08/10/2026
If you’re new here… let’s take a trip down memory lane.
When we started in 2021, life looked very different. Time was more readily available, and while we obviously wanted Buff Cake to be successful, what I imagined for this business then wasn’t even remotely what I imagine for it now. Mostly because I had absolutely no idea what it could be.
I can say without hesitation that I never imagined Buff Cake would be where it is today, which is both an incredibly good thing and, if I’m being completely honest… slightly crazy and scary too. 🫣
Somewhere along the way, things I thought I knew about life started shifting, and I realized we’d accidentally created a whole new dream.
That’s absolutely wild to me.
There have been so many things over the last almost-six years that definitely weren’t on the original Buff Cake bingo card.
* Being featured in the Hippo.
* Seeing Buff Cake in HGTV Magazine.
* Winning multiple awards.
* Walking into stores and seeing something we made sitting on the shelf.
* Meeting people who knew Buff Cake before they knew us.
All of these things seemed huge at the time, but I don’t think I stopped long enough to fully appreciate them when they happened… because there were already 47 other things requiring our attention and another set of goals to meet.
What I can say with certainty is that owning a small business changes you. It also changes your definition of success, and ours has probably changed a few dozen times. 🫠
Why?
Because you watch other businesses grow, pivot, thrive, struggle, close, start over and sometimes walk away altogether, and you realize success isn’t nearly as simple as whether the doors stay open forever.
If you don’t own a business (and even if you do), it’s easy to see one close and think, “Oh, that’s too bad that it failed.”
Not even derogatorily, just because closing and failing seem like the same thing from the outside.
I don’t think that anymore.
I do think there’s an enormous amount of success in having the guts to try something, putting everything you reasonably can into making it work, learning when something needs to change and being willing to pivot when it does. And sometimes, even after all of that, a particular version of the dream just isn’t going to work. That doesn’t erase everything that happened before it or make the person behind it a failure.
Sometimes you pivot, sometimes you redefine the goal, sometimes you decide you’ve given it everything you have and you’re ready for something else… and sometimes… you just keep going. That’s where we are.
This time of year is typically fantastic for Buff Cake, but it’s also always incredibly challenging when it comes to time and balance.
It’s been a heavy year for a lot of people, and we certainly haven’t been immune to that. Right now, doing what we need to do to keep building toward what we want for this business also means I (Brooke) am working a separate full time job….
which is… exactly as relaxing as it sounds. 🫠
But… I don’t consider that hustle culture, and I don’t particularly want to glorify running yourself into the ground in the name of owning a business.
For me, it’s simply doing what I need to do right now to give something we believe in the best chance we can.
There are still some pretty big goals for Buff Cake in the background.
Are they the same goals we had in 2021? Absolutely not.
Will they change again? Probably.
I genuinely don’t know exactly what Buff Cake will look like five years from now.
What I do know is that during the seasons when keeping a small business moving forward feels harder, you become even more aware of the people who continue to root for it.
The people who buy the treats, share a post, recommend us to someone, visit us at an event, carry us in their stores, send us pictures of their dogs, or simply tell us they want to see Buff Cake succeed.
It’s encouraging, humbling and honestly a little overwhelming when you actually stop long enough to think about it.
I probably don’t stop long enough nearly as often as I should. So that’s what this post is for.
Gratitude + Reflection + Acknowledgment
Almost six years of a business I never imagined would become this, a dream I didn’t know I was going to have, a whole lot of figuring s**t out as we go… and a whole lot of people who have given us reasons to keep going.
Thank you for being part of it. 🐾
