Today we’d like to introduce you to Tracey Noonan and Danielle Vilagie.
Wicked Good Cupcakes started in 2010 when Tracey and her daughter Danielle started taking cake decorating classes as a way to spend some time together. After posting some of their work on social media, they started receiving requests from friends and family for events. At the time, Dani was looking for a career direction so Tracey and Dani decided to open a traditional cupcake bakery in Cohasset, MA in 2011. Once the business opened, people were asking for a way to ship their cupcakes to friends and family in other parts of the country. Because shipping a cupcake is often wrought with difficulty (from trying to keep them fresh to protecting them from the shipping process), they came up with the idea of putting layers of cake and frosting in mason jars – ready to eat, right out of the jar. This not only kept them fresh for up to 10 days, it also kept them safe during shipping and provided a unique gift for the recipient.
The idea took off so Tracey decided to apply for ABC’s hit television show Shark Tank. Out of over 50,000 applicants, she and Dani were selected to film on July of 2012. They made a deal with Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful) and the episode aired in April of 2013. The rest is history. After airing on Shark Tank, Wicked Good Cupcakes did a years’ worth of business in 2 weeks and has since become the largest shipper of cupcakes in jars in the United States
Has it been a smooth road?
Growing a business is never smooth, particularly when you see the meteoric growth that Wicked Good Cupcakes experienced (600% growth the year following Shark Tank, 250% growth the year after that!). The challenge was in scaling the business while maintaining the quality. All of the recipes were family recipes curated by Tracey over the years and all the cupcakes were baked from scratch, never from mixes. It was extremely important to maintain this quality even as demand increased and they had to move to a much larger commercial facility. It wasn’t easy, but to this day everything is still done from scratch using those same recipes even when shipping out up to 10,000 jars daily!
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Wicked Good Cupcakes is known for shipping cupcakes, cakes and pies in mason jars. We are the largest shipper of cupcakes in jars in the US. We have become a very popular gifting option for everything from holidays to birthdays, anniversaries, thank you, thinking of you…you name it. We have also become a very popular gifting option for corporate customers as we can custom label the jars to represent their brand. Corporations big and small use us for vendor gifting, employee rewards, lead generation as well as general thank you gifts. What sets us apart is our commitment to the customer. We employ our own customer service team (no call centers) and strive to make the customer experience a good one from beginning to end. We consider every cupcake that we bake special and every customer we interact with is our most important customer at that moment.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Boston is a great city. Great customer base. A great combination of local customers and tourists. Great talent pool and a very entrepreneurial spirit with many resources makes it a great place to start a business. The only thing I would suggest to the city and state is to reduce the amount of fees associated with starting and running a business. Many small business owners I know are struggling to succeed and the plethora of fees required can be very difficult to absorb in the early days.
Contact Info:
- Address: Wicked Good Cupcakes Retail Location
Center Rotunda Quincy Marketplace in Faneuil Hall Boston MA - Website: www.wickedgoodcupcakes.com
- Phone: 781-923-1369
- Email: customerservice@wickedgoodcupcakes.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/_u/wkdgoodcupcakes/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WickedGoodCupcakes
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/wkdgoodcupcakes
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