Couple finds business to be a piece of cake

Selling hundreds of $20-bags of candy and enduring months of toil and labour in fast-food restaurants were the stepping stones to dreams becoming reality for two young university students who saw the need for creative, perfectly detailed designer cakes.

Suejen and Preston Haynes, who just recently tied the knot, had life fairly easy growing up. However, as the years progressed, they realised the value of and the need for hard work

"We were always business-minded and willing to work. It was this mentality that saw Preston selling gummy worms on campus and me joining him while we were dating. We made a lot of money, to our surprise - even more than what our colleagues made as student workers," said Suejen.

Suejen and Preston, who studied English with a minor in law and information science and a minor in mass communication, respectively, at Northern Carib-bean University, came up with the idea for their business, Forever Sweet and Glow Inc, in 2011. After three months of research and numerous experiments, things started to look promising.

The beginning

"We attempted our first designer cake by covering a bowl with fondant and making edible teddy bears and roses to decorate the covered bowl. Having succeeded, we realised that we needed the tools that would help us to create the type of cake that we wanted to provide," they told Rural Express.

Though the profit made from candy sales was impressive, it was not enough to start the business, and so the Haynes applied for work on the United States work and study programme.

Toiling 16 hours a day, six days a week for three months at fastfood joints was not easy, but they persevered, and soon, they were fully equipped with the well-needed tools. On returning to Jamaica, the business, Forever Sweet and Glow Inc, was officially started.

"We started advertising right away on social media and started getting orders two weeks after we started advertising. We have been in business ever since. We have grown exponentially in terms of our business by successfully catering to the customised needs of all our customers," said Preston.

Suejen, who is the head pastry chef, and Preston the designer, have no formal training in the field but are pleased with their output.

"Our cakes are not created by only using concepts seen in books or taught in schools. We have garnered ways to create cakes that we have managed to ascertain through practice, imagination, and a creative knack. The designer cakes we produce do not entail only icing sugar and butter. It includes graphic designing, sculpting, among other things," said Suejen.

Forever sweet currently offers customised cakes for occasions such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, baby christenings, among others. The company also has authentic fondant for sale and offers cake-designing classes.

Anything is possible

"There's nothing too difficult for us to do. We have developed the requisite skills to be able to master any design once it is possible. A cake is created in our minds before our hands go to work. Thus, once we can imagine it, we can create it," they told Rural Express.

Boasting a wide clientele that includes Konshens, Tifa, Jah Cure, Aidonia, Bounty Killa, Movado, Warren Weir, Asafa Powell, Kemar Bailey Cole, Digicel, National Commercial Bank, and Magna Rewards, the forever sweet team hopes to establish boutiques and cake-supplies stores in Mandeville, Kingston, and Montego Bay, and a Forever Sweet designer cake school to teach baking and decorating skills at all levels in a bid to improve cake standards in Jamaica and the Caribbean.

The team, which completed an 11-tier wedding cake recently, one of the biggest in Jamaica, intends to sculpt a cake of a life-size car and person sometime in the future.