The Tastemakers by David Sax Read Free Book Online

When I met Abrams in 2012 the company had seven American locations and four in the Middle East. “We get three to five international franchise requests daily,” said Abrams, who opened the Dubai store in 2009 as a lark. “That ratcheted us up just by being in that part of the world.” He saw potential everywhere, from Turkey and Japan, to Rwanda and, yes, even Paraguay. “When I go to Spain I might have sixty stores. Brazil could support twelve to twenty stores. We’re probably looking at three hundred international stores in five years.… As much as America is disliked in many countries, our popular culture is overwhelming, and that’s the culture that most of the world follows. Especially their middle class.”
    Even though the cupcake trend began in rarefied, elite enclaves like the West Village and Beverly Hills, those were just the entry point to the mass market. “Cupcakes are becoming more mainstream,” said an executive at Crumbs who didn’t want to be named,who explained that the company’s expansion plan was to target malls in the heart of America. “Those malls have more fluid shoppers. It definitely caters to a different type. Yes, it could be high end, but it also could be potential for people who want to buy an affordable cupcake who are not affluent, and that’s a huge opportunity. You wouldn’t compromise the quality of the product. We’d maybe change the pricing of it and expect a higher volume.”
    The elephant in the room is that at some point the mania for cupcakes will subside and the market won’t be able to support an increasing number of dedicated cupcakeries. The public’s interest in the trend will move on to donuts, some say, or maybe a pie revival, and many cupcake shops will either close or branch out to serve more products. “I, too, wonder how sustainable it is,” said the Crumbs executive. “Is it a short-lived trend and something you can sustain and build a business out of this? We grapple with that as well. It’s the million-dollar question.” Or, in Crumb’s case, a multimillion-dollar one.
    The media had been calling the end of cupcake fever since the trend began. Joel Stein, writing in
Time
, called them a “sickness” in 2006, and
Vanity Fair
, in a 2009 essay on the epidemic of cute in America, likened eating cupcakes to sitting on your couch in a Snuggie while gazing at photos of kittens online (though cupcakes are still served at the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party). Business writers predicted the cupcake trend would implode as it grew, like Krispy Kreme donuts had a decade earlier. “In America, bubbles form because any good business idea gets funded a dozen times over,” wrote Daniel Gross in
Slate
back in 2009. “That’s the American way. Cupcakes are now showing every sign of going through the bubble cycle. The first-movers get buzz and revenues, gain critical mass, and start to expand rapidly. This inspires less-well-capitalized second- and third-movers, who believe there’s room enough for them, and encourages established firms in a related industry to jump in.” The recession would right this, Gross predicted, as people traded down for more affordable options. Others searched for the “next cupcake,” holding up whoopie pies, macarons, and cake pops as the rightful dessert salvation. Instead, the opposite happened. Cupcakes onlygrew further. The recession swelled the ranks of cupcake bakeries (led by newly unemployed professionals) and eaters. Cake pops and whoopie pies flashed in the pan. Each time someone predicted that cupcakes had jumped the shark, they were forced to eat their words as cupcakes rose to new heights.
    I’m not immune to cupcake fatigue. Where I was once excited about a cupcake shop opening in my neighborhood, I now shake my head and sigh when yet another pops up nearby. Two years ago I moved into a new house, and a few weeks