Tristen Phipps, 20, is graduating a year early from Ohio University and plans to attend culinary school in the fall while starting up her own business.
Graduating a year early from college is stressful enough for the average student, but Tristen Phipps has her eyes set on more than just a diploma.
In a few short months, she will be on her way to culinary school at Hocking College and at the age of 20 will be the head of her own cupcake business, Sugar Tree Sweets.
Phipps hails from Peebles, a village of nearly 2,000 people that lies about 80 miles east of Cincinnati.
It was in her home during her senior year of high school that she first took up what would become her love for baking.
Though she will graduate with a journalism degree from Ohio University this spring, Phipps’s passion for baking and pastry decoration recently led her to change her career goal.
“I honestly started baking when I started battling a mental illness and I was, like, up all night and I needed something to distract me,” she said. “I just decorated until like three in the morning and I never ate them. I really like just decorating. My family would wake up to all kinds of sweets in the morning.”
Word of Phipps’s baking spread to friends and family after she posted pictures on her Facebook, leading to her first official order.
“This summer is when I really started with orders,” she said. “I was about to go back to Athens and I had just made a birthday cake for both of my sisters. People saw it on Facebook and my aunt asked me if I could do cupcakes for a birthday party, so I did that and I thought that was just going to be a one time thing.”
Soon, however, Phipps’s friends and even strangers began to ask for cupcake orders.
“Since (this summer) I’ve had someone ask me to do cupcakes about every week or every two,” she said.
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The new hobby began with simple and easy ingredients, and most of Phipps creations originally came from a box, she said. But nearly four years later, Phipps has branched out and now finds inspiration from Pinterest, which has helped pique the interest of potential customers.
Some of her signature cupcake flavors include Kit Kat, Reese’s, funnel cake and cinnamon roll. She typically charges $20 for a dozen cupcakes, but “gourmet” batches such as a chocolate espresso cupcake with caramel buttercream will cost $24 for a dozen.
“My dad hates sweets and he would never eat cupcakes, but one day I tried this chocolate espresso cupcake … and my dad went to the kitchen and took one,” she said. “He ate six of those that day.”
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Baking is done either in Phipps’s Peebles home or at a friend’s apartment in Athens, and she mostly finances the business herself. She estimates she has spent between $500 and $600 on ingredients since August 2015.
Occassionaly her parents will chip in as well, and her boyfriend’s family recently purchased a KitchenAid stand mixer — valued between $200 and $400 — as a Christmas present. Prior to receiving the mixer, Phipps manually mixed her ingredients together.
Since beginning to pursue a certificate in entrepreneurship at OU this semester, Phipps has made more progress toward her plan to officially start the business. She is currently in the process of getting proper licensing and has already received a copyright for a company logo.
While in culinary school for the next two years, Phipps hopes to keep the business based in Athens and is looking into partnering with ACEnet, a local business incubator, in order to get access to a commercial kitchen.
“In the beginning I wasn’t trying to do a business at all, it just kind of turned out to be that way” she said. “It’s just crazy to me that last semester I was just making cupcakes on the side and now it’s actually going to be something.”
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