Building a Family Bakery Empire With Odette D’Aniello

Odette D’Aniello is the Founder and CEO of Celebrity Cake Studio, a family-owned and operated retail cake boutique. The company has received numerous awards, including winning Best of Western Washington several times. With experience in the food industry, business strategy sales, and marketing, Odette has obtained additional skills in product design and brand development, event management, and team building.

She is also the Owner of Dragonfly Cakes, the wholesale sister company to Celebrity Cake Studio, designing, developing, and manufacturing delicious handmade and clean-label petit fours, tea cakes, and mini desserts. Beyond her entrepreneurial ventures, she hosts the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, where she shares insights from successful individuals in the food and beverage sector.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:50] Odette D’Aniello discusses her immigration story from the Philippines and working in her family’s bakery in Guam
[7:52] Odette’s experience with culture shock after moving from Guam to Arizona for college
[10:11] Why Odette left teaching and launched a vegetarian café with her family
[13:35] Pivoting to cake design after discovering the profitability of wedding cakes
[17:34] How Odette built a multi-generational family business with her sister and cousin
[19:19] Odette talks about evacuating Las Vegas on 9/11 and the role of intuition in crisis decision-making
[23:29] The importance of embracing meditation and mindfulness as an entrepreneur
[32:53] How Celebrity Cake Studio navigated the pandemic
[40:11] Launching a Filipino high tea experience at Himaya Garden in Tucson, Arizona

In this episode…

Many entrepreneurs struggle to find their niche, especially after experiencing failure or burnout in their initial ventures. How can you pivot from an unsustainable business model to a more profitable and fulfilling path without losing the passion that drove you in the first place?

Baker and entrepreneur Odette D’Aniello’s first café business attracted customers but failed financially. After a chance encounter at a wedding expo, Odette recognized the value of focusing solely on custom cakes — a skill she had honed since childhood. By trusting her intuition, closing the café overnight, and boldly repositioning her business, Odette transformed her struggling venture into a thriving cake studio. Embracing risk, creativity, and a clear sense of purpose allowed her to transform a difficult situation into a long-term success.

In this episode of the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, John Corcoran interviews Odette D’Aniello, Founder and CEO of Celebrity Cake Studio, about building a resilient baking business. Odette shares insights on family partnerships, intuition-driven decisions, and launching a Filipino high tea experience.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments:

“When you do something that’s in alignment with who you are, there’s a lot of ease and joy, and people can sense it.”
“When things are not going well, instead of diving into helplessness, I imagine the possibility of an ideal outcome, and then it happens.”
“You can tell when food is made with love. It just tastes better.”
“I have a really good intuition and a strong sense of survival instinct, especially when it comes to protecting my family.”
“Meditation clarifies my mind, allowing me to give myself and others grace, it’s a practice, not perfection.”

Action Steps:

Follow your intuition during uncertain times: Trusting gut instincts, especially in crisis situations, can lead to safer, faster decisions.
Align your business with your passions: Doing what you love brings joy to your work and creates a stronger connection with customers.
Integrate mindfulness into your daily routine: Meditation improves emotional regulation and focus, which enhances clarity and decision-making under stress.
Be willing to pivot your business model quickly: Recognizing and responding to what’s not working can turn setbacks into opportunities.
Build businesses that support family and community: Involving trusted people fosters loyalty, shared responsibility, and long-term business success.

Sponsor for this episode…

Today’s episode is brought to you by Celebrity Cake Studio, a family-owned and operated cake boutique.

Celebrity Cake Studio has been baking joy into all of their artistically designed cakes and desserts for 21 years.

They are proud to work with a vibrant team of cake designers and bakers that help you celebrate the sweet moments in your lives.

They have received numerous awards, winning Best of Western Washington for many years in a row and various small business accolades.

To learn more about how you can celebrate yourselves or the ones you love, visit www.celebritycakestudio.com or email them at info@celebritycakestudio.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, where we feature top bakery and specialty food entrepreneurs from around the world and share stories and tips on how to create a successful life in the baking world.

John Corcoran: 00:23

Hey everyone, this is John Corcoran here. I’m stepping in as guest host today interviewing Odette for her podcast. So enjoy this episode, which is from a different podcast of Odette telling her background and her story. All right. And today’s guest is Odette D’Aniello.

She is the founder and CEO of Celebrity Gourmet and Dragonfly Cakes, which is a family owned and operated retail cake boutique and also a wholesale company. The company has received a number of awards, including Best of Western Washington a number of times. She has many years of experience in the food industry, including, as she will say, as a child labourer coming into the family business at a very young age in Guam. So we’re going to hear about her upbringing there. And she and I are both active in entrepreneurs organization.

We know each other through that. She’s also the owner of Him garden, which is a tea house and event venue. Beautiful tea House, an event venue in Tucson, Arizona. Odette, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I want to I want to start with your story, because your parents came to the US from the Philippines to work for your uncle’s bakery in Guam.

He arrived in Guam and your parents and then the kids pretty much had to work in this family bakery, slicing bread and all that kind of stuff. It was a lot of work at a young age. Take me back to that period of time and what that was like for you, coming to a new country and having to work as much as you did.

Odette D’Aniello: 01:50

Sure. So my family came from Cebu, Philippines, my Grandfather. Actually, my mother’s uncle started a bakery after World War two. They my great uncle, grand uncle created bread or baked bread out of these, like metal tin cans, like big barrels. And that’s how he started his bakery.

And my mother was maybe, like, he kind of adopted my mom because my mom was working in the rice fields. So she learned how to bake. And later on she married my dad and then became teachers. But she couldn’t make a living with having kids and, you know, earning $2 a month on a teacher salary. So she started making cakes.

And the cakes that she made just became super famous in her little town. And she ended up going back to her grand uncle’s bakery, now run by her cousin. and she started working there. She ended up becoming the manager of that business, and that particular cousin of hers started a bakery in Guam, which is a US territory, as you know. And we moved as my parents, as H-1b.

I think visas like it was a company transfer.

John Corcoran: 03:14

That’s okay.

Odette D’Aniello: 03:16

And we were on these visas. So when we moved, it was me, my brother and my little sister who was one at that time. And she’s currently my business partner.

John Corcoran: 03:27

And you are how old?

Odette D’Aniello: 03:28

I was ten, 11. My sister was one for ten years apart. And when we arrived, the first thing that we did was go to the bakery and we’re told, this is your new job. It is slicing bread and so from running around is free, you know, children playing. We ended up working for my uncle’s bakery.

And it wasn’t just us, it was also their children. So there was a lot of us children working in that bakery. And it really is like an immigrant.

John Corcoran: 03:54

It’s almost like the opposite of what the American dream is like the American dream of, like you come to the United States for freedom. It’s almost like the opposite happened to you. Like then you suddenly had to go to work.

Odette D’Aniello: 04:07

You know, a lot of immigrant families, like, not just, you know, not just Filipinos, but, you know, any other immigrant families that are in niche industries. A lot of the children learn the skills of the job by working with the family and working for the family. The difference between us was that we were not part of necessarily the family. We are workers, so we didn’t necessarily have rest. We just worked after school.

John Corcoran: 04:35

Yeah.

Odette D’Aniello: 04:36

And, you know, my first job was slicing bread and then I taught myself how to decorate cakes because it was the only air conditioned spot in the whole bakery. So I learned and it was really the most fun thing to do, right?

John Corcoran: 04:48

Yeah.

Odette D’Aniello: 04:49

We play with icing and then that was a job and I thought that was the best job ever. So at age ten, I started making cakes and decorating cakes. I made decorated hundreds of cakes. So yeah, it was it was really hard in retrospect. You know, it was a it was traumatic in a lot of ways because, you know, children need to play, children need to have freedom to create, etc. and not have their days full of adult work.

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