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:
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.
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.
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.
Friends and family, especially my son who inspired the branding and my dear departed Mum of course, she would have been proud.
Perfecting my recipes and these days sourcing ingredients, it’s a nightmare.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Managing seasonal orders can be very demanding, especially working from a small home kitchen.
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.
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.