Tucked away in the quaint Germantown neighborhood, just north of downtown, is an unassuming house that is home to a growing cupcake empire. Mignon Francois, a New Orleans native who would eventually call Nashville home, truly started from scratch. In 2008, she was just trying to make ends meet. Using the “follow your spirit” approach, Francois took the last five dollars she had for dinner one week and developed a recipe for sweet success. Today, The Cupcake Collection is a Nashville destination bakery with well over five million cupcakes sold.
“You know when you have a secret treasure that you want everybody to see, but you don’t want them to discover it because then you don’t want to not be able to get it?” Francois jokes about her first cupcake recipe and the catalyst for opening her first bakery.
Mignon Francois is full of life, and it shows in her work and business philosophy. She believes that even though cupcakes were at one time seen as a fad, the way the bakery approached cupcakes was very traditional.
“Our flavors should always speak to my Louisiana heritage. I’m always going to have flavors that resonate with people and their memories. That’s why I think The Cupcake Collection has been so successful,” she says.
The Cupcake Collection made its name on classic flavors, and the star of the show is its mainstay, the sweet potato cupcake. As Francois puts it, the flavor is “so yam good! If you meet a sweet potato cupcake anywhere else, it wants to be this one!” She was raised on sweet potatoes and wanted to make that a significant part of the menu. It’s a standout, not just at the bakery but in Nashville and beyond.
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While the classics put it on the map and keep the older generations happy, the bakery does follow the trends to appeal to its young customers. It’s a unique challenge to create something that makes its mark in a category that’s synonymous with tradition. Francois likes to give customers something familiar, but with a twist.
“I believe in following children,” she says. “There’s a Bible verse that says, “And a little child will lead them.” So, if what happened in the Bible was relevant and it’s supposed to be our basic instruction before leaving Earth, then I should look to that to inform my future.”
Francois turns to her own children and the younger employees at the bakery for advice on flavors – where they’re going, what they’re eating and anything else that’s relevant. For instance, her Millennial employees were going out and drinking espresso martinis, something that has been very trendy in recent years. At their urging, The Cupcake Collection introduced an espresso martini cupcake. It was a unique challenge to capture the essence of what made the flavor so beloved, but Francois was able to tweak an existing café au lait (coffee with milk) cupcake by adding cold brew and vodka to create something special.
Francois equates her cupcake ideas to Southern cooking in general, and more specifically to one of her favorites, gumbo.
“It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that to get a whole lot of flavor. That’s what gumbo is. It’s a pinch of this and pinch of that for a punch of this in your mouth! I feel like that’s how I create my flavors.”
As a Black-owned business (and first generation), The Cupcake Collection faces unique challenges and opportunities. Francois wants to be a representation of what a good business looks like, to give the people of the community, especially prospective business owners, something with which to aspire.
“Bringing this business out in the way that we have and in the magnitude that we have done it has been a banner for my community in a way that this belongs to them too, and it very much does,” she says.
Community is very important for Francois, not just as a Black business owner but as someone who truly cares for all the people in that community. The Cupcake Collection has a core value set that’s represented by a CIRCLE. That acronym stands for celebration, integrity, respect, community, leadership and excellence. As Francois puts it, that C in community is the base that holds up the rest of the layers of the cake.
With this attention to detail, not just in her cupcakes but in the way she runs her business and in the way she treats every person she interacts with, it’s no wonder that Mignon Francois is a baking star on the rise.