Amy Hilliard
Finding Comfort in the Cake
May 7, 2007 | by brett | Permalink
We met up with Amy in her Southside Chicago loft, to hear her story of how she made a leap of faith from the security of Corporate America, to the exhilarating yet exhausting world of entrepreneurship. While we devoured the best pound cake known to man, the warm and collected Amy relived the events that led to her following her passion, and the opening of her business Comfort Cake®.
Pound cake is Amy’s favorite dessert, and she has been making it forever. She would bring it to neighborhood bake sales, family dinners, and dinner parties. Her pound cake became an instant favorite with guests, and the ongoing joke became that if Amy couldn’t make the party, then her cake would just have to take her place.
Through her twenty years of marketing experience with companies such as Pillsbury, Gillette, and L’Oreal, Amy could smell a business opportunity when there was one. And with the overwhelming positive response to her pound cake creations, the scent she smelt was stronger than her famous “Awesome Almond” cake fresh out of the oven.
“I’m a marketer by nature, and I said to myself if one more person tells me that I should put this on the market, I’m going to do it. So I brought my cake to a neighborhood block party, and this woman tasted it and turned to me and said “you have a million dollar idea.” I said to myself, that’s it, that was the last one, I’m going to do it. And that’s when I decided to take the plunge and go forward with the idea.”
While she had mentally made the decision to pursue her passion, the fact was that she was still at L’Oreal and spare time was something that was hard to come by. She was heading up a marketing department with twelve people and over a hundred SKU’s, yet still had the desire to open a business for herself and her family. To create the spare time, she hired a consultant to write the business plan, which proved to be much easier for her to edit the plan instead of write it.
The next step was to put a name to the company and its delicious product.
“At a dinner party one Christmas I brought a cake to a friends house, and a lot of my cakes have liquor glazes. Whether it was because I had done too much Christmas shopping that year or whatever, I guess I poured a little more liquor on the cake than usual. So when everyone was eating it they were asking what I put in the cake. They were like “Wow, this is a comfortable cake.” And they just kept saying that over and over, and again, my marketing nature kicked in and I thought to myself “Comfortable Cake. Comfort Cake. Comfort Cake! That’s it!” And that’s how it was born.”
While Amy was getting everything in order with Comfort Cake®, she was still at L’Oreal where she was faced with a career decision. She was given the opportunity to move up in the company by heading up the marketing for a certain division where she would continue to travel the world, grow with the products, and have the possibility of becoming president one day.
But Amy couldn’t do it. It quite simply wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was traveling too much as it was, she had two children at home, and figured that it was time to live her passion and not create new products for someone else. She said to herself that for once, she was going to launch a product for herself and her family and decided that now was the time to do it. So she resigned at the end of 2000, incorporated Comfort Cake® on February 15, 2001, and is celebrating her five year anniversary in 2006.
The first year of business proved to be a true test for Comfort Cake®. Through a prior business connection, Amy had established their first prospective customer in United Airlines, and Comfort Cake® proceeded to vigorously pursue this lead. They were given a proposal by United to have Comfort Cake® samples. The order sent Amy and her team scrambling to design a logo, find a kitchen to cook out of and produce samples of the delicious pound cake…all in a thirty day span!
Her team somehow threw everything together and pitched it all to United. United sampled some of her pound cake, and a few days later they phoned Amy to tell her they wanted Comfort Cake® to supply their deserts. As Amy learned United wanted 500,000 deserts over the phone, her high spirits and overwhelming excitement led her to accidentally hang up on her first customer without gathering any details to arrange the order! She quickly realized her mistake, hurriedly punched the digits back into her phone, and professionally worked out the necessary details. She was in business!
Now if we add up everything, you might be able to see where the story is headed. Amy started her business in early 2001, and booked United Airlines as a customer in the middle of 2001 for a substantial amount of orders. In August of 2001, Amy took a complete leap of faith by selling her home in order to gsin capital enough to produce the United deserts. She was unable to find a bank that would loan her money despite the enormous United order. And then, less than a month later, the United planes went down on September 11th.
Fearing the worst, Amy figured that the order would be cancelled for sure when she talked to United. And why wouldn’t they? They were dealing with the most drastic event of our time and fighting off financial troubles in a struggling economy. But the ironic part of the story here is that the name Amy created for her product at a Christmas party was also the saving grace for United. With such a frightening time for customers, United said that they thought it would be great to have her deserts on board because the word “comfort” on the box helped relieve the anxiety passengers faced when flying. They decided to not only keep her order, but to include the deserts on other flights as well. The experience taught Amy that nothing would phase her within the entrepreneurial adventure of Comfort Cake®, and that nothing is impossible.
Since 2001, Amy has led Comfort Cake® in the right direction. With the help of her longtime partner CJ, they have grown the business to handle the amount of high volume orders they receive while catering to their corporate clients, like United. The delicious taste of her cakes have garnered national attention from publications, ranging from Ebony to Entrepreneur. Also, the freedom of doing business for herself has allowed Amy to focus on the personal things that matter most, like raising her two children. Because Amy pursued her passion, it is safe to say that she found a “comfort in the cake”.
In her spare time, Amy often talks to students and offers guidance to those who wish to receive. Here is what she offered to us when we asked what she usually tells students:
“You are born knowing what your passion is, but you sometimes don’t recognize it. I tell anyone to look at what you love to do, that you would do for free….because those are the things that are inbred in your DNA that you should pursue. If you don’t like something and it irritates you, then that is your signal to do something about it. Take the time, don’t be so busy that you don’t know what you like. I think a lot of students today are so busy doing so many things that they don’t know what they truly like. They are doing things their parents like, or what their teachers want them to do, but we don’t spend enough time to figure out who you are, and finding what really thrills you.”
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May 25th, 2007
[…] that started with a small flicker of passion and fanned that fire into something greater. Amy Hilliard took a love for baking poundcakes and combined it with her marketing experience to create Comfort […]
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