Like her company’s signature products, FANCY SPRINKLES® founder and CCO Lisa Stelly’s veneer is a unique blend: fun and colorful, edgy and cool. A little naughty even. But behind the blonde-haired, sequin gown-wearing persona you see on social media, Lisa is about substance as much as aesthetics — and that goes for her sprinkles, too.
Stelly, an entrepreneur and mom of three girls, has gone through some shit and come out the other side more confident than ever. In fact, it was during a low point in her life that she began her sweet journey to success.
“After my second daughter was born in 2015, I had really bad postpartum anxiety and depression,” said Stelly. “I was looking for things to just make me feel better, something that I could do that had nothing to do with being a mom. I really just wanted a hobby that was mine and mine alone.”
After falling down the rabbit hole of cake decorating videos on Instagram (look, we’ve all been there), Stelly discovered a hobby that channeled her artistic interests, minus the scrutiny of more subjective art mediums. “I can look at a painting and go, ‘wow, that’s just magnificent,’ and someone else can look at it and go, ‘I don’t get it,’” said Stelly. “No one looks at a cake and says, ‘I don’t get it.’ With a beautifully decorated cake, you look at it and go, ‘OMG that’s amazing, I wanna eat it.’”
Stelly has her daughter’s “very specific” birthday cake request to thank for her first foray into cake decorating. Stelly binged some YouTube tutorials, bought the necessary tools, and to her surprise, she pulled it off.