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Discovered! 505
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How to Make
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Small Business
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You Can Own
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Actually, her business is just that: artfully decorating cube sugar and selling it to the larger department stores, candy stores, and the better bakeries. Demand for the attractive sugar lumps is heavy and Mrs. Shay nets a pleasing profit from the business she conducts in her home, with the breakfast nook table as her workbench. Her tools are few and the cost of her materials is not great, and thus her outlay of capital for getting started in business was virtually negligible.

The whole thing began just a little more than two years ago when Mrs. Shay was taken suddenly with the idea of trying to do something colorful with plain white sugar lumps for a wedding anniversary party. She mixed up some icing, dabbed away at the cubes in an effort to create colored rosebuds on them. Today Mrs. Shay characterizes that first attempt as "crude," and perhaps it was, by her present standards, but it was sufficiently artistic to attract the attention of friends who asked her to try her hand at doing the same thing for them.

MRS. SHAY persisted in her creative effort until the colored roses actually looked like roses; then she spread out and made other flowers and more intricate designs, practicing until she was adept at it and could do the work rapidly. For the first few months, the colorful sugar lumps circulated among her friends only and then one day, strictly on a hunch, she boxed several dozen of them in cardboard boxes, thirty-six to a box, and called at a department store. A buyer took one look at them and purchased the lot, asking when he could get more—and Mrs. Shay was in a profitable business of her own. She promptly went to work on something of a production line basis and found a ready market for all she can turn out.

Mrs. Shay uses extra hard cube sugar, because it has a smoother surface than the softer variety. And after a limited venture in using the oblong-shaped sugar, she returned to cubes alone, finding that they sell more readily. Her decorative material is an icing, or paste, made by beating up an egg white and adding powdered sugar until the desired consistency is attained. She uses a thin paste for outline work, fine lines, and initials, and a thicker, or stiffer paste for the main object on the cube, such as a rose, so that it will stand firmly while hardening. Also, the thicker icing lacks any objectionable gloss.

The paste is colored by placing small portions of it in custard cups and adding standard food coloring, which comes in paste form, save for the blue which she buys in powder form. Paste is preferable to liquid coloring in order to prevent thinning of the icing. Since the paste coloring is purchased in large jars, Mrs. Shay now and then finds it necessary to add a bit of glycerine to it to prevent undue drying.

Mrs. Shay uses cake decorating tools to create the fine designs on the sugar cubes, the type to which a small cloth bag is attached for holding the decorative paste. She found, however, that these cake tools were much too crude for her use and she adapted them to fine work by squeezing the ends of them with pliers and then filing them to the desired fineness. She uses fine jewelers' files in shaping the holes, as well as jewelers' cutting tools. She has an assortment of these decorative tools, all shaped for the particular designs she may be making at the moment. Some emit a very thin stream of paste, while the icing from others may be in the form of a fine ribbon, depending upon the design she is creating.

MRS. SHAY works on an assembly line method in the interest of speeding production as much as possible and a single step in the decorative operation may see only a bit of green added to the figure she is creating. For example, if she is making a design that takes four colors of paste, such as a daffodil, or a pansy, her first step will see only one color, perhaps green, applied to a tray of several dozen sugar lumps. The second step may see yellow added to the entire order, and so on until the design is completed. Changing tools and colors to complete a design on a single cube at one sitting would prove impractical from the standpoint of attaining any speed at all in production.

As an improved merchandising measure, Mrs. Shay soon discarded the cardboard boxes in which she was selling the sugar lumps and had clear plastic boxes made to order and shipped to her in lots of 1,000. These tightly covered boxes hold thirty lumps of sugar and are an attractive display in themselves. As a matter of fact, cost of these boxes, 10 cents each, is Mrs. Shay's chief item of expense, but she found that it pays dividends to merchandise her product properly, in a manner to insure that it may be seen and appreciated.

Mrs. Shay is somewhat reticent about revealing her actual costs and margin of profit. However, some idea of her return may be gathered from the fact that when she was selling the boxes on her own, she received 75 cents apiece for them. She now sells directly to department stores, candy stores and bakeries which, in turn, retail the boxes of thirty lumps for $1.25. It may be assumed that Mrs. Shay receives at least 75 cents per box, and perhaps a bit more. Beyond the cost of the plastic box, materials comprise a small item and thus the chief item involved in production is labor. An estimate of the total cost of materials in turning out the thirty decorated sugar lumps, box included, would range around 20 cents. Her net margin, then, labor excluded, would be around 60 cents per box.

MRS. SHAY'S actual output depends largely upon how complicated and intricate the design she is making. Her fastest number is the rose, which she finds less difficult than any other design. In a long day she can turn out forty boxes of roses, and upon occasion, to fill a rush order, she has turned out 300 boxes of roses in one week—an admittedly long work week. This speed applies only to roses, however, and other designs require much more time. Her most difficult box is the Christmas number which contains sugar cubes decorated with bells, wreaths, candles, poinsettias, fireplaces and Santa Clauses. She finds she can turn out no more than seventy-five such boxes in a week, a fact which leads Mrs. Shay to point out she could not make money if she had to produce Christmas boxes twelve months out of the year. It is only the easier, quicker designs which allow her to maintain an average of profitable production speed. As an idea of time consumed on the Christmas boxes, Mrs. Shay says that about seven minutes are required to make the intricate head of Santa Claus on one sugar lump. The sale of these special, seasoned boxes is heavy, however, with their slow production balanced by her speed on others.