Alabama concert promoter discovers sweet, new purpose
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Near the end of March, a couple of weeks into the COVID-19 outbreak that put normal on hold across America, Jay Wilson’s wife asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday this year.
Wilson, who lives in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood, requested a homemade cheesecake with a buttery, graham-cracker crust — just like the one he remembered from their visits to the Carnegie Deli in New York City.
So, Teresa Wilson made her husband a cheesecake.
“We sat down as a family and ate it,” Jay Wilson recalls, “and we all looked at each other and said, ‘That’s better than the Carnegie Deli cheesecake that we used to get.’”
A concert promoter with Birmingham’s Red Mountain Entertainment, Wilson had spent those last two weeks of March canceling and postponing shows his company had booked at music venues in Alabama and Mississippi.
Now, he was stuck at home with not a lot to do.
So, with his wife walking him through all the steps, he baked more than a dozen cheesecakes over the next couple of weeks and delivered one to each of his colleagues at Red Mountain Entertainment.
“Just to say, ‘Hey, here’s a little gift, and I miss you,’” Wilson said.
They all thanked him and told him how much they loved the cheesecakes.
Wilson, though, realized he was onto something bigger when he got a text from Michael Trucks, a Birmingham lawyer and one of Wilson’s partners at Red Mountain Entertainment.
“This is the truth,” Wilson said. “He said, ‘Ever since the Carnegie Deli in New York City closed, I figured that the possibility of great cheesecake was gone with the times until today.’
“And I said to myself, ‘That’s so weird that he referenced the Carnegie Deli. That’s my favorite, and if Michael is saying that, it really must be good.’”
That was all the inspiration he needed.
Right away, Wilson started putting together a business plan.
He would make hundreds of cheesecakes, market and sell them through email and social media, and then give all the profits to some of the behindthe-scenes concert workers who have been hard-hit because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If the sound and lights guys are having trouble, that means the stagehands, the runners, the production assistants — all the vendors and support people that we use — they’re all going to be in trouble, too,” Wilson said.
“I said to myself, ‘OK, I’m going to make these cakes; we’re going to raise some money.’”
He came up with a name, Jay’s Cheesecakes, and a slogan, “Handmade in Homewood.” He called his charity the Cakes for Crew Fund.
A longtime friend, Rich Albright of the Creative 369 advertising agency, designed a Jay’s Cheesecakes logo overnight, along with mock-ups for branded merchandise such as T-shirts, aprons and coffee mugs.
Alex Colee, a project manager at Red Mountain Entertainment, set up the Jay’s Cheesecakes Facebook and Instagram accounts, and she created a Google Drive file to keep track of all the orders and finances.
Another friend, Jerry Flippen of Flippen Media, shot videos and took photos for the Jay’s Cheesecakes social media accounts, and Joe O’Brien of Event Concessions donated and delivered a double-sided commercial refrigerator to store all the cakes and supplies in Wilson’s basement.
By April 23, Jay’s Cheesecakes was up and running, and the orders started pouring in.
“So many of these kinds of things start with your neighbors supporting you, which is exactly what happened,” Wilson said. “All of our good friends around the neighborhood ordered one cake, two cakes, four cakes.
“I’ve got a real estate friend who ordered 10,” he adds. “I’ve got a mortgage person, they made three orders of five. One of my really good friends is a salesperson. He made two orders of 20. They are buying those cakes to support us, but they are turning around and giving them to their clients.
“We kept spreading the word, and about two weeks into it, a lot of the orders that started coming in were from names that I didn’t know. That just tells me that the word of mouth is spreading.”
Within a couple of weeks, Jay’s Cheesecakes had raised enough money for the Cakes for Crew Fund to start handing out its first relief checks.
“I think we probably gave out our first check at the beginning of May, and we gave out four checks for $400 apiece,” Wilson said.
In the two and a half months since Wilson launched his charity business, he said they have sold about 440 cheesecakes and donated $6,750 to out-of-work concert crew members through the Cakes for Crew Fund.
Wilson said he checks in with some of the venue managers every so often and asks them if they know anybody who could use a little help getting through a tough stretch.
Following a conversation with Wilson, for example, Michael Sellers, co-owner of Avondale Brewing Company in Birmingham, received some money from the Cakes for Crew Fund to help some of the people who work concerts at his outdoor venue.
“We didn’t specify how they used it,” Sellers said. “It could go [toward] putting groceries on the table, paying car insurance, paying rent. They’re just using it just to get through this.”
Helping those folks who help make the music come alive is what the Cakes for Crew Fund is all about, Wilson said.
“You hear stories about somebody [who] can’t pay their mortgage and is about to get kicked out of his house,” he cites another example. “I went to Regions Bank and got a $750 cashier’s check and took it and gave it to somebody to give to the guy.”
Last month, after some of the Nashville agents and managers with whom Red Mountain Entertainment does business put in orders for about 40 cheesecakes, Wilson and Colee packed up four large coolers, drove to Nashville and spent the day going door-todoor delivering them.
“Once we did that big order in Nashville, I opened up a Cakes for Crew Fund in Nashville,” Wilson said. “I went to a couple of close agent friends of ours and said, ‘In yall’s world up in Nashville, find one or two people that are not having a good run at it right now.’ So, they came back to me last week, and I cut a couple of checks and sent them to a couple of people in Nashville.”
Each check also comes with a note from Jay’s Cheesecakes and the Cakes for Crew Fund.
“By baking cheesecakes in our home kitchen and selling them to friends and business associates in Southeast cities, we are feeling an incredible spirit of community and togetherness!” the note says. “Welcome to the Jay’s Cheesecake family!”
When he first started in April, Wilson was buying most of his ingredients at the grocery store, but he quickly realized he needed to buy in bulk — 25-pound bags of sugar, 32-pound buckets of sour cream and 15 to 20 threepound blocks of cream cheese — to save on costs.
He has his costs down to about $8 a cake, which means roughly $17 of each one he sells goes into the Cakes for Crew Fund to give to the crew members in need.
The Wilsons have a Thermador double-oven gas range in their kitchen, so he’s able to bake six cheesecakes at a time and churns out about 40 to 50 a week. As word continues to spread, he’s prepared to ramp up production.
Teresa Wilson, who works as a traffic manager for the Intermark Group marketing firm, still helps her husband with some of the prep work on the front end and the packaging on the back end. For the most part, though, she has handed the cheesecake baking operation over to Jay.
“Like she said, ‘It doesn’t say Teresa’s Cheesecakes on the label; it says Jay’s Cheesecakes,’” he said.
Wilson is in the process of moving his little cheesecake factory out of their home kitchen and into a commercial kitchen that a friend has offered to let him use for free.
“The beautiful thing is, it’s in Homewood,” Wilson said. “So, the cakes are still ‘Handmade in Homewood.’”
For now, the cakes are only available for pick up at Wilson’s house in the Hollywood section of Homewood. However, he does make deliveries for larger orders.
Also, last week, Jay’s Cheesecakes began shipping nationwide, and so far, Wilson said, they have received orders from Nashville, New York, Los Angeles and San Diego. Shipping costs vary according to the destination.