Small Business Accelerator: Bake Your Mark

How Stufona Latta built two brands and a clear path to growth

Stufona Latta has spent years building Bake Your Mark, a boutique dessert business in South Carolina’s Upstate. Her business is known for custom, handcrafted confections. Organizations and businesses come to her for custom desserts, corporate gifts, branded products, event offerings and white-label work.

Along the way, Stufona created something all her own: 86mores. It’s a signature dessert with a distinctive molasses-forward flavor and a true South Carolina story.

When Stufona joined the WeShopSC Small Business Accelerator, she had two strong opportunities in front of her and one key question. How could one business grow both at the same time?

Two brands, one family

Before the accelerator, Bake Your Mark and 86mores did not have a clearly defined relationship. Bake Your Mark already had a strong identity. 86mores was an opportunity to build a distinct product brand around her signature dessert.

The goal was not to make the two brands identical. It was to build two individual brands that clearly belong to the same family.

Together with the Beyond Main team, Stufona established 86mores as the consumer-facing hero product. Bake Your Mark continues as the home for custom and business-to-business work. That distinction gives each brand a specific job. It also lets customers and business partners move naturally between the two.

The work included:

• A comprehensive 86mores brand guide covering personality, voice, values and messaging
• A refined 86mores logo and a complementary color palette inspired by South Carolina and the Upstate
• Brand taglines and positioning language
• A cohesive visual relationship between 86mores and Bake Your Mark

A clearer path to market

With the brands defined, the next question was where 86mores should go first.

Rather than treating 86mores as one more item in a larger assortment, the strategy positions it as a recognizable regional signature. A signature like that can open doors to larger business relationships.

The team built a hospitality-first go-to-market strategy:

• The priority market: boutique hotels, where 86mores can become a memorable local touch for guests.
• Secondary channels: coffee shops and specialty retailers.
• Down the road: a future strategy for grocery and convenience retail, and eventually direct-to-consumer sales.

A stronger foundation

Behind the brand and the strategy, Stufona and the Beyond Main team also:

• set pricing direction for her products;
• restructured her website around both brands;
• improved her SEO and digital positioning;
• and laid the groundwork for wholesale growth and future e-commerce.

What’s next for Stufona

Stufona now has two connected brands, each with a clear audience, and a focused plan to grow both. Her long-term goal is to make 86mores a recognizable Upstate dessert, while Bake Your Mark keeps serving the businesses and organizations that have trusted her for years.

Bring this kind of support to your community

Small businesses are the heart of every Main Street. With the right guidance at the right time, a business like Bake Your Mark can turn a great idea into a lasting brand.

The WeShopSC Small Business Accelerator, led by Beyond Main, gives small business owners personalized coaching and strategic guidance built around their goals. You may be a town, a Main Street program, an economic development organization or a community partner. Either way, there are ways to bring this kind of support to the businesses in your area, including sponsoring a business or launching an accelerator program of your own.

Reach out to the Beyond Main team to start the conversation. We’d love to help your community’s small businesses grow.