empty boxes arriving and some not delivered at all! We were so so disappointed, but in order to remedy all of the complaints and filling out so many claims forms with the shipping company, we had to resort to shipping the Trinity Treat Boxes INSIDE a bigger box to maintain its excellence in taste and texture, and safety. We also decided to suspend using our beloved logo stickers until a later date in time. Talk about a CRAZY time, but all is well!

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

I have been baking since I was 9 years-old! That was 49 years ago! I started out baking my family’s birthday cakes from a box! I started receiving requests for old-fashioned cakes from “scratch” like German Chocolate and Caramel Cakes. As I took more baking classes, my skill set increased to more elaborately decorated cakes and specialty cupcakes. I then started accepting catering events which was a true stretch for me since my speciality is desserts. I always try to meet or exceed the vision that the client has given me for their special events. I take every order as a personal commitment to the excellence that I operate in at all times. I feel that each customer, no matter how small or big the order may be, deserves my BEST effort! If there is something that the customer feels did not meet their expectations, we are determined to make it right for them. We will issue them a gift card for their inconvenience or redo the order for them. I thank God that this is a very rare occurrence at my bakery. My biggest commitment to my craft is making sure each client receives STELLAR customer service!

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

In 2020, during the time that COVID was running rampant throughout the US, a lot of my customers felt safer purchasing their baked goods from the large scale companies like Wal-Mart, Wegmans and Costco. I was devastated to say the least. These were clients that I had become accustomed to serving for many years. I never thought something like that would so greatly affect my loyal business clients remaining active in purchasing my bakery goods. I had to pivot quickly to say the least. So I found myself moving to Myrtle Beach, SC to fulfill and ministry assignment for the Lord. I revamped my business there to include shipping NATIONWIDE! It was a huge challenge to learn how to ship our bakery good and keep them fresh, the correct temperature and within a reasonable timeframe without utilizing high shipping fees to achieve this. I watched many tutorials on YouTube to perfect our methods of shipping our products safely and efficiently with great results! Now we do not have to rely on delivering the bakery items ourselves which is a huge load of responsibility off of our shoulders at this point. This frees up our time to do important marketing campaigns and test new recipes for sale. What looked like the end was really a great new beginning for our small bakery.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The story of how I built my social media presence is quite funny. I was extremely reluctant to be in front of the camera; however, all 3 of my mentors kept giving me the same advice, bake in front of the camera! I was extremely shy and I did not want to do it. It took me almost 3 years to get in front of the camera on Facebook. Once I started getting into a good rhythm of baking the cakes and engaging the audience, I realized I was baking too many treats for us to be able to sell them fast enough. So I decided that I would start a “Pound Cake” series and bake all types of pound cakes and at the end of the video, I would have my daughter to select a name from the live feed and we would ship the day’s special pound cake out to the person absolutely for FREE! Little did I know how much people LOVE pound cake and especially FREE pound cake! LOL! So the next thing we knew, there were 18,000+ followers on Facebook! Who knew! Really! We surely did not. The worst thing I did was listen to a “friend” who said that I had given out enough free pound cakes and I needed to move to another marketing campaign. Well, I can tell you right now, nothing has worked better than giving away the free pound cake series!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sweetcreationsbymelinda.com
• Instagram: sweetcreationsbymelinda
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sweetcreationsbymelindag
• Youtube: @melindagrayson2977
• Other: TikTok: @sweet.creations.b4

Image Credits

MELINDA GRAYSON