Meet Me! Owner, Founder and CEO
When you spend every day with yourself you forget that other people don't know who you are! So let me introduce myself!
I'm Claire Georges, owner, founder and CEO of Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. I'm the one who sends out the newsletters and manages social media - I also wear about 50 other hats at any given moment, so my head is always warm.
I started BBVT back in 2003, just a year and change out of college, but I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial streak. In my hometown of Berkeley, CA I had the most amazing lemon tree. The lemons were so good that my friends and I would smash the lemons on the sidewalk, split them open and suck the juice out. So in the summer when I was 9, my best friend and I started a weekly fresh-squeezed lemonade and baked good stand on the corner. My dad provided the initial investment capital for ingredients, but we self-funded the rest and at the end of the summer we donated the profits to GreenPeace. Using business as a platform for good has always seemed natural to me.
When I was 14 I enrolled in an amazing year-long entrepreneurial program at the Haas School of Business that taught me the ins and outs of starting my own business and I won a $500 college scholarship. "Spotlight Day Camp" never became a real thing, but I used the business plan that I wrote in that program to write the first BBVT business plan when I was 23.
When I was 14 I also learned that I had reactive hypoglycemia, which basically means that if I eat refined sugar, I feel like crap and can't think straight. It's a pre-diabetic condition, but fortunately I don't like feeling like crap, so I was highly motivated to not eat sugar and never let it turn into diabetes (still going strong in middle age!). So I started experimenting in the kitchen to figure out what I could and couldn't eat and how I could make things that I could eat taste like the things that I couldn't eat.
The world of commercial treats that I can eat tend to be overprocessed and taste "good for what they are" (such a ringing endorsement). So I got really into the science of how all of the ingredients in a food come together to taste yummy. I went to Oberlin College and studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but my hobby was still experimenting in the kitchen. I was lucky to find a community of like-minded students there and eat in a dining co-op that didn't eat refined sugar (go Fairkid!). So by the time I was approaching graduation I realized that I had a lot more drive and passion for the science of the kitchen than the science of computers. So I moved to Vermont, got a job as a baker and started learning what I needed to learn to make the dream of opening my own bakery a reality.
Starting a business young is kind of great. I had no giant bills to pay, no one to support but myself and it was socially acceptable to have a roommate or two. I met my now-husband in 2010 and when my first kid was born I had to put a lot more thought into what I needed to support my growing family. So when I stumbled into the hit that was farm-to-fork hot sauces, I realized that I had an opportunity to grow BBVT into what it has become today.
While BBVT has grown a lot since those early days, I have grown even more. I've learned a lot of hard lessons, but those are the stickiest, and I wouldn't trade it all for anything.
Thank you for being along for the ride!
(Both as a customer and for the length of this story).
Me at 16, selling handmade, herb-filled Dream Pillows at a craft show.
