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Amy Muchar: Daisy Pops

Former educator, Amy Mucha, turned her hobby of baking cake pops into a full-time business known as Daisy Pops. After creating cake pop disc cutters with help from her husband, Amy created a 3D printing business for cake pop tools known as Daisy Makes. She is now starting field trips for schools in Ohio from grades preschool to college. Schools have the option to have students travel to her storefront in Kent, Ohio or to have one of her PopMobiles visit their school. We spoke with Amy about starting her business and how it has evolved and grown in recent years.

Lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

How did you start your business Daisy Pops?

I was a high school math teacher so this is not something that I necessarily ever thought I would be doing. My mother-in-law got me a cake pop book back in 2011 I think because it had a koala cake pop in it and I love koala bears. That’s when I started making cake pops. They were something I would bring in to my students to bribe them to do their math better. Once my own kids came along, I made them for their birthdays. One year I made them and sent them with my oldest for his preschool teacher. One of my students’ moms asked if she could buy some and I said, ‘Okay, if you want to spend money on these, then let’s go!’ That was the very first sale which led to about a year and a half of very small sales and making them on holidays and trying to sell them. In March of 2018, me and one of my current students at the time, we sat down and made the social media pages. My husband helped make the website and we made it an official business.

What changed after creating Daisy Pops that made you realize this could be your full-time job?

It kept getting busier and I had to hire out some help because I was still teaching full time. I learned delegation quickly. Then people started asking, ‘When are you going to stop teaching and do this full time,’ and I would roll my eyes and think that’s a silly question because I love teaching too much and you can’t make a living off cake pops. Then COVID hit in 2020. COVID did three things: it took away the things I loved about teaching temporarily, it made individually wrapped treats really pop off because everyone wanted those instead of large birthday cakes to blow candles out on and I also saw what more of me in the business looked like because I had more time since I was teaching online.

How has Daisy Pops expanded since starting as an online business in 2018?

After COVID school restrictions ended I went back to teach one more year. During that year, I decided I was going to retire from teaching after that and then go full time with cake pops. Since then, I’ve had no regrets, and we have a PopFleet of vehicles. We have two PopMobiles, a PopCycle, and a PopCart. We opened our PopShop, a brick-and-mortar store, in downtown Kent in April of 2023. We make close to 3,000 cake pops a week with a team of about 15 cake pop artists.

Daisy Pops is also teaching students about entrepreneurship. What is a field trip at Daisy Pops like?

We love field trips where they come here or field trips where we go on the road to schools as well. That’s where my two loves of education and cake popping collide. Oftentimes in field trips, we will have them make cake pops. Usually, we have them make two cake pops because we say, one for yourself but the other one you have to give to someone else. Our goal at Daisy Pops is to always spread joy with cake pops so we force them to also spread joy with cake pops. Having them share a second cake pop also creates marketing for us. During those field trips, depending on the age of students, we’ll talk about different things.  We talk about statistics and how we use that in our business. We’ve been in to talk to a lot of entrepreneur classes as well. I talk about the Daisy Pops story and how starting a business looks and just everything I’ve learned starting my business. That’s what I love, that PopEducation, and I would love for that to eventually spread across the entire pre-kindergarten to college range.

How can an educator learn more about your field trips and tailor it to their students?

The best way to talk with me about field trips is to email me at Amy@DaisyPops.com. Field trips can be free where you come here and look around the PopShop. We have Make-and-Take options where you can make cake pops here, or you can take cake pops from our display case, or you can Make-and-Take where you’re making them and then taking one. We also can drive the PopMobile to your school. We just did that where we gave a presentation at Bio-Med Science Academy to the middle schoolers. There, we presented, we answered questions, and we came out to the PopMobile and all of the kids bought cake pops. The kids all got their free ones, but then they could come back in line with their money and their parents could come with them too. We went through a few hundred cake pops in about an hour with that which was super fun.

Daisy Makes is a 3D printing company for cake pop products. How did you start 3D printing products?

3D printing is a huge part of Daisy Pops. It started during COVID. We made Make Your Own Cake Pop Kits for people to do at home. We were 3D printing cake pop stands for people to put their cake pops in to dry. We continued 3D printing and we really started using it when we went from ball cake pops to disc cake pops. We roll out our cake pop dough like cookie dough and then we stamp them out with a circle, what we call them now are poppers instead of cutters. Now, we can also do all kinds of different shapes.

When did you decide to create Daisy Makes and begin selling 3D printed cake pop products?

Last fall, other cake poppers online started coming over to the disc cake pop method because they felt this is way more efficient and consistent. Some makers asked what tools we used and if we would consider selling them because they didn’t exist on the marketplace. I had never considered selling them until that person asked. That’s when we formed another company called Daisy Makes. Now we have 25 3D printers going pretty much all the time that are making these cake pop tools and then we sell them to other cake poppers. It’s not necessarily people that own a cake pop business. It could just be a mom making cake pops for her kid’s birthday and she just wants a tool to make it easier. We sell those globally and that business is bigger than the Daisy Pops business already but much easier to do because we have 3D printers doing the work.

How have 3D printed molds improved the process verses traditionally rolled cake pops? Why did you decide to sell these tools to cake pop makers?

I think a big thing too that 3D printing lends itself to is we put a lot of work into being innovative. Just because cake pops have been made one way for the past decade doesn’t necessarily mean they need to continue being made that way. Cake pops are a lot of labor and if you can cut down on that labor by using innovative tools then you can grow your business a little more. We love being in the cake pop community and helping other cake poppers do that even though technically they’re competition because we can ship our cake pops nationally. We like looking at it as, ‘We’re all in this together and all ships rise with the tide,’ so why not help everybody that we can?

What have you learned since starting your own business and what would you tell entrepreneurs who are just starting out?

Owning your own business is a ride. There’s the joke that people always say that goes, ‘I quit my 9-5 job for somebody else so I could work for myself 24/7. Which is so true. If you’re going to run your own business, be prepared to work tirelessly all the time. There’s more flexibility but there’s also so much more responsibility. Especially when you have other people working with you because you are responsible for them as well. I’m a big fan of entrepreneurship but I just say that first, you have to run the numbers.  Make sure you can feasibly do it. If you are already working at a job make sure that you can at least come close to paying yourself what that job was paying you or whatever your living wage needs to be. Second, make sure you’re ready to work really hard. Thirdly, have a group of people surrounding you that can support you. Not necessarily monetarily but support you because they either know business, or they know you or they’re just going to be a fan girl or fan boy of you. Having that close-knit community around you in the business community is clutch and has gotten me through a lot.

Daisy Pops storefront is located at 154 North Water Street Kent.
For more information on field trips, email Amy at Amy@DaisyPops.com.

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