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"The Great Cupcake Wars" - Inc. on Georgetown Cupcake, Sprinkles, Crumbs and other bakeries in the Washington, DC cupcake scene

When I opened my mailbox the other day, I was somewhat surprised, though perhaps I shouldn't have been, to see a cupcake on the cover of the May 2011 issue of Inc. Burt Helm has written a story called "The Great Cupcake Wars" which uses the Washington, DC cupcake bakery and cupcake truck scene, with visits to Sprinkles, Georgetown Cupcake, Hello Cupcake, Red Velvet Cupcakery, Crumbs Bakeshop and Sticky Fingers, as a way of looking at the world of cupcake businesses. (No Baked & Wired though.) For the most part, I didn't think it offered anything jaw-droppingly new to add to the conversation, but with so many of the same bakeries now holding court in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Washington, DC, it's an interesting time. I predict that as the larger chains stake their claim on new cities, it will also open up room for smaller bakeries...especially if the crazy lines that in my opinion are just too long to wait for even the best cupcake in the world are a trend that we keep on seeing.



I think Washington, DC is an interesting city for cupcakes. On my last visit, during a weekend, I couldn't stomach the extremely long line at Georgetown Cupcake (it had to be at least an hour and a half wait, complete with police guard, and the line didn't seem to be moving). I was told the Sprinkles wait was 20 minutes and even Baked & Wired had a line, so I wound up visiting Hello Cupcake twice, and was very happy with their cupcakes.

I think the story does a good job of covering some of the ways the big companies and chains got started, as well as the smaller ones, and the various ways people go about setting up their bakeries as well as some of the costs involved.

From the article:

Georgetown Cupcake opened on Valentine's Day in 2008, to immediate long lines. That was, in a way, a lucky break: They had put themselves at the nexus of the growing cupcake trend and another surefire money source: the throngs of dumb, procrastinating men looking to buy their way out of Valentine's Day. But the lines kept growing longer and longer.

I stop their story. "Why?" I ask. It's a little before 2 a.m., and the first batch of chocolate cupcakes is coming out of the oven. Katherine hands me one. I bite into it. It's slightly crusty on the outside, and the middle of the cupcake, still finishing baking in its own heat, is gooey. The chocolate flavor is deep and rich. And even though I spent the past day gorging on cupcakes, even though I went to bed on a second epic sugar crash and woke up two hours later hating cupcakes and myself, this unfrosted chocolate cupcake, newborn and naked, just washes away my and the whole cupcake craze's sins. Which makes me realize something. Even if this cupcake thing is a passing trend, a total fad, people are using it to create things that are good. Very, very good.

In November 2009, the sisters opened a second location, in Bethesda, Maryland. Because of growing demand from people outside of D.C., they built a bakery next to the Dulles airport. It bakes cupcakes that go immediately onto FedEx trucks to be shipped all over the U.S. overnight. (Customers pay a flat $26 in shipping on top of $29 per dozen cupcakes.) And that was how they won their family over. Their constant appearances in the press, the volume of work involved in running the business, and the exploding revenue the business was bringing in spoke louder than they could. LaMontagne's husband quit his job as a policy analyst and became Georgetown Cupcake's chief financial officer. The sisters' mom helps out, too. They had taken their grandmother's legacy out of the kitchen and into the world and turned it into a business.

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