Today we’d like to introduce you to Verena Velasco.
Hi Verena, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started decorating cookies a few years after the birth of my second child. I had a long history of decorating cakes, and while I loved working with sugar, I found cakes to be very stressful, time-consuming and required a lot of space. When I found someone teaching cookie decorating locally, I signed up immediately. My husband watched our kids. I was instantly obsessed with cookie decorating. I haven’t decorated a cake since then. From there, I started to teach cookie decorating classes and sell supplies online.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s been a long journey to build our business. We currently have a storefront in Glendale, where we sell supplies for the sugar arts and teach cookie decorating classes. Cookie decorating wasn’t nearly as popular when I first started teaching classes. In addition, our social media following was very small. To market our classes, we used to hang signs in cafes around the city, around the rose bowl and other surrounding areas. A combination of factors, including the pandemic and social media, really helped to bring the sugar arts, including cookie decorating into demand. We sold a lot of supplies online during the pandemic and taught a lot of online classes. We were quite successful and wanted to pull the business out of our home. It was in the middle of 2021 that we started more actively looking for a storefront. We found a great place in October of 2021, and we decided to go for it. Since then, we have been providing the best supplies, tools, ingredients, classes to our local and online community of cookie decorators, cake decorators and chocolatiers.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
It was early in my cookie decorating career, and I mean the second time I ever decorated cookies, that I was drawn to airbrushing. I found mixing icing colors very tedious. I learned that I could flood the cookies and airbrush all the colors on. I tend to be more of a technical person, so the airbrush and I got along famously! I love to mix and layer colors using my airbrush. And as a matter of fact, we developed our own brand of airbrush as our first original product pretty early on. We now have an entire line of decorating supplies that are custom products, but our airbrush is still the apple of my eye!
What are your plans for the future?
We have huge plans for the future. By popular request, we would like to open more locations in other parts of California. We would like to get a warehouse and move our online operations out of the storefront now that we’ve attracted more locals. We currently run the online sales and local sales out of the same building. We’d like to expand the wholesale side of our business. A warehouse would also be conducive to more wholesale accounts. We want to hire more retail clerks, so we can extend our retail hours. To be honest, there is no shortage of future plans. It’s just a matter of implementing them.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.designercookiesla.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designer_cookies/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/designercookies
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@designercookies6325
