Tia’s Cakes & Pastries – baking business success

Tia Jackson has been working her recipe for success with Tia’s Cakes & Pastries for a couple of years, but now her small business is really starting to rise.

The 30-year-old Hyde Park resident has combined success in the baking industry with a knack for pleasing customers with custom cake designs, as well as pastries and cupcakes.

Tia’s Cakes & Pastries specializes in the kind of cakes you can find at weddings or special events. The options are mouthwatering, from basic flavors such as vanilla and chocolate to her signature collection featuring chocolate caramel, pineapple guava and apple pie. Other pastry offerings range from pies, brownies, and cookies to dessert specialties such as cake pops, chocolate covered strawberries and cake jars. Many of the cake flavors can be packed into bite-sized morsels, alongside their bigger, cupcake brethren.

Author: Lucas MulderTia Jackson founder and head chef of Tia’s Cakes & Pastries.

Jackson, who grew up in Hyde Park and Dorchester and learned to bake watching her mother and grandmother in the kitchen, says that she bakes all her goods from scratch and that the collaborative customer approach she takes affects flavor, as well as look and design.

She says her baking is inspired by the Southern and Caribbean flavors used by her mother, who grew up in South Carolina, and her grandmother, who is from Cuba.

You would think that in the baking business, taste would triumph above all else, but Jackson said that with custom cakes, look and design often mean more. But not so with Tia’s Cakes & Pastries — she wants her customers to have their cake and eat it too.

“It is hard to find a good bakery that makes things that look good and taste good. That is something that people are struggling to find,” Jackson added.

While her passion for making the best baked goods is evident, Jackson credits the current growth of the business to her realization that even that wasn’t enough. She knew that people liked her baked goods, but she needed a better business plan to go to the next level.

A 2008 graduate of Lasell College in Newton, Jackson studied fashion merchandising as an undergraduate, capping her Lasell studies with a master’s degree in marketing in 2009.

After graduating, she put her marketing expertise to work with jobs at Catholic Charities, the town of Westwood and, most recently, Nizhoni Health Systems. Throughout that time, she also worked nights and weekends for an event planning company called One Life Events, eventually becoming certified as an international event and wedding planner. Her creative impulse found expression as she started to experiment with cake making for One Life Events. In time, Jackson decided to focus on baking, in addition to her fulltime day job.

In the summer of 2012, she posted an online picture of one of her cake creations and was surprised to get several inquiries about making another one. As the number of inquiries grew, her reputation did, as well. That’s when she realized there might be a business in cake making.

“I just have kind of experimented as I went along and it has grown,” Jackson said. “My orders just kept increasing and increasing.”

By late 2014, Jackson — also a mother of two young children — just didn’t have enough time to manage her baking business and a fulltime job. She also realized that working out of her home wasn’t enough to truly succeed.

Armed with a $5,000 microloan from Accion, an organization that lends to small business, she turned to CommonWealth Kitchen in Dorchester, a food startup incubator that provides small businesses with kitchen and refrigerator space that can be rented only when used.

Jackson said that when she moved her baking operations there in February, her capacity to handle orders increased from roughly five to ten cakes per week. That’s what Tia’s Cakes & Pastries typically produces these days.

In addition to space and materials, Jackson took advantage of the CommonWealth Kitchen’s educational offerings on topics such as writing a business plan and handling company finances.

Her time there also has helped her develop a corporate catering business. She also was able to secure a deal with Savvor Restaurant and Lounge in Downtown Boston to provide selections for its dessert menu. Both her corporate catering and restaurant business continues to grow.

Last month Jackson made the biggest move of all. After securing another small business loan from Eastern Bank, she left her job at Nizhoni Health Systems to focus on her baking business fulltime.

The loan provides her with the working capital to really have a go at it.

Jackson is most encouraged by the growing corporate catering business. She hopes to expand into catering breakfast meetings by adding additional breakfast items to her menu, including pastries, muffins, scones and quiche.

Down the road, Jackson also hopes to move on from CommonWealth Kitchen into a local storefront location.

“This is just my stepping stone, because I do want to have a specialty bakery in the future,” she said.

“I want to make it last. I want to make it work. But it is just perseverance and working to make happen. … I am excited for what is to come in the future.”