Sweet Petit Desserts Opens Sweet New Retail Space

Taren Kinebrew, owner of Sweet Petit Deserts.

A local lady turned her affection for confection into a booming business. Sweet Petit Desserts owner Taren Kinebrew has loved desserts since she was a young girl. “My grandmother and I baked all the time when I was little and this is where I learned to bake, and her techniques,” Kinebrew says. “We spent lots of time together baking, which would often lead to messes. The best part was great baked items, which mostly got eaten right out of the oven.” 

Kinebrew started Sweet Petit Desserts in August 2009 after falling in love with a dessert restaurant in San Diego. “I absolutely fell in love with it; their creations were phenomenal,” says Kinebrew. “When I came home it stayed with me.” After having a conversation with a friend about selling her desserts, Kinebrew thought about it and then decided she would try her hand at it.

Since launching her business, Kinebrew has been baking out of her home to provide desserts for a variety of events: weddings, baby showers, company events, you name it. She also did some wholesaling with Buskin Bakery and baking for individual clients. “Part of the concept of my business is baking to order,” says Kinebrew. “It’s creating desserts with real ingredients people can recognize and making them as fresh as possible.”

Kinebrew is taking her business to the next level by opening a new retail space, which will open in September 2013. The store will be located at 1426 Race St near Washington Park. “It’s a very contemporary look. It doesn’t look like a bakery,” she says. “It’s a very trendy shop, the reason being I am always looking for the next thing and creating bite-sized desserts people don’t see now.”

Kinebrew credits much of her success to graduating from Bad Girl Ventures (BGV), a highly localized micro-lending organization focused on funding woman-owned start-ups in the Greater Ohio region. BGV enables female entrepreneurs to build and sustain well-managed, profitable businesses through guidance, education and access to capital.

BGV combines micro-lending with a nine week business development course. Each three hour class is taught by successful business owners and professionals from the local community with in-depth experience in their fields. Each class consists of a two hour classroom session followed by a one hour one-on-one coaching session where experts in the industry spend time answering questions in a “speed date” type setting.

Not only is Kinebrew a 2012 BGV graduate, but she also won a $25,000 low-interest loan for her business. According to Kinebrew, “The program helped me fine-tune my business, financial, and marketing plans and allowed me to network with people I wouldn’t normally meet.”

For Sweet Petit Desserts, the store will serve as a launching pad for many more plans Kinebrew has for the future. “I hope people will pay close attention to what the next thing is,” she explains. “We are in the wraps of something that I can’t really share, but people will be interested in what we do next.”

For more information about Sweet Petit Desserts, please visit sweetpetitdesserts.com. For more information on Bad Girl Ventures, please visit www.badgirlventures.com.