DESPITE running her own hugely successful cake business and baking for The Queen, making cakes hasn't always been a big part of Michelle Shulman's life.
- Michelle suffered a total breakdown which forced her to make some drastic changes to her business. But fortunately, her risks have paid off.series about ordinary women who have launched incredible businesses.Although she inherited the "baking gene" from her grandmother and experimented with cake designs in food tech, it wasn't until she had her daughters - Fiona, 19, and Kelsie, 16 - that Michelle really threw herself into the hobby.
When she first started out, the mum found the financial side of things so awkward with other mums that she only charged up to £15 for cakes to feed between 20-40 children - even if they cost £25 to make. At the start, the aspiring entrepreneur paid £20 to get business cards made and would only buy ingredients for the cakes as and when the orders came in.
I’d be starting at 8 o’clock in the morning and not finishing until gone midnight. I had no work-life balance and it just wasn’t going right and it was at that point where I just broke down and had had enough, I couldn’t do it anymore, I just wanted to give up and I got a knife and tried to put it in my stomach in front of the kidsBut as her business started to skyrocket, Michelle started struggling more and more with her mental health.
"It was May half term at the time because the girls were home and it was a Thursday so I was trying to get the cake finished because Thursdays and Fridays were just cake days, I had to get the cake finished. Patterns vary on the individual but there can be constant changing between episodes or even a mixed state, where both episodes are felt at once.
"I’m quite a stubborn person, I’m not really a person that asks for help a lot. I do now, but back then I was thought, I’ve got to cope, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that, and I was actually making myself ill." In an attempt to add some much-needed distance between her work and personal life, the businesswoman finally took the plunge and rented out her own shop - which allowed her to get her kitchen back for the first time in six years.
"I would always send my wedding cake pictures into wedding cake magazines but hardly ever heard anything - but as soon as I rebranded, I had sent off the same pictures and they then got featured.This rebrand finally gave the confidence to put up her prices - and she now charges £500 for a basic wedding cake in comparison to the £275 she used to make.
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Source: The Independent - 🏆 80. / 59 Read more »