Singapore's Cake Shop

Lyn Lee's delicious wares

Source : BL:Abhishek law ::13 Nov 2011

A lawyer by training, Lyn Lee realised quite early that successlay in the secret of her delicious chocolate cakes.

RECENTLY IN SINGAPORE: 

Appearances are deceptive. A step into a pristine white shop and a slice of a dark chocolate cake that “melts” in your mouth. Absolute bliss.

You look around the other offerings — ice-creams and white chocolate cakes. All are equally good, but this simple brown “old fashioned” chocolate cake leads the list of favourites.

Welcome to the Mecca of chocolate cakes at Awfully Chocolate — 

Singapore's home-grown cake shop and a success story for lawyer-

turned-entrepreneur Lyn Lee.

Ms Lyn Lee who started Awfully Chocolate

A trained lawyer, Lee found her calling in chocolate cakes and not in the 9 to 5 treadmill. And thus began the journey of her cake-shop.

Ask her what prompted this shift and pat comes a simple reply: “It's the search for a chocolate cake that made me start Awfully Chocolate. I wanted to make and eat a chocolate cake that people would eat again and again without getting bored of it.”

THE BEGINNING

“It wasn't just me who wanted to avoid the nine-to-five schedule. There were six other friends of mine who found their calling in entrepreneurship,” she says on the sidelines of a retail summit in Singapore.

And in 1998 in a residential neighbourhood — Katong — in Singapore began the first steps towards what is now Awfully Chocolate. And it's USP — just one plain, almost drab, chocolate cake. No colouring, no cream and absolutely no frills generally associated with a cake.

There was no big display, no cakes on racks and neither was there any big marketing associated with it. In short, it hardly looked like a cake shop.

“What was there to display? We had just one cake and that too just a simple hand-made chocolate one,” Lee recalls looking back at the humble beginnings of the now famous cake-shop. And perhaps it was this simplicity that made the shop click or maybe the right mix of dark chocolate and cocoa. But the venture became a successful one.

But successfully conceptualising a venture is not an end in itself. Financing it and making it run profitably with limited resources and entrepreneurship skills were the other challenges.

FINANCES

As it happens with most start-ups, finances were limited and naysayers aplenty. And people felt that without variety the venture was doomed from the word go. They didn't hope for much from the banks.

Finally, resources were pooled in and pockets were stretched to the limit.

“We did not start big. Resources were limited and a bank loan was not an option. Though we were prepared to work it out, we were not ready to sell our homes and come to the streets if the venture fell through,” Lee says.

MAKING IT BIG

Days turned into months and months into years. The venture had clicked. Good old-fashioned word-of-mouth publicity saw people from across the island nation of Singapore queue up for their share.

“When people said they liked the cakes and came back for more, I was convinced that we had a successful venture,” she said.

The company from its humble Plain Jane offerings has moved on to include three fancy varieties of chocolate banana cake, chocolate rum and cherry cakes. All three have done well. Now, it offers a variety of other chocolate cakes too.

But despite the rapid demand, expansion was still not on the cards.

“I preferred to be cautious with my expansion plans,” Lee says.

In 2004, nearly six years after her first store, Lyn opened her second store using the profits from her first shop. She also introduced ice-cream with the Awfully Chocolate dark chocolate ice cream.

THE MALL MOMENT

Slowly mall developers started taking interest in her neighbourhood store. CapitaMalls, one of Singapore's largest mall developers, assisted her in starting a store in one of their malls in Singapore. It was a new journey for the company — as a retail chain.

The company now has over 17 franchises across Asia, including Singapore, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Ask her about moving to virgin territory such as India and she smiles and says; “I still prefer to be cautious and try out new markets at home rather than big-scale overseas expansion.”