We caught up with the brilliant and insightful MoNique Ivory a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

MoNique, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Well like so many others my husband and I spent a lot of time with our grandmothers. Him with his great grandmother, Miss Agnes and myself, with my grandmother Gladys B. We love to be in the kitchen with them to watch them do their magic.  We decided to change our name from Grace and Glory Sweet Treats and we wanted something that reminded us of them & the also the song Grandma’s Hands had a little to do with it too.  So that was our new name Grandma’s Hands, a reminder that your grandmother’s hands are always in everything we do.  We also adjusted the spelling of grandma to what my husband because he actually called his great grandma “gramma”. Sweetery is a great ending to a new beginning.

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

In 2008 our journey started with (My husband Bernard) he was and came up with the idea for a banana pudding cheesecake.  Around 2 years later, I started making and creating cupcakes for our sons’ class events and over time the community gave me the name Cup Cake Lady. My passion for baking grew into layer cakes then continued into celebration cakes. We also began to donate cupcakes and cookies to various community events for children.

One year during my furlough, I decided to make cinnamon rolls after, my husband told me that his grandma used to make them for his birthday and that he always looked forward to them.

This sparked a brainstorming, and as a result I spent a lot of time developing my own special cinnamon roll recipe. and he created a beautiful glaze to pair with the roll, in which we call it the The Good-Good.

During my downtime, we also decided to focus on making more authentic southern desserts, like our authentic southern banana pudding, red velvet chess, red velvet cake, pound cake, and peach cobblers and some with our own twist.  Since baking has always brought me a lot peace & joy.  So, when anyone taste our food and then they say… “I haven’t tasted anything like this since my grandmother used to make it for me”.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We send text message blast out once a month, & we also have a newsletter that reaches our clients once a month . Social Media has also assisted with keeping our clients up today with any current news that has not be reached by either text message or email.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Since my job kept furloughing,  This gave me the opportunity to change to the way I thought about being an entrepreneur.  If I am my own boss, then I wouldn’t have to be furloughed by corporation.

The following year a country we had pandemic, and this allowed me to restructure the business to single serve and individual desserts so that my business would continue to grow and allowed me to leave my job.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://grammas-hands.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grammas_hands/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/grandmashands1208

Image Credits
@culinaryengineer126 Bernard Ivory