laurie shannon, 29, oshaWa
She bought an $800,000 house with the money she earned decorating cakes
i learned to BaKe as a kid with my mom, but I didn’t get into cake decorating until I was an adult. I learned everything I know from YouTube. In 2013, my now-husband, Kevin, and I started talking about creating our own cake-decorating channel. That September, I got a full-time job at a cupcake bakery. The next month, I started my YouTube channel. I was living with my parents in Pickering at the time, so Kevin filmed me in a storage area in their basement. I draped tablecloths over their boxes so they didn’t show up on camera.
I made treats and easy cakes at the beginning, then shifted to trendy designs, like Olaf from Frozen and a baby shower bump cake. I was only getting a few thousand views per video. Then, in March 2015, I made a Cinderella cake on a batteryoperated turntable, which spun around as if Cinderella was twirling on the dance floor. It got a million views. I thought, This is it. I’ve made it now. But that’s not how it works. Just because you get success on one video doesn’t mean you’re going to get success on all your videos, and we didn’t have another hit for a while. There were times when I wanted to quit because I put so much time and effort into it but I wasn’t making any money.
In May 2016, I quit my bakery job so I could focus on our channel. Several months later, we started making compilation videos: I would go through my archive, identify themes and put a bunch of clips together. Soon, they were getting a million views each, then 10 million, then 15 million. My princess cakes compilation ended up with 200 million views. The compilations have no dialogue, so they get a huge international audience. We went from 80,000 subscribers in February 2017 to one million in November 2017. Around that time, Kevin quit his job as a Zamboni driver to manage the business end of the operation—accounting, bookkeeping, analytics and virality research.
We sometimes shoot for 14 to 16 hours a day, and some videos take five days to shoot. Whenever I’m filming, I’m always making a cake for the first time—no practice runs. Then, if I mess, up, viewers can see how I overcome those mistakes. We also watch trends to see how we can reinvent them. We saw that mini cakes were trending, so I started creating mini animal cakes. They’ve received tens of millions of views.
This year, we were able to buy our 3,000square-foot dream home in North Oshawa, which cost more than $800,000. We’re transforming the basement into a studio with several filming areas, and we’re also looking into buying income properties.
The revenue never stops. Some of our superviral videos can earn six figures in ad revenue. We also do brand deals with companies like Squarespace, Hershey and Warner Bros, and we get paid for appearances. We were featured on Live With Kelly and Ryan twice, and last May, we went to a huge YouTuber event called Brandcast. I was decorating cakes in a booth next to Alicia Keys performing on stage. It was crazy.