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I am 225: Haley Thompson

  • By Meredith Whitten

Haley Thompson is not your typical teenager. At 19 years old, she is one of the youngest business owners in the region—and a successful one, too.

After graduating from East Ascension High School in 2015, the Prairieville native opted to forgo scholarship offers—including one from the Louisiana Culinary Institute—and start her own bakery instead. She opened Bliss Patisserie in Prairieville that September.

The popular shop offers cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, Italian ices and cake jars—the latter being Thompson’s own creation, Mason jars filled with cake and icing.

Thompson hails from a family of entrepreneurs. Her sister opened her own bridal shop when she was 17, and her parents own a real estate business. With that in mind, it’s not surprising this teenager was confident enough to open a second location of Bliss less than a year after the first. The new location opened at the Mall of Louisiana in April 2016.

Here, Thompson shares how she turned her passion for baking into a profession. blisspatisserie.com

“I started baking sweet potato pies with my grandpa at Thanksgiving, and we would sell some of them. A few years later, I asked my mom to get me a baking kit. I would watch YouTube videos about baking over and over. I’d study them.

I started off doing strictly cupcakes. Cupcakes are cute and bite-sized. It’s like having your own personal cake.

I was baking out of my house, but that got very overwhelming. I was still in high school, so I could only bake on weekends. My mom told me I was taking over her kitchen.

What led to having the bakery was a Thanksgiving box I put together. It was just a bunch of sweets I made [and arranged] in a box. I posted it on Instagram and went to bed. When I woke up, I had more than 100 orders. My mom said, ‘Delete the post. You can’t take on any more orders.’

The first day we opened, I didn’t know what to prepare for. I thought, ‘Do I make 100 cupcakes?’ I thought I’d overshoot it, so I made 450. We opened at 10 a.m., and by noon we were sold out. We had to close for a couple of hours so I could make more.

I can wake up every morning and honestly say that I love what I do. It’s a true reflection of who I am.”

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.


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