For years, Lisa Ebbert’s family and friends told her she was “on to something.” Having cultivated her daughters, Kristen and Lauren, in the kitchen from a young age, they naturally accompanied her in launching their family-owned bakery business, 3 Sweet Girls Cakery.
Today, their two Cincinnati-area locations provide cupcakes, cookies and other treats for brides, birthdays, and other sweet occasions. But there’s more to this bakery business than cute cupcakes and sprinkles. Creativity, passion and family are the main ingredients to their success.
My Experience: Bringing Family to the Table
Lisa Ebbert and her daughters, Kristen and Lauren, are featured in our video series, “My Experience…. Bringing My Story to the Table.” The series explores the journeys, passions and experiences of food service professionals working in different environments. Following their story below, Lisa answered some of our questions about her experience having a family-owned bakery.
Q&A With Lisa Ebbert from 3 Sweet Girls Cakery
You and your daughters share a passion for baking. What is it about baking that you love?
Lisa Ebbert: “We enjoy baking because we have so many fond memories of times we have spent baking together as a family and with friends over the years. We also love the opportunity to share our creativity with others. It is always fun to see the joy it brings to people when we hand them their baked goods. We love that there are unlimited options for things we can create.”
Tell us about how your business, 3 Sweet Girls Cakery, started.
LE: “We started our business out of our home in 2010. We always loved baking and it got to the point that we were baking too much to eat ourselves and did not know what to do with everything. We started baking for friends and then their friends. We quickly outgrew doing this out of our home and decided to open the bakery on Montgomery Road in 2012.”
What are your most popular products and how do you keep up with demand?
LE: “Our most popular products are cakes, cupcakes, cake pops and cookies. Customers love that they can customize any of our products! We have gradually hired more and more staff to keep up with the demand. We have a great group of people who work well together and help each other out to get the job done!”
What are some new things you have planned for 2017?
LE: “We plan to expand into doing more wedding cakes in 2017 and customized specialty cakes. Our cookie sales are really growing and we plan to continue to expand in this area as well. As always we will be developing more new cupcake flavors.”
What does an owner need to know before they opened a second location?
LE: “Opening a second location is exciting and opens up your business to a whole new group of people who may not have been exposed to your product before! For us, our second location does not have a kitchen and acts only as a store front. This has required a lot of planning because we cannot bake at the second location and instead we transport more product as needed. Planning is key! There are a lot of things that need to remain consistent and accounted for from one location to the other(s). Having trustworthy employees cake make all the difference since you can’t be in two places at once!”
Who taught you baking and what is your favorite memory in the kitchen?
LE: “A lot of what I learned about baking was from my mother and grandmother. When I was young that was something we did for fun a lot. Some of my favorite memories are baking and decorating holiday cookies. This has been a tradition every year! We have been so busy decorating cookies at the store since we opened that we haven’t decorated them at home, so this year we decided to start a new tradition of experimenting with new cookie recipes together at home instead. There are so many fun recipes to try and create. We are all going to come up with a recipe we want to make.”
What are two baking tools you can’t live without?
LE: “Disposable pastry bags are so awesome. Not sure what we would do without them! Cake pop racks are something we could not live without and they are very hard to find.”
LE: “We started our business out of our home in 2010. We always loved baking and it got to the point that we were baking too much to eat ourselves and did not know what to do with everything. We started baking for friends and then their friends. We quickly outgrew doing this out of our home and decided to open the bakery on Montgomery Road in 2012.”