The Surprise Email

A few weeks after the Ceramic Art London exhibition, I received an email from the Editor of Homes & Gardens magazine.  She had been a guest at the CAL exhibition, and had taken a photo of my cakes, and had contacted another business thinking my designs might suit their brand, and wanted to ask my permission to pass on my contact details to them.

Talk about out of the blue.  This I had never anticipated, at least not so early on in the business.  I know I've been baking for absolutely years, and making cakes for other people, but to do it for a business takes it to a whole new level.

So I received a lovely email from a lady at a high end soft furnishings and perfume store, who was interested in commissioning some of my 'gilded' cupcakes for a press launch they were holding in May, at their flagship store in Marylebone, London. to launch the updated packaging of one of their classic fragrances.

I suggested that I make them some samples, to have a look at what I did, and to give them a chance to tweak my designs.  I delivered these the following week, by hand, to their HQ in the W. Midlands.

They were delighted with the cakes, and asked me to provide packaging too.

The individual packaging they wanted was in the style of a transparent cube, with a pink base and holder.  The cakes were going to be on display for the launch, and then put in each cube, to be sent out in goodie bags for each member of the invited press.

The hardest part of this commission was finding the packaging.  You have no idea how hard it is to find such a simple package.  I was able to find the cubes, but the pink base was frankly impossible to track down in the UK, and the overseas stockists weren't prepared to ship it to me.

In times like this, you need to get creative, and it occurred to me that we could just try to make the inserts, instead of buying them readymade.

A trip to a local hobby store secured some sheets of thick grade, pink card stock, and a clever cutting tool like this one by EK Success

I designed a template, and we (dear boyfriend and I) made the box inserts.  A resounding success story, to a problem that had kept me awake for too many nights.

We delivered them, on time, to London, and treated ourselves to a well-earned coffee in a cute little Italian  cafe  just down the road from the store on Wigmore St.

Here's a picture the organiser of the launch sent me of their evening's soiree, and I got a hand written letter from their director saying how perfect the cakes had been a week later.

Don't the bottles and cakes just go perfectly together?