00:00Hola USA! My name's Amita Kasem and I am the owner and founder of Flower Shop and
00:04I'm so excited to chat with you today. I grew up in actually Juarez, Mexico and I
00:09went to school in El Paso, Texas. I did get to learn and go to school in America
00:14where I then went to college there and started my career here. Growing up I was
00:19always baking with my mom. It was just something that we did together to sort of
00:23give as a gift to different people, bring joy to someone, and we would bake
00:27everything from a Mexican pastry to literally trying to figure out how we
00:32can make cookies more colorful and like cakes for people's birthdays. I never
00:37really thought about it as a career until I started getting orders from random
00:42people in the fashion industry and I thought to myself maybe I should wake up
00:46and play with Sprinkles for the rest of my life. So it was really really hard for me
00:50to take the leap to do it full-time. It really was just people giving me the
00:54confidence by ordering the cakes. When I think back to 2012 and you told me you're
01:00gonna have two stores, a best-selling author, children's books on the way, and a
01:05bunch of brand collections, like I would have never believed you. Even when I opened
01:08the Flower Shop store here two years ago in New York, I thought to myself here's my
01:12ten-year plan and we accomplished it in one year. I do think that in this sort of
01:19world we live in now where everything is fast and everything is instant and you
01:23can share everything with everyone through your own outlet. You don't need
01:26to wait for anyone to make things happen for yourself.
01:29Originally when I started doing the explosion cakes they were inspired by
01:32piñatas. Growing up in Mexico it was just like the most fun thing you could
01:35have at a party so I wanted to bring that joyful and like colorful experience back
01:41into birthdays. As I was doing it I was noticing that so many people were bummed
01:45that I couldn't ship it and they wanted to know how to make it and that's when the
01:48book came about and I started working on the book and it was very easy step by
01:52step. I wanted to give them not just the recipe but another outlet where they
01:57could just go to Williams-Sonoma pick up a kit and just be able to have
02:01everything already inside. When we saw how well the Williams-Sonoma collection was
02:07doing and I started talking to Pottery Barn kids about creating sort of this
02:11magical room where they could live every day like it's their birthday in their
02:15bedroom and as we started developing the collection we started with bedding and
02:20then we had furniture and decor and tabletop and backpacks and they just
02:23sort of kept exploding. You know growing up my father is from Kuwait my mother is
02:28from Mexico and I grew up in Mexico going to school in America I mean it's a whole
02:32mess but I loved it so much and I think my children's book the magical and the
02:36birthday that just came out is actually kind of ties together that global vibe with
02:42the birthdays and it's sort of shining a light that no matter where you are in the
02:47world or where you're from or what you believe in you share a birthday with
02:50someone and it makes us all human.
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