Melinda Mason, owner and operator of Nothing Bundt Cakes, places an M.V.P. decorated Chocolate Chocolate Chip Bundt cake atop the center case at the store near Hamilton Place Mall. Melinda Mason readily admits having the same opinion many people do when they first drive by a Nothing Bundt Cakes store.
“Who would open a store that does just bundt cakes?” she says of her initial reaction after driving by one in Southlake, Texas, where she lived at the time.
Once she and her husband stopped in for a Bundtini and the occasional Bundtlet, both smaller versions of the full-size cakes, she began to understand that this was a different kind of cake store. After two of her special-education students got jobs at the franchise there in Southlake, it was part of her role as their teacher to job-coach them. It was then that she realized that not only were the cakes good, but the business model was just as appealing.
“I got to see the whole operation,” Mason says.
She was so impressed, she soon contacted the home office in Dallas, applied for a franchise, took retirement from her teaching job and began scouting for a location to open her own Nothing Bundt Cakes store. She chose Chattanooga because she and her husband love the outdoors and she has family in West Tennessee.