BAKED BY US GO FUND ME

Who are we?

Baked By Us is more than just delicious cupcakes! We also support young people with disabilities to gain real work experience and cafe skills.

Led by Jess Robinson, Baked By Us is a learning and training cafe that wants to help bridge the gap for some of the %93 of unemployed people with disabilities to lead into mainstream or supported employment.

At Baked by Us everyone does everything! From learning how to make cupcakes, fillings and toppings. Develop kitchen skills, and serve customers. Deliver orders around the community

Work as part of a team to build confidence, and make connections and new friends.

Most importantly we have created a space in which those with a disability who have been shut up by mainstream employment due to lack of “experience or skills” we bring those people a sense of belonging and community that they may we may not find elsewhere.

Baked by Us was built 3.5 years ago from the ground up with no financial assistance or loans. We have always done everything ourselves from all the renovations to building our website.

The downside to this is during tough times we have only ever had our savings to fall back on.

Like many other businesses, the COVID-19 lockdowns took almost everything from us financially and it’s felt like at times impossible to recover.

During the lockdowns when we had no income we still had staff wages, rent and bills to cover. All these costs came from our savings.

Since ending the rising costs and decline in sales due to inflation and roadworks have meant all of the current bills are just barely being covered.

Which unfortunately means we haven’t been able to rebuild our savings for things like repairs or plans or plan towards the future and expansion of the businesses.

I really hope by taking the time to break down the costs we can be transparent about why we need to raise funds and what we would be spending the money on.

I would also like to mention the reason we have never received a grant or government assistance, is currently we are unable to structure the business in a way needed to be eligible to apply for these. One day we would like to move towards this set-up. But until then here is a cost breakdown of everything we need to help us.

We want to break out of survival mode with this money so we can put the time and effort into expaning and growing our business!

If anyone has any questions or would like to know more we aim to be as open as we can about our campaign. Please email any questions or inquiries to [email redacted].au

Now for the cost breakdown.

We actually spend alot on the roads in staff cars accessing the community for things like collecting ingredients, packaging ect!

Eventually we would like to be using cars for more community access like being market stall holders!

We would want to increase the number of deliveries across Geelong! Having two cars would mean we could have a learning car for that some of our participants could use to practice their driving skills in!

We are in desperate need of kitchen upgrades on most of our appliances is commercial equipment which is just soo expensive! Just the mixer alone we are looking at is costing 7k!

While this might seem like a lot having a purpose built operating system increase the productivity and flow of the day to day running of Baked by Us! This is honestly is our biggest need and would change our lives! Freeing up space here would allow us to spend so much more time on the growth of the business. And more focus on the disability aspect of the business.

Our current operating system doesn’t allow for deliveries to be booked online. Customer customisations. It doesn’t deliver breakdowns in stock required to make. Print packaging labels.. basically anything we need to take the daily pressure off in terms of planning and counting stock needed.

The cost for this one is so high as we would be getting in the experts to completely transform our internal set up!

Really focusing on community access for our participants, having a market set up would be an amazing way to boost sales and create more community engagement!

Invest in Bake with Us including packaging and shipping 40k

We love preparing our DIY cake

mixes and spinkles! And with the funds we would love to invest in packaging and shipping equipment to start shipping around Australia and potentially even wholesaling in different stores!

This investment would also mean more opportunities for more participants and staff growth!

A simple one but worth mentioning! We have been putting off new signage. But we have quotes ready to go when we have the funds! New signage would give us more street visibility and bring in new customers!

This is probably the biggest want and need and even though we know it won’t happen overnight as we are still bound by our current lease.

But we are DESPERATE to move for a few reasons.

The first is cheaper rent we currently paying $3500 per month and it’s just too much!

Number two is we outgrew our kitchen a long time ago and need a bigger more functional space.

The third reason is we want a cafe where our community come for coffee and sit down! We would love to be a kid friendly cafe!

This would mean we could provide so teach so many more workplace skills and offer a better overall experience for our customers and especially our participants!

If you have taken the time to read this and donated this we would like to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. By helping us you are creating jobs and opportunities for people that need it by supporting our mission!