A Bakery Burns, And An Entrepreneur Pulls Herself Together

Danaris Mazara got the call at 4 a.m. There was a fire, a bad fire, at Sweet Grace Heavenly Cakes, the bakery she founded in 2008.

She rushed down, standing outside as the smoke poured out of the building, praying that they would be able to put it out quickly. At first, the firefighters thought the blaze started in the basement of her building; gradually, they realized it was in the basement of the liquor store next store. The smoke had set off fire alarms on her side.

The understandable delay caused precious time. By the time the fire was out, Sweet Grace was a total loss. The building had to be demolished because of the chemicals used to put out the fire.

“I was so desperate to tell them to hurry up,” Mazara says. “But there was nothing to do. It was one of those times when you’re falling down in pieces.”

Seth Levine and I wrote about Mazara in The New Builders, published two years ago by John Wiley & Sons. It’s a book about this generation of small business owners in America, and the obstacles they face in establishing their businesses. Seth and I heard about the fire when he planned to stop by Sweet Grace on a visit to Massachusetts, but couldn’t reach anyone at the bakery to plan the visit.

A Resource for the Dominican Community

Mazara launched Sweet Grace Heavenly Cakes in 2008, when her husband was out of work, and they had a newborn baby to take care of. She used $37 in food stamps to buy ingredients for flan, which she sold in the break room in Samsung, where she worked. Over 15 years, she expanded into cakes, and eventually had a business that employed more than a dozen people, mostly women, and owned a store in Lawrence, Mass. She had met the governor and made ties throughout the community.

Mazara believes she will be able to reopen in about a year, pending finding a new location – and “the moment she opens her doors, the community will support her,” says Frank Carvalho, a Brazilian immigrant, entrepreneur and founder of a local community development finance institution, Mill Cities Community Investments.

“My heart was broken when I heard,” he says. He has been helping her come to terms with the loss, and working with Mazara and her husband, Andres. In the early years as they were building the bakery, he sat with them to help them learn business planning. Now he is once again walking with them. “When you sit at the kitchen table with someone, you become part of my extended family,” he says.

Yet, the odds are long. More than 90% of businesses fail within two years after a disaster (some because they never reopened, and others that reopened and failed), according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Disasters, meanwhile, are coming with increasing frequency, even those not related to climate change. For instance, there were 116,500 fires in businesses in the 10 years from 2012 – 2021, up 20% over the previous decade, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

Business Interruption Insurance Is Crucial

Mazara was smart in many things, including in that she listened to advice from experts and had a good insurance agent. She had insurance for the physical location and – luckily — business interruption insurance.

But it is still an agonizing process of paperwork, insurance claims and grinding decisions. For instance, the city offered her a space in a shared kitchen, but she did the math on how many cakes she could produce she realized she would not be able to cover the rent after the first three months were up.

There are the usual stupidities in the bureaucracy: For instance, because she told the unemployment compensation agency that she planned to rebuild, she said, her claim was initially turned down, leaving the family with no means of support while they wait for the insurance money.

Mazara spent weeks in tears and still sounded shaken when we talked to her, nearly two months later. On social media, she has begged for the community to support her employees over the year it will take her to re-open. Two Go-Fund-Me campaigns have raised a total of about $4,500.

She was disappointed that EforAll, an organization that helps get small businesses run by women and people of color off the ground, offered little in the way of substantive support. An EforAll program helped give Mazara her first business training and offered introductions throughout the community (including to Seth and me).

Danaris served as an informal spokeswoman for EforAll and was a star fundraiser. She was typically – and courageously — open about her feelings now. “I was very sad about it. They used my image and my story,” she said. “But they haven’t said OK don’t worry, we’re here for you.”

Meralis Hood, the organization’s CEO, offered this response by email: “We have been very proud and invested in Danaris' success,” she wrote. “As such, we have been in contact with her several times since the fire and have offered advice and support. Sadly this is not our first entrepreneur to run into this type of challenge, and as a 501c3 with over 1,400 ventures now started, our policy is not to provide financial assistance even during difficult times because it would not be sustainable or scalable.”

The ICE Office Next Door

Mazara has overcome many obstacles. She came to the United States by way of Puerto Rico, speaking no English, and quit a job after one of her supervisors mocked her for trying a few words in English. She learned the language and became a supervisor, herself. Her husband, Andres, whom we also got to know, worked at a paper plant that closed during the Great Recession of 08-09. The couple has two daughters.

Eventually, Mazara’s success at the bakery turned her into a representative of the Dominican community in Lawrence. Her bakery backed up to an ICE office, the juxtaposition an example of America’s conflicted embrace of immigrants. They are more than twice as likely as people born in the country to start the small businesses that comprise more than 40% of the economy, yet often face discrimination and in extreme cases deportation.

Mazara never let her stature as an embodiment of the modern-day American Dream blind her to the reality that she was one in a million, usually thanking God for how far she had come.

Most immigrants with small-business dreams don’t find the circumstances that, combined with her willpower, enabled her to build the small business. She hired women like her, some supporting children back in the Dominican Republic, stayed up past midnight on many nights doing paperwork for the business. She spoke often about her business and supplied cakes for celebrations in her community – the fanciest and tastiest cakes you could imagine, for weddings, birthday parties and quincineras. Small tubs of flan had a place of honor in a refrigerator by the door.

When the ICE agents stopped in, she gave them cake samples.

Now, she’s facing the prospects of doing it all again. The people who know her believe she will. “Every time I pass by where the bakery was, I think about everything I built, to get destroyed in one day,” she says. “It’s very, very difficult.”