Today we’d like to introduce you to Southern Girl Desserts.
We are proud to be Los Angeles’ first full-service southern-inspired bakery. As Floridians, we moved to Los Angeles to pursue careers in the entertainment industry but our connection to family and desserts of our childhood took us both into a totally different direction. In 2007, I (co-owner Catarah Coleman) founded Southern Girl Desserts in my apartment in Inglewood, CA. Co-owner Shoneji Robison joined the team just six months later and since then, we’ve been creating southern desserts for nearly 14 years. During the infancy of our business, we noticed that there weren’t a lot of southern dessert options outside of red velvet and peach cobbler here and there, but that was the extent of it. It was also the height of the cupcake boom. Our thought was to join the trend but create flavors that reminded us of home. We created flavors that would set us apart from our competition such as pecan pie, peach cobbler and our signature sweet potato pie cupcake. Early in our business, we competed on the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars three times. The third attempt, we won and that exposure catapulted our business to populariy. In the beginning of our business, it seemed easy. We had challenges here and there, but nothing too stressful.
However, the addition of employees and a brick and mortar in 2012 proved to be a challenge we had not experienced before and had to make many mistakes before we could get a full understanding and grip on how to manage these new responsibilities. Enrolling in educational opportunities like the Goldman Sach’s 10,000 Small Business Program and the UCLA MDE Program gave us the tools to overcome these challenges as well as finding mentors in our industry to give us the advice and point us into the right direction. In these 13+ years, we’ve learned a lot of lessons and have made a lot of mistakes. We are grateful that we’ve learned how to be kind to ourselves, every employee is different and you have to manage them accordingly, not to let everyone’s opinions take us off course, follow our gut, ask lots of questions, always have a plan and hire professionals that know more about a subject than we do. Surrounding ourselves with smart people has been the best decision we’ve ever made. What we’d like the world to know about our brand and story is that it was started to create generational wealth and to share our personal experiences with desserts and baking through our baked goods with others. We are a family-focused business with good intentions and a heart to serve and make people happy. At the end of the day, we just want to make our ancestors proud.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has NOT been a smooth road, but we didn’t expect it to be. We have made mistakes and have failed many times. We are human and we don’t always get it right. When starting Southern Girl Desserts neither of us had a business background. We knew how to bake, we knew what people would like and we knew it tasted good, but that was the extent. We had no idea the challenges of being an entrepreneur in the food business. The main struggle was finances. As we grew our business and took on the responsibility of a storefront and employees, we realized that it wasn’t just about baking but so much more we had to learn. We quickly realized that we couldn’t go to the bank and get a credit card or a loan for years, causing us to trust risky, high-interest loans that caused more grief than relief. Thank goodness we received our first-ever traditional loan from Opportunity Fund in 2015 which improved our business credit and gave us the capital and confidence we needed to keep going. Money will always be necessary in business but we also learned that it takes more than capital to build a trustworthy and competent business, it takes a village of people including employees, lawyers, mentors, family, friends and community to get you there. Most importantly, our vision has always been seen past the obstacles and because of that, we know we can get over that wall no matter how tall or slippery it may be.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Southern Girl Desserts is a southern inspired bakery located in the Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills District of Los Angeles. Since 2007 we have served the community made from scratch desserts including our peach cobbler, banana pudding, sweet potato cupcakes and lemon icebox pie. Our menu is comprised of over 50 dessert options that bring back nostalgia for so many. We are owned by two southern girls, Catarah (Green Cove Springs, FL) and Shoneji Robison (Sarasota, FL) we both attended the Florida A&M University, a premiere HBCU in Tallahassee, Florida. We are known for our sweet potato cupcakes which are now offered in Vegan and Gluten-Free options. We are unique from other bakeries because we are continually creating new southern inspired desserts and flavors that only two southern girls could create.
Our experience living in the south and learning from our grandmothers and aunts taught us how to make something out of nothing and always follow our gut. Doing those things have lead to us doing the right thing. We do our best to hire young people from the surrounding community who need a second chance at life! We don’t judge based on a person’s background or lack of experience, we give them the opportunity to prove we made the right decision to hire them and that makes us proud. We are also proud to grow a business our grandmother’s started so many years ago. We ship nationwide on Goldbelly and also provide corporate gifting.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The most important lesson we have learned on this amazing journey is that we can’t give up. If we would have given up in 2010 when we lost our first storefront, we would have not known how much we could accomplish. As tough as business and life may get, giving up is not an option because you’ll never reach success because you never tried.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.southerngirldesserts.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/southerngirldesserts
- Facebook: Facebook.com/southerngirldesserts
- Twitter: Twitter.com/dessertdivas
- Yelp: Yelp.com/southerngirldesserts
Image Credits:
Madworks Photography
