COMMUNITY STORIES: ALEXIS DOELLINGER + ASH CASTRO-MERRIAM
I jumped from Illinois to Arkansas to Texas, and I am now in Arizona.
My relationship to my creativity is a similar story. I have always been what I like to describe a “craft dolphin”. Diving headfirst into learning one craft then jumping straight into the next one.
Baking was always something I did on occasion for fun. It was never one of my main hobbies like crochet or cross-stitch, but I always enjoyed it.
However, this all changed when I started baking with Ash. It quickly became one of my favorite things to do, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else with Student-Made.
Like with my creative hobbies, I have jumped around with what I want to do with my life quite a bit. I wanted to be a zoologist, then an epidemiologist, then a psychologist, and when I hit high school, I took my first ASL class and wanted to be an interpreter. I was formerly a Deaf Studies major and had an amazing experience in those classes but I slowly felt like this wasn’t the pathway for me.
I realized I want to teach. I have always worked well with kids and have a love for learning and sharing what I learn with others. Elementary Education just felt like the perfect fit after a while.
Growing up, my aunt was always the dedicated baker for family events. In late elementary school, I decided I wanted to start trying to take over baking for some of these events.
This continued love of baking is eventually what led me to Student-Made.
I first became intrigued by this a few years ago, when I learned that my mom used to work as a forensic investigator. Starting at the UofA, I was initially unsure if I really wanted to go down that route of study, so I started in Deaf studies instead.
But after a while, as a lifelong enjoyer of the sciences, I started to miss that kind of learning, so I decided to take the chance on Criminal Justice Studies, and I wound up loving it! I am now working on deciding a minor to go with my major, and figuring out specifically what kind of forensic work I want to get into.
We make all of our products from scratch. It has been over a year since we started baking together and six months since we started our business. Individually, we have been baking for years and it has been a mutual passion.
Because of this, we knew joining Student-Made was an option but didn’t think we had anything worth selling. When we were baking fruit tarts together for the first time, we realized we wanted to share our food with others.
With advice from Hannah, we decided to reach out to Student-Made to see if a baking business was even a possibility, and the rest is history!
Since we obviously cannot hold onto unsold products between shops, we need to bake everything fresh each time. This results in at least 3 full days of baking.
As much as we love to bake, this can be difficult because we both struggle with chronic pain.
We have also learned when it is best to limit the amount of pop-ups we attend so we can have a good work/life balance.
We attribute this award to our incredibly successful first pop-up where we sold so many of our baked goods and had a lot of happy customers. We are incredibly grateful to receive this award and are committed to keep up the hard work.
Our time trying to actively sell and market our products as well as the community’s support have helped build our self-confidence immensely.
The people in our community have been so incredibly kind and helpful. We hope that we can be that for other creators (and provide them with yummy treats!)
Our dream would be to have our own little bakery in town. In the meantime, we plan to continue selling out of a home kitchen and building up to that dream.
A potential challenge could be if we don’t end up living in the same area post-grad. If this possibility becomes a reality, we would still like to continue working together to sell what we bake in separate locations.
