We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Samantha Miller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Samantha, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.
Family businesses can be both rewarding and challenging, as they come with their own set of dynamics that can greatly influence their success or failure. Me and my twin each have different strengths and succeed at different things in life. I tend to thrive on street-smarts and hands-on experience, while my twin excels in the realm of book smarts and academic excellence. Combining these qualities in a business context has proven success for us! I would also love to hand down the business to our children or other family members one day.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Samantha Miller and I am the founder and baker of The Toffee Twins. I started baking from an early age and never stopped. A show I was casting for got cancelled and I was out of a job. I found myself to be home all day and night trying to find the next show that would take me. I started fooling around in the kitchen with butter, sugar and chocolate and came up with this insane toffee recipe and created Milk Chocolate Potato Chip Toffee. I made way too much so I gave half of it to my sister to take with her to her work the next day. She came running home and said people want to buy this. I then started creating more toffee recipes and perfecting them. Once the recipes were in place, I had a few dreams about the name and The Toffee Twins was in business. We make one of a kind insane toffee with crazy delicious flavors like Milk Chocolate Potato Chip Toffee, Oreo Toffee, S’mores Toffee, Pretzel Coconut Toffee and more! Everything we do is custom from boxes and bags to extravagant one of a kind designs.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Our advice for starting a business on social media is to take it one day at a time. It’s a very slow process but worth it. It takes time to build your social media presence these days. When we started there was just Facebook. Now there are so many different outlets to spotlight your business. For us, we have gotten about 80% of our business from Instagram. We take the time to respond to each message and comment and really foster the relationships of the people who follow us and buy our product. People love to see photos of our toffee and we are here for it!
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Numerous friends and family members have generously contributed to every step of our journey. However, a pivotal factor that greatly bolstered our progress was active participation in business networking events. Establishing a connection with your local chamber of commerce is of paramount importance, as it provides invaluable insights into the businesses within your vicinity and facilitates crucial networking opportunities. We also try to go to as many women entrepreneurial events as well. It’s important to hear from other people just like us!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ToffeeTwins.com
- Instagram: @thetoffeetwins
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/thetoffeetwins
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-toffee-twins/
- Twitter: @thetoffeetwins
- Other: Tiktok: @thetoffeetwins
Image Credits
All photos taken by Samantha Miller