Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalie Davis.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I got started as a baker about 20 years ago. I had just moved to a new town and needed a job and saw a sign on the door of the grocery store that they were hiring. This was in the days where you could still walk in to a place and ask to talk to a manager about a job. Which is what I did and she said “Sure! Where do you want to work?” I said it didn’t matter so she stuck me in the bakery. The manager gave me about a 10 minute lesson on cake decorating and had me give it a try and surprisingly I was really good. It was just a super market bakery so the designs were nothing extravagant but I really enjoyed it and baking became my job for about the next 8 years or so at various bakeries. I went into nursing about 10 years ago but still kept my hand in baking for friends and family and took it on as a hobby. After being an ICU nurse all through the Covid years and feeling like I needed a change I attempted a failed bid at law school (I started attending MSU college of law on a full scholarship but ended up dropping out after realizing I felt more useful in the nursing world). After all this, I really needed a breather. I took some time off from my “real job” in 2024 to try to give my baking business, Sugar Spark Bakery, a real go. While it did not turn into the full time gig I had hoped for and I have since returned to nursing while maintaining a custom order baking business, being able to dedicate so much time to baking really opened up a huge creative avenue for me that I never saw it as before. It can really be an art form and I am the type of person who always needs a project so it’s really fun to have this outlet as a way to decompress and develop my artistic skills. Painting, sculpting, and color theory are all big parts of cookie and cake decorating.
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 smooth. I didn’t realize I was getting in to such an over saturated market. I thought I would just throw up a website and social media page and a few pictures of my work and the rest would be history. I signed up for every craft show and farmers market and vendor event I could just about every weekend for the first 6 months and almost everyone was a total flop. For some reason I just never sold very much. Once I sat there for 2 hours at a SUPER busy market and didn’t make single sale. I packed up early and cried all the way home. And my social media presence wasn’t growing and my calendar wasn’t fully booked for months on end like I thought it would be. It felt like I had imposter syndrome. Just felt totally inadequate and self-doubting and like I wasn’t good enough to make people want what I made.
My social media still hasn’t grown and my calendar still isn’t booked. It is HARD growing a business and getting traction and visibility. But I have grown a small but mighty client base who really appreciates the ART form of my baking and trusts me with their visions for whatever their occasions are and that feels really special. I would love to have my calendar booked solid for months but having the time to create highly detailed, bespoke custom edible art and building my passion for it instead of just cranking out order after order on a tight schedule has been a nice discovery.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I would say my specialty I am known for is my realistic butter cream floral cakes and my sugar cookie art. I really pay attention to details and put a lot of time into figuring out and developing the techniques to achieve certain looks. Especially when a lot of “inspo” pics I recieve are AI and not made by a human hand. I love finding ways to make AI into the human hand. It seems like so much of life is the opposite of that these days. We want to make everything in the human world into something we can feed into chat gpt for answers. I want to do the opposite. I like an analog life. My husband thinks I am nuts and should just throw some icing on and be done with it because they are “just cookies” but to me they are my form of artistic expression. I have also for some reason become the go to lady for painting pet portraits on cookies.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Accomplishment and learning. Like I said I always need a project. I can’t just sit and watch TV every night or lay on he couch all weekend. I have to be doing something constructive. Making something or fixing something or taking an online class (OMG I take so many online classes) to learn how to make or fix something. I paint my house, I do wood working and refinishing. I do my own car repairs. I briefly went to Delta for the auto repair program and got my mechanic trainee license but have never used it professionally. Of course I do my cookie art. I come from a long line of very hard working hands on women. I grew up watching my great grandmother grow a garden and can food and knit and sew. She was never at idle. Her daughter, my grandmother is an amazing cook and baker and my mother is a very hard worker as well and I think I have all those traits in my blood too. So accomplishing tasks and learning new skills makes me happy.
Pricing:
- Decorated cookies $60 to $100 per dozen
- Cakes start at $6/serving
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sugarsparkbakery.com
- Facebook: Sugar spark bakery
