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.
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