Odette D’Aniello is the Founder and CEO of Celebrity Cake Studio, a family-owned and operated retail cake boutique. The company has received numerous awards, including winning Best of Western Washington several times. With experience in the food industry, business strategy sales, and marketing, Odette has obtained additional skills in product design and brand development, event management, and team building.
She is also the Owner of Dragonfly Cakes, the wholesale sister company to Celebrity Cake Studio, designing, developing, and manufacturing delicious handmade and clean-label petit fours, tea cakes, and mini desserts. Beyond her entrepreneurial ventures, she hosts the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast, where she shares insights from successful individuals in the food and beverage sector.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [2:09] Odette D’Aniello shares how her family immigrated from the Philippines and began working in a family bakery in Guam
- [8:12] Odette’s culture shock moving from Guam to the University of Arizona and adjusting to life in the mainland US
- [10:31] Why Odette and her husband moved to Washington State and opened a vegetarian café before pivoting to cakes
- [19:39] Odette talks about evacuating Las Vegas by car after witnessing the 9/11 attacks unfold on TV
- [23:34] How meditation and mindfulness became integral to Odette’s personal life and business leadership
- [30:23] Odette’s early response to the pandemic, shutting down operations to prioritize employee health
- [35:34] Acquiring Dragonfly Cakes, a tea house, and an event space
- [45:20] Advice for navigating entrepreneurship through retreats and mindfulness
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs struggle to find their niche, especially after experiencing failure or burnout in their initial ventures. How can you pivot from an unsustainable business model to a more profitable and fulfilling path without losing the passion that drove you in the first place?
Baker and entrepreneur Odette D’Aniello’s first café business attracted customers but failed financially. After a chance encounter at a wedding expo, Odette recognized the value of focusing solely on custom cakes — a skill she had honed since childhood. By trusting her intuition, closing the café overnight, and boldly repositioning her business, Odette transformed her struggling venture into a thriving cake studio. Embracing risk, creativity, and a clear sense of purpose allowed her to transform a difficult situation into a long-term success.
Tune in to this episode of Top Business Leaders Show as host John Corcoran interviews Odette D’Aniello, Founder and CEO of Celebrity Cake Studio and Dragonfly Cakes, about reinventing a business for greater impact. Odette shares insights on leading a family business, cultivating mindfulness as a leader, and navigating crises like 9/11 and COVID-19.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Odette D’Aniello on LinkedIn
- Email Odette D’Aniello: Odette@CelebrityGourmet.com
- Celebrity Cake Studio
- Dragonfly Cakes
- Himaya Garden
- Celebrity Gourmet Podcast
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Quotable Moments:
- “I think a lot of times when you do something that’s in alignment with who you are, there’s a lot of ease.”
- “You can tell when food is made with love… when food is not made with love or with resentment, you can tell.”
- “The only constant is change. That’s something that we are very aware of.”
- “Every act is a meditative act. And that is what I’m working on and practicing.”
- “If everything was possible, what would it be like then?”
Action Steps:
- Follow your intuition in business decisions: Trusting your gut, especially in pivotal moments, can guide you toward bold, effective choices. Odette’s instinct to pivot her business led to greater success and alignment with her passions.
- Align your work with your personal passions: Building a business around what you love creates joy and sustainability over the long term. Odette found that doing what she loved energized both her and her team, even during challenges.
- Embrace mindfulness and meditation: Practicing mindfulness helps leaders stay calm, focused, and responsive rather than reactive. Odette credits meditation for helping her navigate crises like 9/11, COVID-19, and family hardships.
- Be willing to pivot quickly: Flexibility and readiness to change direction can turn a struggling venture into a thriving one. Odette shut down her café overnight to focus on cakes, transforming her business trajectory.
- Seek support from entrepreneurial communities: Joining organizations like EO connects you with peers who can offer guidance, resources, and encouragement. Odette’s involvement with EO expanded her network and deepened her leadership skills.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 Media, we feature top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.
John Corcoran: 00:20
All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we have Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, gusto, Kinko’s, Ypo, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you. And of course, this episode brought to you by our company, rise 25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and if you want to learn more, you can go to rise 25.com or email at 25. Com.
All right. And today’s guest is Odette D’Aniello. She is the founder and CEO of Celebrity Gourmet and Dragonfly Cakes, which is a family owned and operated retail cake boutique and also a wholesale company. The company has received a number of awards, including Best of Western Washington a number of times. She has many years of experience in the food industry, including, as she will say, as a child laborer coming into the family business at a very young age in Guam.
So we’re going to hear about her upbringing there. And she and I are both active in entrepreneurs organization. We know each other through that. She’s also the owner of Himemiya Garden, which is a tea house and event venue. Beautiful tea House, an event venue in Tucson, Arizona.
Odette, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I want to I want to start with your your story, because your parents came to the US from the Philippines to work for your uncle’s bakery in Guam. He arrived in Guam and your parents and then the kids pretty much had to work in this family bakery, slicing bread and all that kind of stuff. It was a lot of work at a young age. Take me back to that period of time and what that was like for you, coming to a new country and having to work as much as you did.
Odette D’Aniello: 02:10
Sure. So my family came from Cebu, Philippines. My grandfather, actually, my mother’s uncle, started a bakery after World War two. They my my great uncle, grand uncle created bread or baked bread out of these like metal tin cans, like big barrels. And that’s how he started his bakery.
And my mother was maybe, like, he kind of adopted my mom because my mom was working in the rice fields. So she learned how to bake. And later on she married my dad and then became teachers. But she couldn’t make a living with having kids and, you know, earning $2 a month on a teacher salary. So she started making cakes.
And the cakes that she made just became super famous in her little town. And she ended up going back to her grand uncle’s bakery, now run by her cousin, and she started working there. She ended up becoming the manager of that business, and that particular cousin of hers started a bakery in Guam, which is a US territory, as you know, and we moved as my parents as H1, b I think visas like it was a company transfer.
John Corcoran: 03:34
That’s okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 03:36
And we were on these visas. So when we moved, it was me, my brother and my little sister who was one at that time. And she’s currently my business partner.
John Corcoran: 03:47
And you are how old?
Odette D’Aniello: 03:48
I was ten, 11. My sister was one for ten years apart. And when we arrived to the first thing that we did was go to the bakery and we’re told, this is your new job. It is slicing bread and so from running around is free, you know, children playing. We ended up working for my uncle’s bakery.
And it wasn’t just us, it was also their children. So there was a lot of us children working in that bakery. And it really is like an immigrant.
John Corcoran: 04:14
It’s almost like the opposite of what the American dream is like the American dream of, like you come to the United States for freedom. It’s almost like the opposite happened to you. Like then you suddenly had to go to work.
Odette D’Aniello: 04:27
You know.
A lot of immigrant families, like, not just, you know, not just Filipinos, but, you know, any other immigrant families that are in niche industries. A lot of the children learn the skills of the job by working with the family and working for the family. The difference between us was that we were not part of necessarily the family. We are workers, so we didn’t necessarily have Rest. We just worked after school.
John Corcoran: 04:55
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 04:56
You know, my first job was slicing bread, and then I taught myself how to decorate cakes because it was the the only air conditioned spot in the whole bakery. So I learned, and it was really the most fun thing to do, right?
John Corcoran: 05:08
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 05:09
Play with icing. And then that was a job. So I thought that was the best job ever. So at age ten, I started making cakes and decorating cakes. I made decorated hundreds of cakes.
So yeah, it was it was really hard in retrospect. You know, it was it was traumatic in a lot of ways because, you know, children need to play, children need to have freedom to create, etcetera and not have their days full of adult work.
John Corcoran: 05:38
Right.
Odette D’Aniello: 05:38
In that way, it was not good. But in the positive note, it was the way I learned my skill. And it’s, you know, when they say that you find your passion and your love at age ten and, you know, cake decorating was certainly that for me because it was a it was also an artistic outlet.
John Corcoran: 05:55
You I love to ask people about what they were like as a kid. And, and you mentioned that in high school, you sold newspapers, you got involved in Junior Achievement. You wrote stories for magazines. Talk a little bit about that.
Odette D’Aniello: 06:10
Yeah, I, I was, I didn’t well that whole newspaper project, it was because my high school, I went to a Catholic girls high school, and part of our project was our after school project when I was able to stay after school, when my work was done at the bakery, we had a junior achievement program. And, you know, you could start a business. And I started a newspaper business and I sold ads and made money out of it. Actually it was I sold ads and candy grams. It might have been me and a couple of other girls, but it went really well.
And that’s I was like, wow, this is great. That’s that’s awesome. And then I went to college. You know, I started I kept working, right. But then at the same time, I also had these side hustles where I work as a writer.
I wrote for a magazine. This is before the internet, right? So I worked for a local magazine. I was writing for them, I made cards, I painted on cards, and wow. Yeah, I sold sarongs at one time.
John Corcoran: 07:16
You were you you had seen sarongs, I think, in the Philippines. Right. Or Guam?
Odette D’Aniello: 07:22
No.
John Corcoran: 07:23
In Bali. Okay. Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 07:24
90s, you know, pieces of cloth that you wear on, you know, wrapped around you at the beach. And, you know, I was living on Guam. Yeah. So everybody wore a sarong. But then in the US, there was no sarong.
So I would bring them and I would just sell them to my friends times. The amount of money.
John Corcoran: 07:42
You ended up, you’d never been off of Guam. You’d never been in the mainland US when you decided to go to college at University of Arizona. Is that right?
Odette D’Aniello: 07:51
No, because we were waiting for our. It took a while to get our ducks in a row with getting a green card and all. So after we got our green card, I went to the to the University of Arizona.
John Corcoran: 08:05
But what was that like for you moving to Arizona and living on the mainland after growing up in Guam?
Odette D’Aniello: 08:13
I’ve only lived on an island, so I lived in the Cebu, which is surrounded by water. And then Guam is surrounded by water. And these are little islands. I’ve only lived in two islands when I was, when I was young. So when I moved to Tucson, I was sure, first of all, because, you know, it was landlocked and it was all full of cacti, and there were so many white people like I was.
It was culture shock for me because Guam is very diverse. There’s a lot of people from all over the world who live there. It’s a it’s a melting pot, sort of. And I was just shocked because the only time that I ever really saw a lot of Caucasians were Mormons in the Philippines who taught me English or my some of my teachers in Catholic school. But then, you know, it turned out to be such a beautiful experience because I met so many different people with different types of, you know, I learned so much about the world, and it was a culture shock initially, but it was really quite I felt quite at home afterwards because, you know, the people when I, when I realized that people in, in the mainland us at that time, you know, I didn’t realize that they, they were the type of people that would just tell you exactly what they meant, yes or no, they don’t.
There wasn’t like this passive, like passive way of saying no, which is a very Asian. My culture is like, if you’re saying yes, you don’t say, oh, if you’re saying no, you don’t say no. You just say, you know, kind of like, you know, yes.
John Corcoran: 09:59
Yes.
Odette D’Aniello: 10:00
No or like, no, like a lot of mixed messages. So I like the fact that people were very direct. I kind of I very much liked that because I was I like personally I’m a pretty direct person. I mean, I’ve always been a direct person, and it was very hard for me growing up in a Filipino family, being a direct person.
John Corcoran: 10:21
You decided to eventually start your own bakery and you ended up moving to Washington State to do that. Talk about that.
Odette D’Aniello: 10:31
So my husband was a teacher too, actually. After I graduated, I became a teacher and.
John Corcoran: 10:36
Runs in the family.
Odette D’Aniello: 10:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my my husband was was from Connecticut. He moved to Guam because there was a teacher shortage, and I met him on Guam, and he wanted to live there forever. And I was like, no, gosh, no, there’s no libraries. Like, you know, I was such a good reader, like.
John Corcoran: 10:58
The.
Odette D’Aniello: 10:59
Stores were. So there’s one bookstore in the entire island. I really wanted to continue on with my education, because I was getting a master’s degree at that time, because I was a teacher, and I just wanted access to more learning and more books and more people, different types of ways of living. And, you know, I had already traveled extensively at that time because I in college, I was an exchange student, but he wanted to stay on Guam and wear slippers and, you know, live on an island for the rest of his life. But we had this bet that if he if we both go to teach internationally, if we both got jobs at then I would teach internationally for two years.
If we didn’t, then we’d move to Washington and start a life. And I got a job and he didn’t. So we moved to Washington.
John Corcoran: 11:51
Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 11:51
And then we started a bakery.
John Corcoran: 11:53
And they started bakery. Yeah. And what was it like making that shift from, you know, here you had worked in a bakery growing up and, you know, in your words, it was kind of oppressive. You didn’t get to experience that childhood. And yet here you are starting a bakery.
Some people would run from that experience and never want to go back to it. And yet, I guess you discovered enough love for like, cake creating cakes that you decided to start your own or have your own bakery.
Odette D’Aniello: 12:22
They opened. We opened a cafe.
John Corcoran: 12:24
Okay, so it wasn’t a bakery first.
Odette D’Aniello: 12:26
It wasn’t going to be a bakery. It was like this cafe. I was I my favorite restaurant was a seventh day Adventist restaurant in, in Guam. And they it was a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian.
I was as a pretty staunch vegetarian and and a vegan at some point when it when it wasn’t hip. Yeah, this was not hip. This is in the 90s and nobody really was that. Yeah. And I thought I was just going to open this, like seventh day Adventist type of kind of situation where you can choose your own sandwich fillings and all that.
That was my big dream, and it was a really bad business model. I learned about bad business models.
John Corcoran: 13:05
The cafe was a bad business model. Why? Bad why?
Odette D’Aniello: 13:08
Because I it was too cheap. I had line. The line was out the door, but the food was too cheap. I didn’t we didn’t really know because I opened it with my brother and my husband. We didn’t really know how to run it very well.
We, you know, there’s a lot of perishables, a lot of it, you know, just kind of went. When your menu is so big.
[continue to page 2]
John Corcoran: 13:29
So you did something right. If the line was out the door, why do you think the line was out the door?
Odette D’Aniello: 13:33
Because it was cheap.
John Corcoran: 13:34
Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:35
I mean, it was with the breads are baked Fresh.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:39
The the breads were super, were baked super fresh like every day by by from scratch. And you could choose your own fillings and you can get unlimited drink for $5.
John Corcoran: 13:50
Oh, wow. That’s cheap.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:51
Yeah, I’d go there.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:52
Every single meal of the day too, if I was that person.
John Corcoran: 13:55
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:55
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 13:56
But so we weren’t doing well. And the next, next door to us was this flower shop. And this woman would sell her flowers for like, three roses for $25. I was like, and by the time I was like, what’s the cost of goods of that? You know, it’s.
Odette D’Aniello: 14:15
Like, yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 14:16
And so I realized I’m like, I think I’m going to do cakes because because I ended up going to a wedding show and I, I met these, this couple and they only did cakes for a living and they were charging hundreds of dollars for it. You know, when I grew up, cakes was just a side job. Like I wasn’t the main thing, The main thing. And I was like, wait, you guys only do cakes.
Odette D’Aniello: 14:41
Like.
Odette D’Aniello: 14:42
Like those wedding cakes? Because I can make those with my eyes closed. And they’re like, yeah, this is all we do. We do it out of our garage. I’m like, you don’t have overhead, you don’t have rent, you don’t have insurance.
I was just I was only I was, what, 28 years old? I didn’t know anything about this business. And so I talked to the to the wedding show owner and he said, well, do my show on in January and you’ll never have to worry about your business again. And I charge it to my credit card. And I did it.
John Corcoran: 15:11
You charge like what? Like a booth.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:13
Show.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:14
$800.
John Corcoran: 15:15
Like, did you get a booth or something where you.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:18
You got a booth.
John Corcoran: 15:19
Like, behind you right now? Like that you had like.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:21
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 15:21
You had like, big, beautiful cakes. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:24
Yes.
John Corcoran: 15:24
And did that book you up?
Odette D’Aniello: 15:26
Yes. Wow.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:27
So within maybe like a week, we decided to shut down our cafe, changed our sign and.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:35
Said.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:36
Cake studio.
John Corcoran: 15:37
Wow. Just like that.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:39
We have no breakfast of people who were lined up. They’d be like, wait, what happened? I’m like, we’re cake studio now.
John Corcoran: 15:46
And really.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:46
It.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:47
Says cafe. Out the door is your sign. I said, well, cafe means coffee.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:53
It’s like, basically.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:54
Just pretended like it was always that way.
John Corcoran: 15:57
Wow. That’s funny.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:58
It was.
Odette D’Aniello: 15:59
Really funny. And then, you know, that’s how we started growing. It’s 26 years ago.
John Corcoran: 16:04
Wow.
John Corcoran: 16:05
And and was it all good or were there any downsides to shifting to that model? Like one thing I would think of is like, well, there’s some seasonality to it. People tend to get married in the summer. Was it difficult to like, get used to that kind of rhythm of it? And also you’re selling a very extensive, extensive product most of the time once, like I assume they don’t.
Or maybe, maybe they would come back and buy a cake on their anniversary, but it’s like mostly a one time purchase as far as the customer goes.
Odette D’Aniello: 16:32
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 16:33
Well, we started getting customers from like a local hotel bought from us, bought products from us. The military did.
John Corcoran: 16:42
Some more repeat customers then.
Odette D’Aniello: 16:44
Yes.
Odette D’Aniello: 16:45
And there was like a casino. Yeah. So. So this kind of, you know, the whole it kind of evened out.
John Corcoran: 16:53
Okay. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 16:55
Still, you know, when you’re charging $5 with, you know, with that loss, every transaction, it didn’t matter. So what we did was just like tightened our bootstraps. Like actually speaking of bootstraps, I actually read a book by Tim Ferriss.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:11
Wait, was it Tim Ferriss?
Odette D’Aniello: 17:12
No. Who wrote the. Oh, no. No, it wasn’t Tim Ferriss who wrote the bootstrap Bible.
John Corcoran: 17:18
Bootstrap Bible, I don’t know, I don’t.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:19
Know God.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:20
Not.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:20
My.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:21
Oh, Seth. Gordon.
John Corcoran: 17:23
Seth. Okay. Got it. Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:25
So I found his book at the library, and I read that like 20 times. And that’s got through it all.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:33
I highly.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:33
Recommend that.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:34
Book.
John Corcoran: 17:34
What was that like shifting from this, you know, losing, losing a money on each $5 sale to selling, you know, multi hundred dollar cake.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:43
It was great. Yeah, it was great.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:45
And it also was in alignment with who we were because that’s you could tell that we really loved that.
John Corcoran: 17:52
You know say more about that.
Odette D’Aniello: 17:54
So I think a lot of times when you do something that’s in alignment with who you are, there’s a lot of ease around it and there’s a lot of joy, and people can sense it versus people like when you’re not in alignment, the level of like, resentment shows.
John Corcoran: 18:10
Did your sister join the business from the get go?
Odette D’Aniello: 18:14
Yeah, she moved with me. She was 18 and so she moved with me and she started going to school. And then when my brother, my brother and I. This is a downside of going into business with a family member. My brother left the business ten months later.
We were always like, kind of love, hate And he left the business. And so my sister stopped going to college, and she became my business partner and my cousin, my first cousin Wallace, who was baking on Guam for our bakery there, our family bakery there. He moved and became our baker.
John Corcoran: 18:49
And a family affair.
Odette D’Aniello: 18:50
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 18:51
So it’s been the three of us. And then my husband. Still.
John Corcoran: 18:54
Is he in the business?
Odette D’Aniello: 18:56
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 18:56
Yeah, yeah, but he’s a teacher. He teaches, you know, he was. He taught for all of it. All of this entire time. But he was just during the weekends, you.
Odette D’Aniello: 19:06
Know, he.
Odette D’Aniello: 19:06
Would help. And, you know, if things get needed to be fixed, it’s just really good to have partners, you know? Yeah, a good team. And we have been a good team. You know, we’ve we have been together for 25 years.
John Corcoran: 19:21
Wow a 911. You were in Las Vegas at a bakery show a 911.
Odette D’Aniello: 19:28
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 19:28
And your daughter was there. She was 11 months old. You were going to the show for the first time when you saw the terror attack on the television. What did you do next?
Odette D’Aniello: 19:39
So we went to Las Vegas. It was our first trip, you know, we started making money. So we went to the International Baking Expo in Las Vegas, which happens every four years. And we were super excited. We’re, you know, we were staying at.
What is the one that that’s the tallest, cheapest hotel at the very end of the strip? Stratosphere.
John Corcoran: 20:08
Okay. Stratosphere.
Odette D’Aniello: 20:09
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 20:09
We went to the first day of the show. The second day of the show in the morning, I went to the my I saw on TV that there had, there was a plane. A plane had just crashed into the the Twin Towers, one of the first planes. So I, the first instinct was Pack everyone up. Let’s go.
And we didn’t have any news at all what was happening? My baby was only 11 months old. My daughter, who’s, you know, who’s now the director of marketing. She was our 11 month old baby. There were, you know, my me, my sister, her husband and my cousin.
I said, let us pack up and let’s bring that gigantic car that we rented back to Washington. We’re not flying. And they were just like, wait, we’re going to the show today. I was like, no, we’re not. We’re going home today.
We don’t even know how many planes are in the sky. Like, I had this instinctive thought that there was it was going to be disastrous. So we.
John Corcoran: 21:06
Why do you think what was what caused you to have that feeling?
Odette D’Aniello: 21:12
I have a really good sense. Like I have really good intuition. So. And I also have, I think, a real sense of survival instinct. Plus I was, I’m, you know, I had a baby.
Odette D’Aniello: 21:24
So that was.
Odette D’Aniello: 21:25
A lot of, you know, I was very on high alert because.
Odette D’Aniello: 21:28
My.
Odette D’Aniello: 21:29
Just thinking I need to take care of this, this baby. This baby needs to be safe. Safest place is to be home. So we went down, checked out of our hotel. We didn’t ask for permission.
We just took the car and everybody else was still gambling. It was 9 a.m., you know, Pacific time. We got to, you know, we loaded up the car with a lot of water and food and and, you know, anything that we can do to survive getting stuck in Death Valley because we had to drive through that. And, you know, there were no cell phones.
John Corcoran: 22:02
Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:04
So we just drove out of the desert. I’m like, the best thing is for us to drive into the middle of the desert. Because if there’s massive attacks and tallest buildings, being in the stratosphere is a bad idea.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:16
Yeah. So just go in the.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:18
Middle of the desert.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:19
Right?
Odette D’Aniello: 22:19
It’ll be hard to hit us.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:21
So.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:22
And then, you know, then by the time we got to the middle of the desert. That plane in Philadelphia had was in Philadelphia. Yeah, there was a plane that had had just crashed.
John Corcoran: 22:32
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:33
And people were frantically looking for ways out of of cities. And so we got home and, you know, three days later we had a wedding show and we went to the wedding show.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:47
Wow.
Odette D’Aniello: 22:47
Like, it was it was really pretty incredible. And every single, you know, every four years, you know, we go there and all the people who’ve been in the industry for the longest time, we talk about that. We’re like, remember, remember.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:02
You know, when that.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:03
Happened.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:03
And. Right.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:05
Nine over 11 happened.
John Corcoran: 23:06
Right, right. The show was just had that instinct to go home. I’m wondering if that instinct has served you well in the business and in other ways where you you have this kind of intuition for if something is not working out to, to make, to act quickly?
Odette D’Aniello: 23:23
I think so. I think.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:25
So.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:26
I think so.
John Corcoran: 23:27
Yeah. It’s a good one to have in business, right?
Odette D’Aniello: 23:31
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:31
It also helps because I meditate every day.
John Corcoran: 23:34
Yeah. Let’s talk about that. I know meditation, mindfulness is kind of a really important part of who you are. It relates to baking also. So talk a little bit about how you discovered that.
Odette D’Aniello: 23:49
So when I was when I was younger, I, I was, I was raised Catholic. So a lot of, you know, a lot of reverence for and being prayerful came from that. Right. Because being raised Catholic, I went to Catholic school all my life. And then when I was a teenager, I had a really tragic loss of a friend.
And after that, you know, it was a it was a I maybe it was a trauma response where I was wanting to know why that happened. And I just kept praying a lot. And, you know, basically that whole intention of understanding why tragedies happen led me to different modalities of prayer. And one of that became meditation. And that has been my go to.
So for the past, you know, 35 years I’ve been meditating. And it has really helped just just helps me a lot. It calms my nervous system. It clarifies my mind. I understand things greater, you know, doesn’t mean I’m, you know, I’m still super flawed in so many different ways, but it allows me to just kind of give myself some grace and maybe other people grace.
It’s still a journey, you know? But it’s a practice, right?
Odette D’Aniello: 25:09
It’s a practice.
John Corcoran: 25:10
Yeah. You came from poverty. You didn’t have any privilege. You didn’t have any opportunities. Immigrant.
And you’ve said that meditation helped you to manifest the life that you have now. Because now you obviously you’re a member of EO, you, you know, run multi-million dollar businesses. Talk a little bit about how meditation plays into that.
Odette D’Aniello: 25:31
Yeah, a lot of it.
Odette D’Aniello: 25:33
Is putting myself and you know, maybe, maybe because I grew up in not the most, you know, ideal way for a child to grow up, that I always had this penchant for imagining things, imagining a better place. Like, you know, I always imagined being in, like, the sound in the middle of The Sound of Music, for example. So if you know, if things are not going well, I would just close my eyes and I’m in the middle of The Sound of Music. You know, I’m in the middle of flowers, and I’ve always been a very imaginative child. Maybe as a trauma response, maybe not, I’m not sure.
But I think it is. I think it was more of a trauma response. And a lot of kids do that when, you know, when there’s just so much, you know. There’s so much like input that that the brain, a young brain, can’t really process. So I would imagine things well, what happened was the things that I imagined actually came true.
Like I ended up, you know, in Switzerland in the middle of that field. And, you know, a lot of people can attest that they really when you imagine something like as if it’s real, it happens.
Odette D’Aniello: 26:42
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 26:43
And I, I have always just used that.
Odette D’Aniello: 26:47
In a lot of different ways. So when things are not going well, instead of like, you know, diving into this like, you know, deep hole of, of, you know, sadness and, and helplessness, I end up creating like, what would it be like if this was my ideal? If, if it was everything was possible, what would it be like then. And then it happens.
John Corcoran: 27:12
And you know, the food business, bakery business is really hard. You know, just looking at the last few years, there have been so many restaurants, food businesses that have gone out of business. It’s such a hard business to be in. Does the meditation help you to kind of keep everything level as you’re, you know, navigating this industry?
Odette D’Aniello: 27:35
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 27:36
It is a very hard business. And a lot of people, you know, it comes and goes like the the whole business is in a flux. You know, you work with really tight margins. It’s very commercialized. A lot of a lot of it is, you know, you’re competing with mass producers.
So small businesses like ours, you know, it’s very rare to be in business for this long. And, you know, a lot of it, though, is that we really enjoy what we do and joy emanates. Right. I, I just recently made a new friend in Tucson who is a, who’s a she’s a biologist, an RNA biologist, and she works for the Astro Bio lab. And she has a PhD from MIT and Harvard.
John Corcoran: 28:18
And smart.
Odette D’Aniello: 28:18
Cookie. And she’s.
Odette D’Aniello: 28:20
Super smart. And you know what I found fascinating in her research? She told me that when you love something, your cells actually emanate light. They emanate light when you when you’re around people that you love, when you do something that you love, when you are uplifted by good music, you know your cells just emanate light. And that light is energy, right?
So a lot of it is that, well, you can tell when food is made with love. You can tell when a chef loves what they do. It just tastes better. It tastes good, even if the servings are so tiny. And when food is not made with love or with resentment, you can tell.
And it’s actually not good for your gut either. So I think one of the the main reasons why we have lasted this long is because we absolutely love what we do. We go through so much. There’s like so many different things that happen throughout the day or the week that could just be so like demoralizing. But we really like what we do and there’s so many happy things.
There’s so many fun things. There’s a lot of laughter, there’s a lot of creativity. There’s a lot of, you know, who is sad making a cake, right? Like it is. So it’s freaking fun.
Like I say that and my kids can attest to it too. Like my daughter, she left, you know, she is now working for her. She just totally enjoys what she does, absolutely enjoys it. And you know, and people are happy. People are just happy to meet you.
You know, it’s not.
John Corcoran: 29:58
Yeah, I love that.
Odette D’Aniello: 29:59
Like I’m there like, oh my God.
John Corcoran: 30:04
We, we we were talking earlier about your reaction to nine over 11. Well, in 2020 January 2020, you had a friend who was visiting from Hong Kong who said that, you know, this is going to come to the US at a time when a lot of people didn’t think that was going to happen falsely. Talk a little bit about what your reaction was like after that.
Odette D’Aniello: 30:24
Yeah. So I had a, you know, I have a child childhood friend who lives in Hong Kong and she, she, you know, she’s a really smart cookie as well. She’s, you know, she owns a hedge fund. She’s super smart. She came to visit Seattle to speak to our chapter about her hedge fund.
And she she was frantically looking for masks. And she said, you know, this is going to happen and this is going to come to the US. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can see that. Like. And I saw the concern in her eyes, like, you know, I was like, I can see that.
Well, I ended up going to Hawaii to the Regional Leadership Academy for EO and I. And that was that was always present in my mind that I hope they don’t shut down borders. And this is before. Like, I hope they don’t shut down the airports because, you know, you don’t know if what happens during a pandemic and by the end of it, you know, the first case happened in Seattle. So I flew home and that was March by March 12th or 16th or something, I started seeing like it’s spreading.
And then my employees were like, you know, I live with my grandma or like my mom was sick. So then I just woke up one morning and I told my, you know, my sister that I think we need to shut down. So I shut down the business. I told everyone, like, you know what? We’re going to figure out how to pay you.
And, you know, we we didn’t know what furlough was before because we’ve never furloughed anyone.
John Corcoran: 31:59
We’ve never.
Odette D’Aniello: 32:00
Hired anybody. So we’re like, okay, we’re just going to have to figure this out. But as of right now, your health is the most important thing in your family members. So we gave all of our inventory away. We shut everything down and within a couple of days, the whole county shut down.
So, you know, and we stayed home.
John Corcoran: 32:18
And you went home and you started meditating.
Odette D’Aniello: 32:21
I did, I started meditating three hours a day.
John Corcoran: 32:24
Wow.
Odette D’Aniello: 32:24
I did a I did I would sit down meditation and then I would do walking meditations. And, you know, I’d walk five miles and I was meditating the entire time. I just basically just let it go. And I was also grieving. My brother had passed away a few months before, so I was dealing with that too.
So that has that allowed me to just really like, you know, really heal. And it was a it was a bit of a gift. And it was also quite incredible in that, you know, it took us like a month to recover and by, you know, within a month or two we were up and running again. And the demand just grew because grocery stores were very busy and our business just took off.
John Corcoran: 33:05
Did you have to shift the business because you were were you from like, you know, making wedding cakes that were for a while there people weren’t doing weddings.
Odette D’Aniello: 33:13
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we did a lot of wholesale. So we have a brand called Dragonfly Cakes is their little petit fours. And, you know, we distribute them nationally.
And, you know, we had a small distribution at that time. And then our distribution just grew. And that took over for all of the parts that were not, you know, were not running yet like events. So that really helped us. And we’ve got to bring back our employees.
And, you know, it was it turned out it turned out great. And I, I could really attribute that to like a calm mind, you know, not too reactive, not too afraid. And, you know, I’m just going to say I’m naturally an anxious person. So, I mean, I have to meditate. I mean, people who don’t have maybe people who haven’t gone through like trauma or they’re.
John Corcoran: 34:03
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 34:04
In their disposition, Shouldn’t. You know, it just works for me. Just because I’m naturally an anxious person.
John Corcoran: 34:11
And your father also got cancer, and you had to care for him for nine years in the midst of running your business?
Odette D’Aniello: 34:17
Yeah, my father and my mother had a stroke, and we kept our business running. We, you know, we took care of him at home like we, you know, we were we only shut down, you know, luckily, our team was amazing. My sister and I work really well together. And kudos to my sister. She has such a good head on her shoulders too.
She’s amazing and strong and she runs our business with like such a tight, tight ship as a tight ship and we had a great team who helped. But yeah, we had to go through my, my the death, the the the illness and death of my father, the, you know, my mother, my mother, my mother’s stroke, my sisters, you know, very my, my, you know, getting giving birth to our children, raising our children all throughout this business. It’s not hasn’t been easy, I must just say. But it’s been an adventure.
John Corcoran: 35:13
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 35:14
It’s just I could say that.
John Corcoran: 35:15
Yeah. And you’ve also in the midst of this, you’ve acquired other businesses. Dragonfly cakes, I believe, was an acquisition. And then now you’ve acquired bringing you back to Tucson, acquired a tea house and event space in Tucson. So talk a little bit about that kind of coming back to your roots.
Odette D’Aniello: 35:34
Yeah. So yeah, we purchased we acquired a company called Wax Orchards and it was a chocolate fudge company. And we still have it, but we, you know, when you sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. Well, this was a I’m not going to say failure. It just didn’t work out.
So, you know, selling chocolate fudge in jars to companies like target at, you know, 5% margin. It’s not a business model. It’s a really good one. So we shut it And then, you know, six months later we purchased Dragonfly Cakes, which is a, a, a pet forest company. These are tiny little cakes that are covered with chocolate and they’re delicious.
And so that is the company that we distribute nationally. And that was an acquisition as well. So that.
John Corcoran: 36:20
Why did why that of all the different types of companies you could acquire.
Odette D’Aniello: 36:25
Well we knew it. It was within our vertical. So I also knew all the equipment. I’m a big bakery equipment nerd.
John Corcoran: 36:32
Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 36:33
I knew how to make these things, but the fudge, we were outsourcing that. So a lot of the things that are in cans in the middle aisle of a grocery store, a lot of that is made by co manufacturers. And that’s what we did. We our chocolate fudge was co manufactured. So I would order, you know, $50,000 worth of fudge.
So and you know it’s just sitting in the warehouse. It’s either sitting in a warehouse or you’re waiting to get paid. So yeah like a lot of money sitting around. So Dragonfly Cakes is something that we manufacture and we know how to do it. We had really great help with an organization called Impact Washington in Washington State that helped us.
So, you know, if you’re a manufacturer and you have local resources that can help you with your production, I would highly suggest using that because that really helped us, you know, just get things going and kind of figure out all the kinks and, and start producing and start shipping fairly quickly, you know, from, from acquisition to to full production. It it took us maybe eight weeks. It was quick and we moved it from California. So we moved all of the, the whole facility to California from California to Washington.
John Corcoran: 37:44
Was that hard?
Odette D’Aniello: 37:45
It was an adventure.
John Corcoran: 37:46
That must’ve been hard to do.
Odette D’Aniello: 37:48
Oh, it was it.
Odette D’Aniello: 37:49
Was quite an adventure. Yeah, because we needed to get it up and running before the 1st of January, which we did.
John Corcoran: 37:57
You, like, load up trucks and drive them up?
Odette D’Aniello: 38:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:00
We packaged everything the the seller created. You know, we didn’t even she didn’t really tell her customers that the whole facility was moving. So she was bulking up there, their inventory and then shipped, like, you know, packing everything up, shipping the whole thing to us. We frantically put it all together and started testing. And then we had six weeks to be up and running.
John Corcoran: 38:23
Wow.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:23
And we did. We started shipping in six weeks. It was a mess.
John Corcoran: 38:27
When was that acquisition?
Odette D’Aniello: 38:29
That was in 2016.
John Corcoran: 38:31
So it was a couple of years before Covid. So in retrospect, it helped to diversify your business going into Covid.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:37
Yeah, it really did.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:39
Everything just, you know, works out.
John Corcoran: 38:41
So it’s fascinating. Sometimes when businesses do that, they don’t even realize that that that diversification may have saved their business going into some big, you know, pandemic.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:49
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 38:50
Yeah I mean, you know, there’s also there’s, you know, things are never the same. Right. So I don’t I think there’s always the only constant is change. So that’s something that we are very aware of. It’s like, you know what?
Yeah. This is not going to stay the same. It might be really awesome right now. And that’s one of the things that has always been in my mind. Like I don’t you know, we don’t live extravagant lives just because you don’t know, like small business owners, you can’t go buy a Ferrari, you know?
John Corcoran: 39:18
Right.
Odette D’Aniello: 39:19
You just can’t like that. I’m in a food business. Maybe if I was someone in another business, I would. But I just live a very simple kind of.
John Corcoran: 39:27
You know.
Odette D’Aniello: 39:27
Low key life.
John Corcoran: 39:28
You mentioned with the chocolate fudge that it was too outside of your wheelhouse. And you acquired a tea house, an event space. What have been some of the learnings or challenges around that? And also one that is in, you know, quite a distance from where you live in Washington state?
Odette D’Aniello: 39:45
Yeah. So the we my, my daughter went to the University of Arizona and I absolutely loved this town. And we just happened to have this venue. That’s all. It was already ready to go.
It just needed to be loved. So I’m a big gardener, so a lot of it is because I love to garden. And I wanted to revive the garden. And that was my thing, like I wanted I want this garden to go.
John Corcoran: 40:11
She bought the business so that you could revive the garden.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:14
I was buying a garden and I was going.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:18
To have a bakery.
John Corcoran: 40:19
That was a good fixer for you.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:21
Kind of a fixer.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:22
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:23
But it turned out that it is quite a task.
John Corcoran: 40:29
The garden or the bakery or the business.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:31
Or the garden.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:32
Was really hard because, you know, a desert garden is very different from.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:35
A, you know, very different.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:36
Garden where it rains all the time. So I, I’m an expert in ground drought tolerant ground covers now.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:43
Yeah. I know.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:44
You know, I know how to you know, I know a lot of things about a lot of things a little bit.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:50
About.
Odette D’Aniello: 40:50
A lot of things right now. And we started doing high tea, which is the reason why, is because a lot of our customers are tea shops, because we we sell these metaphors and, you know, tea shops have they they buy our metaphors. So we started going around going high tea and I was like, you know what? If I were to have my own tea, I’m going to give everybody food, like lots of food, you know? And so my kids and I did a brainstorm and we decided on the name, and then we decided on the business model and we said, let’s do high tea, but let’s make it Filipino high tea.
Odette D’Aniello: 41:28
So I was.
Odette D’Aniello: 41:29
And my mother, you know, my mother still, I still have family who live in the Philippines. My mother lives there, my mother and my brother were living in Cebu. So I was visiting them. And, you know.
John Corcoran: 41:44
It’s.
John Corcoran: 41:44
High tea, a big thing over there.
Odette D’Aniello: 41:46
It’s not it’s called merienda.
John Corcoran: 41:48
Okay.
Odette D’Aniello: 41:49
So it’s really out of our own brains. It’s it’s like a it’s an exercise in creativity.
John Corcoran: 41:55
Okay. And so and you had mentioned when you went to University of Arizona, it was very white. Did you find that bringing this Filipino high tea tradition to Tucson, or maybe maybe Tucson’s more diverse now than it was when you went there? But did you did you find that it was difficult finding customers for it, or did you find that because it was something different, people were excited about it?
Odette D’Aniello: 42:18
I find people in Tucson very warm and welcoming. There’s a there’s actually a big Filipino community, and Filipino culture is very similar to Hispanic culture. And the and the palate is very similar. So it’s it’s been really fun and great. And I have an amazing I found an amazing team that we work with.
And it’s been really quite fun.
Odette D’Aniello: 42:40
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 42:41
It’s kind of a bit of a dying tradition, I have to say, because my wife loves nothing more than going to tea. She loves going with friends to a tea shop experience like multiple hours, little tea cakes, all that kind of stuff. But. And we’ve been together for like 25 years, but I feel like she, you know, we have kids and everything, but but she’s had trouble, like finding a lot of tea shops have gone out of business, you know. You know, it just seems like the tradition is not around as much.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:08
Well, it’s.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:08
Not a very easy business model. It’s really a lot of work.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:12
I mean.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:13
I think the regular high teas like they offer at the Empress in, in Victoria is probably like, I think the.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:19
Cost of.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:20
That is super cheap.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:22
Yeah, it.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:22
Really is about what they, you know.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:25
The experience.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:26
Maintaining the experience.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:27
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:27
All the stuff around you.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:29
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:29
That’s what costs a lot. But I made it harder in that we actually make hot food. So we have four we have four courses of Filipino warm Filipino food. Right.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:43
Oh cool.
Odette D’Aniello: 43:44
Normal high teas would never have. They have warm food. It’s always just sandwiches. So that has helped, you know, in in differentiating us. But it’s also made it hard to really scale.
It’s not like I want to be cooking, you know, every single day. I don’t want to be a chef like I don’t.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:01
Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:01
Although I love to cook. It’s it’s a whole different story when you’re cooking for a mass number of people consistently.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:08
Yeah. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:09
I do have a chef who, who cooks for for us now that, you know, I’ve taught him how to cook a Filipino like Filipino dishes that I created. But he cooks it consistently in commercial kitchens like.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:26
I cook.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:27
At home.
John Corcoran: 44:28
Yeah, right.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:29
Small stove. I didn’t even know how to turn on the freaking grill, you.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:34
Know, like, yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:35
Even know what a flattop was. So I’m learning a lot and and that’s what makes it quite fun for me. It’s, you know, it’s it’s the when I think it’s every entrepreneur maybe, you know, the, you know, when you’re learning is, you know, like steep, you know, it’s so exciting. And then when it starts to even out, then you’re like, okay, what’s my next project?
Odette D’Aniello: 44:57
Right.
Odette D’Aniello: 44:57
You know, I’m sure you understand for sure.
John Corcoran: 45:01
So this has been great. Odette. And circling back to the mindfulness and meditation we were talking about earlier, before we wrap up, are there any resources that you would point anyone listening to this who is curious about meditation, where they could, you know, learn about it or how they could get started?
Odette D’Aniello: 45:20
Yeah. So I, I would if for any entrepreneur, I think the most important thing that I did was go on a silent retreat. You know, there’s one right outside of you, John in San Francisco.
Odette D’Aniello: 45:37
Spirit rock. Spirit rock.
John Corcoran: 45:39
Yeah. It’s like 20 minutes to the west of me. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello: 45:42
Yeah, it’s the best. And then I also go to a lot of different other retreats Tweets. I’ve gone to Joe Dispenza retreats because he’s from the Pacific Northwest, and that has been it’s very different and that’s very active. It’s super fun. It’s more of like, you know, putting yourself in a trance and basically creating where spirit rock is more of, I would say heart surgery, you.
Odette D’Aniello: 46:07
Know, you.
Odette D’Aniello: 46:08
Quiet, you don’t talk to anyone for a week. You don’t look people in the eye, you don’t write, you don’t, you know, you don’t do anything except really look inward. And, you know, between the two, I would say that it’s been transformative for me. And I also, now that I’m older, I, I seek to meditate with community. So if there’s a group that, you know, I can meditate with, I participate in that and whatever modality.
Right. And, and, you know, when we travel, my kids and I, my family, we’re very much into going to churches like especially church, Catholic church, which is familiar my both my kids, you know, we raised them Catholic. We love that. I mean, any type of activity that, you know, gives you a sense of reverence of what is beyond the body is really helpful. I mean, I think to stay connected to the whole reality that, you know, basically our life is an adventure and it’s all an illusion.
By the time we pass away. That is what’s permanent.
Odette D’Aniello: 47:12
You know.
Odette D’Aniello: 47:13
You’re in Bhutan with EO Asia Pacific, which is I’m a part of. And what I love about that culture, it’s a Buddhist culture, which, you know, I’m a practicing Buddhist, although I was raised Catholic. It’s Buddhism is a practice. It they live for the other world for the next life, you know. And so that’s why they’re kind to other people.
They’re kind to each other, and they really take into account how their actions impact other people. And in that way they’re mindful with every action that they do that they’re not necessarily, you know, oh, I’m meditating. It is that every act is a meditative act. And and that is what I’m, you know, working on and practicing.
John Corcoran: 47:56
Yeah. Well, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you and Celebrity Gourmet and Dragonfly Cakes and my garden.
Odette D’Aniello: 48:05
Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or you can send me an email at Celebrity Gourmet. I’m hoping to, you know, do more things that are in alignment with my mindfulness journey and along with business. So stay tuned for that.
John Corcoran: 48:20
Odette, thanks so much.
Odette D’Aniello: 48:22
Thanks. Thanks, John. Take care.
Outro: 48:24
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