From her kitchen counter to Amazon to a million bottles sold

A baby shower cake changed the course of Liz Butts’s career a few years ago. As she put together the ingredients for the cake, she realized she needed a custom sprinkle color she couldn’t find anywhere, so she colored her own at her kitchen counter. She bought plain white nonpareils and mixed in the food coloring she already had on hand.

At the time, she worked in corporate finance in the oil and gas industry, “which is what most people do in Houston.” By night she decorated cakes, and she loved the creative work even if she never believed it alone could replace her income.

“I love the creative process of making and decorating cakes,” she said. “I was getting so much fulfillment out of doing that.”

A few days after making that first batch of sprinkles, she saw an opportunity.

“I remember texting my husband and saying, ‘You know, I think I could probably sell these. If I need them, maybe other people do, too.’”

Her husband wasn’t sold, but he saw the risk as low. Three months later, in March 2017, she launched the Sprinkle Pop website with four blends. She sold $1,000 in the first month and by the end of that year, she had left her job.

Butts focused on creating curated, color-coordinated blends tailored to specific occasions. She mixed decorettes, nonpareils, candy pearls, and confetti for texture and to create a premium look. She calls the category “bougie sprinkles.”

“You can add those to your cupcakes that you made at home, and now they look like they’re a professionally decorated dessert,” Butts added.

Quality is why the company makes everything in the US. What began in her home kitchen is now an 8,500-square-foot, third-party-audited food manufacturing facility in Houston with a team of about 15 people.

“Being able to create jobs in my community in Houston is so fulfilling,” she said.

Much of the work is still done by hand. Royal icing decorations are piped one by one and in a year, the business produces more than a million of those decorations. Sprinkles are also colored by hand, using Pantone color-matching to hit the latest trends. Sprinkle Pop offers over 40 colors versus the 8-12 individual, solid sprinkle colors that a standard manufacturer might carry.

In 2018, a little over a year after launching Sprinkle Pop, Butts started selling in Amazon’s store. She had learned at a conference that roughly “60 percent of product searches start on Amazon,” and her small team was struggling to keep up with the “mini viral moments” that kept outpacing fulfillment. “We would be silly not to try and be there,” she said.

The results followed. About 50 percent of the company’s sales now come from Amazon, with the rest from food service customers and bulk manufacturing lines. Sprinkle Pop also partners with several local hospitality chains on custom blends. Her proudest milestone is a physical one: “The thing that I’m most proud of at Sprinkle Pop was when I sold my millionth bottle of sprinkles.”

Butts leans on a few Amazon programs to run the business her way. She has tapped into Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), a program that lets sellers outsource order fulfillment to Amazon and offer customers free, two-day shipping through Prime, since 2019. FBA took the fulfillment bottleneck off her small team and got orders out faster.

Amazon Ads, which helps independent sellers connect with shoppers, keeps Sprinkle Pop visible as competition grows, Butts said. “It’s one of the better return-on-investment ad platforms out there,” she added, helping shoppers searching broadly for “sprinkles” find her occasion-specific mixes.

“Amazon Ads has definitely helped us grow our business. When we started bringing those on, it effectively doubled our revenue, getting our product in front of more customers much more quickly,” Butts explained.

Buy with Prime, which independent sellers use on their own websites to offer Prime benefits to shoppers, moved fulfillment on Sprinkle Pop’s website onto Amazon’s logistics, replacing a cumbersome mix of three channels where “one of the channels was always suffering.” That shift, she said, lifted “a huge, huge labor cost” and freed her to focus on new products, like the recently launched Cookie Pearls line.

The company is now a family business. Butts’ husband, Sean, came on full-time about a year ago as Chief Operating Officer, allowing Butts to focus more on creativity and sales and marketing.” Their daughter, Penny, born last September, also comes to work every day.

Butts’s advice for anyone weighing a similar leap: “It’s never the right time, it’s always a risk, but it’s almost always worth it.”