FEATURE

Owner of The Cupcake Collection:‘I believed that I wasn't meant to drownin debt and brokenness’

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

Mignon Francois gives this advice to would-be business owners: Start with what you have.

It’s what she did when she started her business in 2008. She had a stand mixer, a dorm refrigerator and a small man cave she claimed from her former husband. With that, she spent the last few dollars she had for dinner one week to start what would become The Cupcake Collection.

The sweet enterprise has now sold more than five million cupcakes, she says. On any given day, there’s a line down the sidewalk filled with tourists, food delivery drivers and locals. There’s always a mix of folks just dropping in for one cupcake, people celebrating their own birthdays and sweet friends braving the line to get a perfect treat for their friend’s party. It all started because she believed. “I wanted to be a surgeon and life showed me that I was intended to change people's lives through joy — and cupcakes just happened to be the carrier that I chose,” Francois says. “Before I started The Cupcake Collection, I couldn't bake — not even out of a box — so how am I supposed to do this? But I think of it as a testament to what you can do when you believe. I believed that I wasn't meant to drown in debt and brokenness. I believed that I was meant to be here and that people who came into my presence or who experienced me should be left feeling that joy and feeling that experience of, ‘I saw you.’”

The Cupcake Collection sits right off of 6th Ave. N., and it sneaks up on you if you’re walking down the sidewalk in front of it. It’s just far enough away from the sidewalk to make someone curious, though these days the lines may tip folks off more so than when Francois first began. When her family moved into the house, it was condemned.

“It was two bedrooms and a bathroom with a tub,” she says. “And that bathroom with a tub and a toilet doubled as the family sink, and, you know, the community pool for all of my children. I knew even then though — we were even telling people that Germantown is a wonderful place to be. It was because it reminded me of how it was in New Orleans because the sidewalks were brick. It was because it had the charm of the community that raised me.”

Francois moved to Middle Tennessee from New Orleans: “New Orleans raised me, but Nashville made me,” she says. She places a huge importance on history and paying homage to those who came before her. Her coconut cream cupcake was created with her grandmother, who would mix all her cake batters by hand, in mind.

“All of it’s always going to pay homage back to the ancestors, whose blood is running on the inside of me,” Francois says. “They were great makers and bakers who never would've had the opportunity to produce goods to sell and

for other people to experience them. So while you may not ever know their name, you will experience them because you will know my name and you will know my cake as the best cake you've ever had. That’s always been the goal — and that cupcake is me trying to mimic my grandmother.”

During Mardi Gras, The Cupcake Collection was serving up a king cake cupcake. The regular selection is vast, ranging from birthday cake to carrot cake to sweet potato cake and beyond, but they’re all toothsome — the cake is moist but has a firm bite and each one has the perfect amount of frosting.

At first, she says people didn’t believe she could have a successful business in Germantown. She would tell people where they were going to open and they would say she was going to have to deliver to them. She had faith that the neighborhood would one day be a destination.

“We've been given several opportunities to not only tell the narrative story of Germantown, but to create a new narrative for people as we've gotten a chance to sign many of the petitions that allowed some of this stuff to be put up here. We’re now able people that Germantown is a destination and you wanna come here and that's what we began doing. We believe in speaking what we seek until we see it. And that's what we did the moment that we stepped into Germantown when I first purchased this house.”

Franocis raised her children, went through a divorce and built the business in that house.

“And I found that the more I did that with grace and the more that I offered that to other people that was extended also to me,” she says. “And so to the point where I had some hard days and I was standing there in the front of the bakery, smiling, you know that fake it until you make it. I turned it into faith until you make it. And I realized that faith was currency that would perform for you like money. And that was what was leading me. I didn't have any credit when I started this. I didn't have any money when I started this. I didn't have any experience in the business when I started this, but yet here we are having changed the narrative of Germantown.”

Francois says over the years she’s learned that the business was not built just to get her family out of debt.

“When it got us out of debt, I started realizing that it wasn't just meant for me to keep,” she says. “It was also for me to share and that I could pour that onto other people by showing them what they could do to feed their families.”

The Cupcake Collection also has a location in New Orleans, operated by Francois’ sisters. It was important to Francois to teach her sisters, and extremely important, she says, to show other little brown girls that they can do what they believe if they see themselves doing it. She hopes to be the first CEO of color to run a major food brand in the nation.

“Whatever you believe you can have, you're right,” Francois says. “And that's the thing that I am spending my greatest amount of time sharing with people. I want to just leave a legacy that shows other people how they can also redeem their time. There are no mistakes in life. Everything that we've been doing is leading you from where it is that you are to where it is that you want to be.”