Ruby and Karis are two best friends who started baking cupcakes together when they were just eight years old. They spent their childhood dreaming up homemade flavors and drawing floor plans for their perfect bakeshop. Over the years, they started taking orders solely via Instagram DMs, refining their craft, and even catering a wedding when they were just 12 years old.
Today, they are the co-owners of Sweet Stars Cupcakes, an online-based bakery specializing in handcrafted cupcakes for weddings, showers, birthdays and special events. What began with two little girls imagining a brick and mortar cupcake shop in Hawaii has become a business built on friendship, faith and plenty of frosting.
Their business is guided by three core values. Cupcakes, community and Christ. "I feel like creativity could be thrown in there as a fourth C," says Karis. Those values influence everything from community events and decorating nights to partnerships with local businesses.
And after baking together all of these years, they've created their own well-balanced partnership. "Throughout this whole process, we've really, really learned, and we know now that it really is a team effort and we both bring a lot of different skills to the table," says Karis. "Ruby is definitely more business-minded. I'm a little bit more creative, so I just have the big dreams and Ruby helps bring them into reality."
While Karis focuses on marketing, branding and creativity, Ruby oversees finances, recipe development and operations, but they intentionally share responsibilities."We feel like it's super important for us to learn from each other, especially when things pick up and get busy," says Karis. "It's important for us to be able to take over each other's tasks and pull up each other when the other person can't handle as much."
Ruby has enjoyed watching those roles evolve. "With baking, I am definitely the, 'How do I make this flavor taste like this?' Or 'What do we need to add?' Or 'This oven is different.' Just figuring out how to make it all work. And then Karis makes the most fluffy frosting ever."
Their love of baking has always been part of who they are. "I think it's always just been inside of us and deep down," says Karis. "I think we always knew that was what we really wanted to do out of life. And our parents really did teach us to, 'Do what you love and you won't work a day in your life.'"
Many of Sweet Stars' flavors can trace their roots back to childhood notebooks filled with recipes and ideas. "A lot of what we do, especially flavor and recipe-wise, we actually took those from when we were kids," Karis says. "We have hundreds of papers of our little kid handwritings of flavor ideas and little recipes that magic Ruby was coming up with when we were just eight years old." Now those childhood ideas are paired with customer feedback to create new seasonal cupcake collections.
When it comes to customer favorites, fresh ingredients set Sweet Stars apart. "I feel like we are definitely known for a lot of our fruit cupcakes," Ruby says. "We very much pride ourselves on using organic ingredients."
Growing up gluten- and dairy-free also inspired Ruby to make sure everyone could enjoy dessert. "Karis brought the idea of, 'Hey, we should make cupcakes you can eat too,'" Ruby says. Alongside favorites like strawberry, red velvet and chocolate peanut butter, Sweet Stars continues expanding its gluten- and dairy-free offerings. "Everyone deserves to have a treat," Karis says. "And so we want to make that accessible for everybody."
Although birthdays helped launch the business, weddings have quickly become one of their specialties. Karis experienced a particularly meaningful full-circle moment when she served Sweet Stars cupcakes at her own wedding.
"I got married in May and that was one of my very favorite things that we got to do," she says. "It was super cool for me to go down into my dessert room and just see our up-to-standard bridal-approved cupcakes. And they're ours in our room and it's just so cool to see that now there's brides out there that are using us for their cake."
For Ruby, helping create those cupcakes for her lifelong friend made the experience even more meaningful. "My very best friend, I don't have a sister, but I do because we're the closest thing to sisters," says Ruby. "It was just cool to see your best friend who's dreamed of her husband her whole life and then getting to put our childhood dream in that."
The name Sweet Stars also came straight from childhood. "We have drawings from when we were little of our dream store that we were going to open in Hawaii," says Karis. "For some reason the thought of us being stars in our parents' eyes just really stuck. And then obviously cupcakes are sweet."
As they considered other names before launching, they ultimately couldn't part with the original. "Having the old drawings and the pictures that just give it so much of a story, we were like, 'We can't change this,'" says Ruby.
Since launching, Sweet Stars has celebrated several milestones, from large corporate orders to community markets at The Factory. "I think honestly just launching the website too," says Ruby. "It just made it so official. And just seeing customer faces, people we don't even know that find us and we get to make cupcakes for them."
They currently bake from Ruby's Franklin home while planning for future growth. "We're working on getting a little central location," says Karis. "A storefront is obviously the goal."
Before opening a retail bakery, however, they hope to move into a commercial kitchen to better accommodate larger wedding and event orders. They also hope to make shipping cupcakes a reality. "We've had so many requests for that," says Karis. "We really want to figure out how we can market that in the best way."
For two friends who started with a dream, a notebook full of flavor ideas, and a conviction that cupcakes could be something more than dessert, Sweet Stars is quickly becoming exactly what they had always imagined. SweetStarsCupcakes.com / @sweetstarscupcakes