Cristina, When Fashion Comes to the Kitchen

A successful idea is able to predict people's unexpressed needs and provide an answer. It's a wish to feel like children again and treat yourself to a delicious break in a magical atmosphere that encourages patrons to come to this small café, with a typical American style, near the Wagner area in Milan.

Vanilla Bakery will celebrates its first year in business on 15 December, and its creator, Cristina Bernascone Raffoul, is organizing a large-scale party. But, more recently, the bakery has featured pumpkins and ghosts in its shop window for Halloween. When walking through the door, it's like entering an enchanted world made of sugar and pastel colors. After a degree in Business Management at Bocconi and a Master in Fashion Management financed by the European Union, Cristina started a career that she had always thought would be the most natural professional for her, working with her family's company, distributing well-known fashion brands to Asian markets, especially Russia and the Middle East. Three years ago she came to a turning point: going from fashion to food."I was always passionate about sweets and over the years I had the opportunity to spend a long period of time in the United States and learn the art of American pastries," she says. When the opportunity to buy the venue at Via San Siro 2 presented itself, close to home, Cristina didn't let it slip away. She opened with four employees, which increased to ten in less than a year. Even the 60 square meters of the shop will soon increase, since work will begin in a few months to enlarge, doubling the 25 settings. "I didn't want to promote only through industry press," says Cristina. "My aim was to get the brand known in fashion publications, giving it a signature other than food," she explains. This is how successful collaborations began with the most blazoned fashion magazines, with Vogue leading the pack. "Fashion magazines perfectly understood the mood of my startup," she says. "It's not just a pastry shop where we sell sweets, but it's a concept store where we offer the customer a well-rounded experience." This is why the interior design has been planned with an attention to details – from the horizontal, colonial-style wainscoting, to the polka dot wallpaper, which duplicates the brand's logo, as well as the armchair-shaped mirrors and windows decorated by a professional designer. When you enter Cristina's store, it's not just to buy a dessert, but for the joy of enjoying an experience that engages all your senses. And you shouldn't expect to find Italian desserts like crostata or panettone. "In 10 months of business, it only happened once," says Cristina, "which I think is a great success."Vanilla Bakery's clientele represent a target with an "educated" taste, aware of the different culinary and cultural tradition that the brand promotes. "Our customers are wide-ranging and diverse, but the majority are tourists or Milanese who like to travel." Cristina's shop is traditionally Anglo-Saxon: food, design, music and books. American holidays are always celebrated: "On the 4th of July, to celebrate Independence Day, the American Consulate commissioned a 5-square-meter cake with the stars and stripes!" The shop sells sweets to the general public, but it also organizes events, catering and courses on cake design for children and adults.At the beginning, its success was not entirely certain, especially because of the skepticism of people working the food industry regarding such a non-conventional strategy adopted by the founder of Vanilla Bakery. "I hired a PR consultant before the cook," laughs Cristina. "Everyone said I was crazy!" Then, however, her intuition turned out to be a success, even if it was not the automatic career path for her university studies: "We shouldn't close doors for ourselves simply because they don't correspond with our study program or aren't in line with the idea we had for our career," says Cristina. "I think that is a typically Italian limitation and that younger generations need to be more open to flexibility: university studies are a springboard, not a restriction."