A bespoke cake maker tells MARION SAUVEBOIS how her marketing experience is proving useful

LOOKING back, the seed for Corporate Cakery was sown from the moment her very first order pinged in her inbox.

But it would be two years before cakemaker Samantha Whittingham “stumbled upon” the niche which would propel her humble cottage industry into the uncharted territory of business-to-business (B2B) baking.

“Thinking about it now, it was obvious I should have done it all along,” she chuckles the 28-year-old. “From day one, my first order was from a business asking for their logo on cakes, but I was so caught up in trying to cater to everybody, I missed the signs right in front of me. But I suppose it had to be the right time for me to rebrand.”

The idea of edible advertising was hardly novel; and yet, as orders poured in from large corporations and small one-man-bands alike, clamouring for branded treats, she knew she had uncovered a virtually untapped market.

Like her nifty detour into corporate cakes, Samantha’s whole foray into baking was largely unplanned. In fact, she only dabbled as a post-graduation stopgap. Struggling to find that all-elusive first ‘real’ job at the outset of one the worst recessions in living memory, she decided to enrol in a sugar craft course in her native Bolton and master the fiddly art of fondant topping.

Long after she was offered her first graduate job in the Adver’s sales team, she continued to devote every spare moment to her nascent hobby. Her talents did not go unnoticed and her managers routinely roped her in to feed the troops and boost morale. Spurred on, In 2013, she started her own blog, Little Miss Cake Maker – an online ‘scrapbook’ to keep track of her numerous ideas and inspire other amateurs.

She left Swindon for a senior sales executive role in Bath and it is there she began to seriously ponder giving her baking lark a real go. In 2014, she handed in her notice and re-launched Little Miss Cake Maker as a ‘create your own’ online cupcake business.

“I got my first order through Twitter the second day after I left my job from someone I didn’t know and that really spurred me on, got me excited to carry on,” she beams. “The idea was that people could create and customise their own cake from scratch – and everything of course was made from natural ingredients, that’s always been really important to me. The customer could build everything on screen, upload pictures or logos.”

Her initial eagerness to cater to all and sundry and emotional investment in her start-up clouded her judgement, she admits. But not for long. Poring over her accounts only a few months into the venture nudged her back on track. The majority of her clients were businesses, all after a variation of the same: branded bakes bearing their logo. Corporate Cakery was born.

“The baking and advertising have come together naturally,” she adds thoughtfully.

“I think for a while I knew I had to evolve, but it’s hard, it was my baby,” adds Samantha, who moved the business into a unit at Cheney Manor last year. “It’s hard in the beginning, everything you create is part of you and it’s quite easy to feel everything personally. And the ‘little’ didn’t fit, I didn’t want to be a small business forever.”

By the start of 2016, she had registered Corporate Cakery as a limited company. Cakery – a newly-coined term to describe a cake shop – perfectly encapsulated her modern outlook and steered clear of the ‘bakery’ label, with its bread and pastries, all of which she does not offer.

While she still occasionally trades under Little Miss Cake Maker, the bulk of her work now focuses on her B2B concern. From the off, her marketing background gave her handy insights into clients’ needs and wants.

“I found it easier to communicate with business people – that was my comfort zone,” explains the 28-year-old from Middleleaze. “I suppose it’s backwards to what most cakemakers find normal. My work was business and marketing whereas most of them deal with brides and kids’ birthdays. It played to my strengths.”

Far from just printing company headers on icing toppers, true to its ‘create your own’ ethos, Corporate Cakery is keen to inject businesses’ brand and identity into every moist layer.

Just a few weeks ago, health-conscious Samantha incorporated a fitness centre’s flagship protein powder in her signature cupcake recipe.

Unlike so many die-hard traditionalists, the equal opportunist offers her range of vegan, gluten-free and allergy-friendly cakes at the same price as her regular bakes. Penalising customers for food intolerances or lifestyle choices is simply outrageous, she insists.

Her popular Fall In Vegan Love Cake was handpicked early this month to feature in Small Business Saturday’s online recipe book.

Now a no-nonsense businesswoman, the days of ‘one for me one of them’ are firmly behind her. The once gluttonous cakemaker admits churning out trays of sweets has all but spoiled her appetite for fluffy sponge and buttercream, beyond - and any indulgence nowadays is strictly in the name of quality control.

“I used to love eating cake, I used to,” she emphasises the past tense with a smile. “I remember people warning me in the beginning, ‘You won’t love cake forever’ and I said, ‘Yes I will’,” adds the two-time Wiltshire Business of the Year Awards finalist. “They say you can have too much of a good thing and I’ve learnt it’s true.”

This may be a blessing a disguise. As her online shop has boomed, drawing orders from the four corners of the region, she has had to rein in the starry-eyed foodie in her, and unleash the hard-nosed, business-savvy MD.

“It’s much better to wear my managing director hat most of the time rather than my cakemaker hat,” she concedes. “It’s gone full circle. I left a marketing job because the only way forward was to go into management and now I’m realising that filling all my time baking, there’s only so much I can do to make the business grow.

“Now I’m reconciled to the idea of being a business manager. And it’s quite exciting.”

With sheer tenacity, an unwavering work ethic and heaps of moreish recipes, she hopes to succeed in cornering the market – nationally.

“My ultimate goal is to be the market leader,” she says confidently. “At the moment there are not a lot of competitors, but I’m pretty sure it will change so I’ve always got to be one step ahead and do it to the best of my ability.

“My motto is pressure makes diamonds. If there are people nipping at my heels, trying to catch up to me, it will push me.”

To place an order or get in touch go www.corporatecakery.com, call 01793 987 070, email info@corporatecakery.com. Alternatively, visit the Corporate Cakery on Twitter and Facebook.