She did it with cupcakes. Can she do it again with pizza?
Betting against Candace Nelson might not be the wisest choice.
Nelson, who along with her husband, Charles, created the successful Sprinkles cupcake empire after plunking down $200,000 to open its first LA location in 2005, is now taking on another eatery niche that, on paper, would seem to be tapped out. Don't tell that to Nelson, who is growing her new Pizzana restaurant brand at a healthy clip, backed by business partner and actor Chris O'Donnell.
From its single restaurant that opened in 2017 in Brentwood, California, Pizzana now has three West Coast locations and its first eatery in Dallas, with more stores being targeted in Texas.
"Pizza is one of the world's beloved foods, it's centuries old, and yes, people might say it's an overcrowded market," Nelson told AZ Inno. "But because people love it so much, it also gives you proof of concept. So if you execute well and differentiate yourself, you stand a good chance."
Pizzana's slice of the pizza market focuses on the traditional Neopolitan pizza, which is known for its almost soupy center if cooked in the traditional Italian style and eaten with a fork and knife. The trick for Nelson's Italian-born chef Daniel Uditi was to create a hardier crust that Americans could pick up with their hands that still had the texture of the traditional Napolitano.
"For our first year we didn't even offer takeout. I mean, who does a pizza restaurant with no takeout? We wanted to create the out-of-the-oven experience out of the box, so now for takeout we sell the pizza 75% cooked, then you bake it at home."
Just as she was able to create a buzz for the Sprinkles brand through cable TV shows such as "Sugar Rush" and "Cupcake Wars," Nelson is following the same formula for Pizzana as executive producer of a new pizza-focused program, "Best in Dough," airing on Hulu.
Nelson cooks up an entrepreneurial journey
As Nelson tells it, getting to this point in her journey took plenty of failures, days of self-doubt and other squeamish moments. She's covered it all in her new book, "Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn your Passion into Profit."
The book mixes how-to advice with Nelson's own recollection of the good, bad and ugly times in her life, written in a breezy, easy to digest style. It's also chock full of other examples of famous entrepreneurs and brands that Nelson mentions as a way of backing up her points.
She'll offer some of these tips in person as the keynote speaker at the Phoenix Business Journal's Health, Wealth & Happiness event for female executives on Jan. 26 at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess.
"A lot of people still have this notion that being an entrepreneur is some mythical quality that most of us don't have," she said. "I hope the book will help people uncover their passion and find that idea, test it, and then go all in."
Nelson said that because women weren't raised in the same corporate playgrounds as their male counterparts, who regularly talk business while playing golf or attending sporting events together, they need to create more entrepreneurial groups in order to support each other. She cited Female Founder Collective as one of the best such organizations.
Creating a cupcake empire
Nelson's father was a corporate attorney, so she says there was never any question that his daughter would find a "solid" profession rather than something mundane — like food services. So she starting work right out of college with a profitable stint as an investment banker in California, and then jumped into the tech world with Snap.com.
But after the dot-com bust of 2000, Nelson was out of a job, and spent her days watching Oprah as her bank account balance ticked downward week after week. The bright spot? She got engaged and focused on the wedding. Then, on their honeymoon, 9/11 happened.
"Imagine a one-two punch like that. You lose you job, and then the whole world changes overnight," she recalled.
Always a foodie of sorts, Nelson went back to school to become a pastry chef and go into the custom cake-making business. After getting rave reviews, she found out it was too difficult to try to scale a business with so much customization. She eventually downsized to cupcakes, focusing on the highest-quality ingredients she could find. (She liked the alliteration of calling the startup Candace Cupcakes, but it had to be "bigger than me," so she settled on Sprinkles.)
When Nelson and her husband sold Sprinkles to a private equity firm in 2012 to spend more time with their two sons they also stepped away from running the business. They knew their strength was in conceiving a great idea and launching it, not handling the day-to-day operations of a fast-scaling bakery company, known for its cupcake vending machines found at airports and other high-traffic locations.
She also has her own investment firm, CN2 Ventures, to sprinkle some funding sugar into early-stage consumer focused startups.
"Charles and I are more excited about the early stages of a startup and adding value," she said. "That's where I think we excel."
