In January last year, Cake 9 entered the mushrooming online cake market with a rather niche target audience. But about a year and a month later, Cake 9 today has attracted a diverse customer base, and more importantly, retained them with its taste and quality that it says are its priority.
Cake 9 is a venture that Nishma Adhikari started as a sister company of Bidhee Software, where she is the Creative Director. Bidhee already had a clientele in many areas and Nishma had observed that cakes were exchanged and gifted in most, if not all, occasions by the clients and their customers. So, she started her venture to sell corporate cakes to the clients and personalize them with their logos and theme colors.
“Our clients loved the cakes and the idea. It was through them that others started requesting us for cake deliveries and eventually, we decided to cater to end users’ orders too,” shared Nishma. But for her to actually make that shift, the gap between the demand of cakes (ie 14,000 lbs) and its supply in Kathmandu, even with many bakeries and cake delivery services, became the deciding factor, she added.
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Cake 9 has its office at New Baneshwar and its cakes are baked at Lokanthali. A team of eight coordinates its operations as well as marketing and logistics, with a defined chain of work. Cake 9 deals in all the classic flavors but its chocomocha and ice-cream cakes are particularly famous. “We promote cakes with creams rather than fondant ones and give special focus on its taste, which I believe have kept our customers loyal,” she said.
Adhikari is an engineering student and a coder first, so computer had always been her world and she spent most of her time coding. But with Cake 9, she became an entrepreneur and was exposed to real, social world. “Different from when I started and why, new doors started opening for me. It taught me traits of a good leader, how to communicate better and be more social. And by stepping onto it, great opportunities like TechCamp, Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) 2017, GIST Tech-I along with SheEO Series and Nepalese Young Entrepreneurs’ Forum have come my way, giving me a better insight of the market, not only in Nepal but also abroad.”
Stepping further, she has now taken up another project that combines both of her worlds and has exposed her to a more social, maternal world. ProMom is an application that focuses on maternal and child health care, and provides tips to new mothers, and their family members with tips for safe motherhood from the day of conceiving to the day the child is two years old.
Customers get tips based on their roles and the app also helps take care of the mother. One can even communicate with the doctors tied with the app from smartphones or SMS. The app is still in planning and testing phase, but has received positive response from users and medical personnel alike.
“For ProMom I talked to many new mothers, medical experts and did a plenty of research to make it easy for new moms who are working, or in nuclear families and have very little knowledge about motherhood. During my research, I found that the Total Mortality Rate per thousand in the city was not much different than that of rural areas so there definitely was a gap in knowledge and ignorance in implementation,” said Adhikari talking about the planning phase of ProMom. She is taking ProMom to GIST Tech-I, and if she wins, she will be participating in Global Entrepreneurship Summit to be held in Turkey in April.
With different entrepreneurship journeys and experiences along the way, she feels that women entrepreneurs in Nepal still have negligible presence. She highly encourages women participation in all her ventures, and is constantly working on innovations as well as new designs for both Cake 9 and ProMom for better user experiences. ProMom will be soon launched and Cake 9 will have a new website, she added.
