Name: How This Tiny Brooklyn Bakery Quadrupled Its Sales | Small Business
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T17:09:10.000Z
Duration: 14 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When it comes to opening up a business, people are so money-driven.

So it was super important for me to make sure that, regardless of what you got in your pocket, you could come inside here and afford something.

My name is Jeté Kirsley, the owner and pastry chef of Jetem Patisserie.

I think the calling of my life is always to help people.

I accept EBT or food stamps because I accept all types of people in my store.

When you step inside here, you're not in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn.

It doesn't look like a place that accepts EBT, right?

You would think this is a, quote-unquote, "White-owned French patisserie," but it's not.

I'm going to have to get ready for this big caterer notice that I have.

So this order, they ordered some specialty croissants from us, and they ordered four flavors, four dozen each.

All right, so I'm just going to pour the milk in.

I was a pastry cook from about 2016 up until 2022, working for various famous, well-known people, giving a lot of my energy to other people's businesses.

It was just like, how much longer are you willing to give your creativity away without any recognition or just even a thank you?

And I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to take a chance on myself.

I'm about to literally fill all 160 of these croissants.

This isn't some, like, magical world that all these croissants got hand-rolled on my day off.

I was here on my day off doing all of these croissants by myself.

I went to culinary school, but there was no baking program.

I taught myself everything when it comes to French pastry specifically, thanks to YouTube and wasting a lot of products.

To help me fill the croissant, I need you to cut.

So we're going to cook the whole, since you're going to fill them, and

I literally manufacture this croissant recipe myself from my house.

I say it's a Black girl twist on French pastries because it is.

Because I'm not, like, classically trained.

Like, people may think that the things that I'm doing is not, like, the pure French way or whatever it is.

A croissant is a croissant is a croissant, no matter how you do it.

I think one of our most expensive ingredients is chocolate.

Just ingredients alone is about, I would say, more than half of my revenue a month.

I feel like I need to start charging more for this.

Now that I think about it, New York City is expensive.

Do you know how much commercial rent in New York City and Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy?

My rent is probably, like, four times the apartments upstairs.

I think my first huge expense was my dough sheeter, which was, like, $15,000.

I ain't never spent more than, like, $1,500 in my life.

So if to spend $15,000 on one thing and it's not shoes or bags, would I sort of leave my bank account?

In my first year, I had a negative balance.

I sat here with my Bible study group, and

I told them, "Guys, I have $2,000 in my bank account.

I do not know how I'm going to pay my employees tomorrow." And then the next day, I went viral, and

the Lord blessed my bank account abundantly with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Once we went viral that April, we ended 2024 with about $385,000.

Do you know what it felt like to see my bank account have hundreds of thousands of dollars in it and for me to not spend no money on myself?

So when people saw that this was a Black-owned patisserie at the high quality that it is, people were shocked.

People were like, "This girl is doing something that isn't normal for her, quote-unquote, 'culture' or her, quote-unquote, 'neighborhood'." And it's just like, we're we're all not a monolith.

Fifth, can you go ask Chelsea for the catering boxes so that we can start getting these in boxes?

And so that you can I know I'm, like, upset and trying to get everything.

I think that a lot of people don't talk about, like, when you go viral, what it does on your mental health.

Like, virality brought me a lot of money, but

I also slept in here for a week straight without showering.

I didn't want people to be traveling from so far to come here for no pastries to be in the case.

The toll that it took on my body, my mind, and

my spirit, people don't talk about that, you know?

Ooh, maybe all of them will have their own box.

She's helping me because she know I need help.

I was like, "Oh, my God, I need help." And then I was crying.

And then look at the Lord sending me a friend named Faith.

That's why you got to be faithful to the Lord, because he'll send you the things that you need.

She was like, "I'll help you." I was like, thinking I was like, am I going to walk up and, like, insert myself?

And I walked up, and I was like, "Apologies for eavesdropping.

if you do need help, like, I don't mind volunteering my time." Like, a random-ass stranger just, like, offering help, that don't happen in New York City, you know?

And also, it's definitely made me realize, like, how hard it is to own a small business.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How This Tiny Brooklyn Bakery Quadrupled Its Sales | Small Business

literally

stretch

specifically

stigma