A sweet way to make a living – Five questions • Rejected writer and mother of three relishes success, freedom in opening a bakery in the Shaw neighborhood – 22 May 2009 P-D

The recipes for Reine Bayoc’s cakes and cookies can’t be found in a book, and neither can her ingredients for starting her own business in St. Louis. The concept for her SweetArt bakeshop was born from raw rejection and creative energy, all brought to life with family support and convenient timing.

Bayoc opened the shop in the Shaw neighborhood in December, specializing in cupcakes, cookies and other baked sweets. Since then, she has expanded the menu to include quiches, sandwiches and light lunch items – all vegetarian, all natural ingredients and all made fresh daily. Keeping things fresh has Bayoc putting in 70 hours in a five-day workweek, but she said she refuses to freeze her products overnight for future sale.

SweetArt was started with loans from family and not long after a successful art sale by her husband, Cbabi, a local artist who has gained some national attention during their 11 years of marriage. Bayoc’s creative interests were in writing, but after having three children, she found it difficult to get a job that allowed her to be a mother and a steady supplier of income for the family.

While searching for jobs and raising her children, Bayoc learned to bake and started selling her goods at local markets, even getting a cookie contract with Straub’s Markets for a time. Despite minor success, she longed for something steadier that also could be a home to her husband’s art.

When friends found a deal for cheap retail space, the Bayocs decided to take a risk, spent their last cent to open the shop the day after Christmas and prayed for rain. She now says with a nervous laugh that the family might have been homeless if the shop had failed.

But Bayoc said the business is on pace to turn a small profit in its first year – which, if that holds true, is a major accomplishment for most any small business during this recession.

When did you realize you would make the switch from writing to baking?

I go (into a local magazine) and I’m doing the interview and I’m thinking it’s going really well. … You know I have holes in my résumé where I’ve had babies, so somehow we got to talking about how I had three little kids. … We get up to leave and one editor says, “How many children do you have?” And before I could answer, another editor says, “Three!” And she gave this look like, “12! … This woman, we should not hire … She won’t be reliable.”

And when she made that face I said (to myself), “I am not going to get this job.” … And low and behold, I didn’t get the job. … I don’t know why they didn’t hire me. I can’t say it’s because I have a tribe of small children. I don’t know what it was about. But I remember seeing that woman make that face and I said to myself, “I’m running my own business. And I don’t know what it’s going to do, but it’s going to be something that I love, where I can be in charge, where my children can run around if they want and nobody can tell me they can’t be there, because I own it.”

How do you feel about being part of the trend of several cupcake shops opened locally in recent years?

Cupcakes aren’t a trend. They’re nostalgic. They’ve been around since … people had them at their birthday parties at schools forever. I’m almost 33, and I remember people bringing cupcakes.

I have really good cupcakes, but I’m not just cupcakes, and that’s purposeful. I think our cupcakes are fantastic. … But I also think our quiche is. I think our veggie burgers are. I think everything we have is incredible, and I like where we are focused. I like that we do cakes and cupcakes and cookies and a great vegetarian, vegan lunch.

I didn’t just open a cupcake place. There are other places that are just cupcakes, and I’m sure they’re doing great business, but I purposely didn’t want to do just cupcakes.

How does being a business owner affect your family life?

As a woman and a mother, we battle being a businessperson and mom. I have to be a businessperson so I can feed my children and provide for them. But I have to be a mom, too. And at first, which is more important? How do you do it when what you do is the livelihood for your children?

But I think I always work best and stay true to myself when I say my children and my family always come first. That’s why we’re not open on Sundays. Even though we’re right across the street from the church. Even though people come in and say, “You’d make so much money if you were open on Sundays.” And maybe I could, but I’m not ever, ever, ever going to find out. My children are out of school on Saturdays and Sundays. I’m here for a long time on Saturdays. There’s no way the only other day they’re free from school I’m going to be here. It’s not worth it.

Have you been able to find a way to balance the creative aspects of your personality with the need to make money?

Creatively, I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. We don’t do sheet cakes. Everybody and their momma wants a sheet cake. They don’t want a cut-around cake.

…Would it be a big deal if I went out and bought a sheet cake pan? No. It’s not difficult. But I like that aspect of old school round birthday cakes. … So I just make sure I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.

As soon as I veer from the things that I know in my heart I want to do, I won’t make money. I will make money by doing what I know I’m here to do, and that’s what I stick to. That way, I create that balance.

Describe the experience of owning your own business.

It’s even more work than I thought it would be. It’s not just baking.

It’s customer service. It’s managing your taxes, even though we have people who help with that. People see you in the shop and they want to talk to you. Even though you could be in a mad dash to finish something, you have to stop and say “Hello,” because I wouldn’t be here if the customers weren’t here.

…We opened the day after Christmas because we had no more money. We had to open so we could make some money. It was a really good day. You wouldn’t think it would be. We sold things. And the next day, we sold more things. And we were just like, “Thank God we’re making money.” We had spent every dime.

—

REINE BAYOC

Title • Owner

Company • SweetArt

Address • 2203 S. 39th Street, St. Louis

Age • 32

Education • St. Louis University, bachelor of arts in English and French, 1998

Family • Married, three children

Photographer develops his art in Shaw Neighborhood – He hopes to put photo cooperative in rehabbed structures – 21 Jul 2005 P-D

The boards on some of sturdy old brick buildings at the northeast corner of Thurman Avenue and Shaw Boulevard have been removed. At that corner, Nathan Clark is restoring the buildings to long-lost splendor.

Some of the woodwork is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright designs. An art gallery is growing in some of the space, and a cooperative for photographers where they could live, work and display their art is also taking form.

“My goal is to have a photographic collaborative, to bring some great photographers together in one community,” said Clark.

Clark owns three buildings there. He says that when he bought them, kids with guns, gang members, board-ups and trash were common.

The property came cheap. One of the buildings cost $65,000. Now it is worth $400,000.

Clark, 38, speaks with zeal. “I am a photographer by passion,” he said. “My passion is large- and medium-format black and white photography.”

His building at 1818 Thurman Avenue has a darkroom with five work stations. The art gallery, called Shaw’s Gallery, fills the first floor of the building next door at 4065 Shaw Avenue, and the third building, at 4069 Shaw Avenue, could become a restaurant.

Four apartments are taking shape above the art gallery and restaurant area, and two have been rented even though the apartments are still works in progress. Rents range from $750 to $800. One of the tenants is a photographer.

“Living over a gallery — what photographer wouldn’t like that?” Clark said.

On a recent day, Clark sat at a dark brown bar that dates to the early 1900s. It fills a corner of the gallery. The floor is light in contrast, made of golden maple, oak and heart pine.

On one wall hangs a face the size of a torso, made of bleached wood by Abraham Mohler. Mohler also works in marble. He does all his work by hand and lives to the east on Shaw Avenue.

Shaw’s Gallery has free viewing parties on the first Saturday of each month and is also open by appointment.

Clark is a precise man, neat and trim. He said, “I think this building reflects me.”

He said nothing has been done the easy way, and he has done much of the work himself. He recalls, with gallows humor, sandblasting exposed brick walls on one of the hottest days of the year.

These days, Clark has an assistant, Steven J. Davis, 30, of the Central West End. Davis studied to be a sculptor and helped set up some galleries in Kansas City. He is working for Clark as a carpenter.

Davis read a book on William Adair Bernoudy, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright who worked in the St. Louis area. Davis is hand-fashioning the woodwork in the apartments along Bernoudy’s sleek lines. There are even hidden storage places in the woodwork of the entry foyers.

“This building took me over,” Davis said.

Their meeting was serendipitous — the mother of a friend of Davis’ wife married Clark’s father.

Clark works full time at Boeing Co. as an aircraft mechanic. Part of Clark’s dream is for income from the buildings to make it possible for him to work full time as a photographer.

In carving out his own dreams, Clark has helped other neighborhood reclaimers realize theirs in the Shaw Neighborhood.

He said that eight years ago when he bought his first building, people thought he was crazy. At the time, there was no redevelopment on the north side of the neighborhood. The buildings needed extensive repairs. So far it has cost Clark $340,000 to rehab the gallery building alone. But he is certain he will recoup his investment. There are nine rehabs going on in the 4000 block of Shaw Boulevard and nearby De Tonty Street.

Clark gives others much of the credit for changing the neighborhood — “the perseverance people who care about neighborhood issues, people who stop to pick up the trash.”

He also is proud of his contribution.

“I’ve already taken a chance,” he said. “I’ve helped established the northern part of the Shaw Neighborhood as a good place to invest.”

Planting a seed in Shaw – 7 Jul 2005 P-D

James Fox of Hartford Coffee Company fame has opened a second establishment, the Thurman Cafe, on the site of a long-ago small grocery store in the Shaw neighborhood at Thurman and Shendandoah avenues, two blocks north of Tower Grove Park and two blocks east of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Fox says the new place is a “community cafe” similarly family-friendly to the Hartford Coffee Company, but with a larger, bistro-like menu focusing on fresh and unprocessed foods. In addition to tapas-like sharing plates, there are sandwiches and wraps ranging from classic roast-beef-and-cheese to Mediterranean themes, as well as a full list of salads — and, of course, Hartford coffees. The Thurman Cafe is open from 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday;