Help Super Bloom Bakery Close Gracefully

Before Super Bloom Bakery was an online bakery, we were a Farmers Market bread stand in Los Angeles in 2018. Within two years, we were in upwards of eight markets. But in March 2020, we were forced to pivot our business to selling online. We’ve been extremely fortunate to have a base of fiercely loyal customers who helped spread the news about our bread. They really helped us to grow, despite the lack of proper marketing and ad budget.

Running a business is a marathon and a race... However, we have to be honest here, we’ve seen our competitors drop out of this race. And in the spirit of competition, this seems like a good thing, but it's not. Our two biggest local competitors were female-founded, and in 2024, they both went out of business. We were not happy to see them fail. We were scared. Instead of dropping out, we stayed on track. We considered what might have made these businesses lose momentum, and made adjustments. Our biggest sprint forward was the leap into larger scale manufacturing.

We've spent the better part of the past two years trying to make this work and as many of you know, it hasn't been very graceful and we've fumbled A LOT. What we didn't consider is the fact that when you go from self producing to large scale manufacturing, EVERYTHING is BIGGER. In order to reap the benefits of scaling to become profitable, it requires HUGE investments ahead of production. And any logistical mishaps that might occur in the kitchen or anywhere else along the process would mean doing a second bake to replace the batch before and that's exactly what we've had to do after our first few runs.

Looking back now, we recognize we didn’t have the capital that’s needed to grow and scale despite how ready we thought we were.

And let's face it, sending out perishable goods like bread nationwide is an incredibly expensive endeavor when you factor in the rising cost of packing supplies, labor, ingredients and shipping labels. There were fin-tech lenders who explicitly denied even considering our application due to our perishable inventory. Insurance services that help to recover the cost of missing or damaged packages also rejected our type of business. On top of all of these challenges, we could not have anticipated the refunds and reshipping of products that were necessary because of delays related to unpredictable factors such as bottlenecked supply/chain, wildfires, atmospheric rivers, and record breaking winter storms across multiple states.

We’ve done our best to do what a lot of small businesses do in order to “keep the light on”, borrowing money from friends and family, taking out predatory loans and prioritize spending on a week-to-week basis. But November was a dark time for us, and we finally had to make the difficult decision to sunset Super Bloom and stop the madness of trying to kick the can any further. 

Here’s where we are today. We have one last bake before we close up shop and we will only be baking our sourdough loaves. Bread can still be purchased on our website - only the Four Loaf Box - so that we can continue to ship out the inventory that the kitchen has in stock. We will begin to ship out the back order breads starting on the first week of January (promise). However, we still have some bills to pay before we go and we need your help.

We'd like to close out with as much grace as possible so we've set up a GoFundMe page to do so.

****Once we raise $10K, we will release our prized sourdough recipe to all those who've donated. Beyond the $10K, we will continue to share other recipes including some bonus recipes that we discontinued a while back.*****

Here’s the breakdown of how much we need to raise and how we will use each block that’s raised:

We owe our manufacturer upwards of $15K. 

Shipping costs generally runs around $5K-$8K in labels alone and supplies to send them will be an additional $1K. 

The legal fees to close out our business is going to be about $3-4K. In sum, it will be closer to $25K, but we're hoping that sales will continue on our website so that we can run out of our inventory as we shut down.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. We have new recipes in development and we’ll be taking what we’ve learned from mistakes to build something BETTER and do it the RIGHT way on our next go. STAY TUNED for more information and we will send you updates as they come along. Thank you so much for everything, we couldn't have come this far without each and every one of you.

XO,

Lizzy and Hae