Ashika Senaratne, is a banking professional turned cake maker and is developing her business and product range as we speak. She has been running a productive operation for almost two years and her products are in demand around the world; Sri Lankan diaspora take them back by the kilo!
Diriya Stories is a series designed by Diriya.lk to relate stories of business persons in order to applaud and recognize Sri Lankan entrepreneurs and also to inspire and encourage others to take up businesses.
Here we go with our 12 questions for Ashika:
Describe your biz
A home baking business specialising in Sri Lankan cakes for local and export markets. Love cake, Date cake and more recently milk toffee and even wedding cakes have been added due to demand.
When and where did the idea form
My staple gifts to people is my cooking. I gifted some cake to a friend and she wanted my cakes packaged, customized and labelled to take overseas as gifts. She insisted and didn’t give me a choice.
The start
I had to hit the ground running with my start-up. My first significant order came with 3 days’ notice to deliver. I sourced the ingredients and sorted out the packaging and initial branding in just 3 days. I come from a family of Bakers. My Mum was a famous Baker and Caterer. Baking and cooking is in our family’s DNA.
Who inspired you or where did you draw strength from
Friends and family, especially my son who inspired the branding and my dear departed Mum of course, she would have been proud.
Most difficult obstacle
Perfecting my recipes and these days sourcing ingredients, it’s a nightmare.
Something nice some told you to spur you on or something you read
I am flattered to receive lots of wonderful comments and repeat orders for my cakes for their quality, consistency and taste. My customers say they are delicious!
How many people do you employ?
At the moment I manage all my baking and orders myself. Have some kitchen help but planning to develop this to a full-fledged business.
Any outsourced entities/person that benefit from your biz
I am very particular about my ingredients. This means I support the suppliers who provide high quality baking goods by buying regularly from them. Also my printer who does my boxes, it’s a small business and I am happy to be contributing to that.
In your opinion your most positive quality
I am great at multi-tasking and enjoy working under pressure. This means I can manage my small business, my family life and be a caring friend that, is particularly important to me.
Yours or your biz drawbacks
Managing seasonal orders can be very demanding, especially working from a small home kitchen.
Future plan
Expanding of course. I am experimenting on a host of new stuff and my friends and neighbours are my guinea pigs. The responses have been good. Plan is to make my cakes a household name.
Advise to start ups
Dream Big, Start Small
We wish Ashika the very best in her future endeavours. Sinfully Sweet can be contacted on 0773633453.
If you are an entrepreneur and have a story to share please contact us on info@diriya.lk
Interested in reading more Diriya Stories, check out our post on Amira Ghaffoor.
Thanks for publishing this article, I be been a customer of her cakes for a while now, I will never go back to any big name cake makers any more , She’s got the best cakes in every aspect! You try once, you’ll never go back, to traditional cakes! Thank you very much and good luck, Ashika… (Customer from USA)
She stands by “ quality over quantity “ by far, without a doubt… way to go Ashika..