Page 8 - Food & Drink Magazine March 2021

✷ RISING STAR
Hard head in the clouds
Paola and Michael Karamallis’ part-time experiment spinning up clouds of sweet joy to sell at local markets steadily grew to become Australia’s most-awarded fairy floss brand. Here’s how they transformed Fluffy Crunch from an events-based business to an online success story. Stuart Ridley writes.
PAOLA Karamallis always dreamed of owning her own café instead of working for someone else. But despite more than 15 years’ experience in hospitality, real estate agents would not take her seriously.
“The problem was our applications kept getting rejected because real estate agents told us we had no skin in the game,” she explains.
“We needed to show we could run our own business not just manage one, so we started Fluffy Crunch as a part-time experiment at the local markets to gain business experience.”
Michael remembers feeling on cloud nine when Paola returned from a day at the markets with close to $1000
just from selling fairy floss, even though the profits weren’t huge.
Still, the couple worked out that if she could sell five times that amount of fairy floss in a week, Paola could afford to quit her weekday job and save up to make her café dream a reality.
Except it didn’t quite work out like that.
IT’S SHOW TIME!
“Call it serendipity, but about six months in, I was made redundant from my role as a customer experience manager and had the opportunity to invest my time completely into Fluffy Crunch,” says Michael.
“By the end of the year Fluffy Crunch was earning enough to replace both our previous incomes and that’s when we decided to put the dream of the café aside.”
Paola admits she was quite relieved when Michael suddenly had more time to help with Fluffy Crunch.
She had been frantically juggling her hospitality work during the week with late nights responding to more and more online inquiries about providing Fluffy Crunch for party favours at events.
“I found myself going to bed at 3:40 in the morning every day because I had to cope with having my day job and then answering Fluffy Crunch inquiries via email, Instagram and Facebook word of mouth,” she says.
By 2018, they’d settled on a winning combination of fewer but larger events, like Vivid Sydney, Canberra’s Floriade, and the Royal Melbourne Show. At the show, they sold more than 25 eye-catching, taste- bud-thrilling fairy floss flavours with a host of magical sprinkles such as freeze-dried fruit, edible glitter, popping candy and powered Nutella. Not surprisingly, young people gave their products a lot of love on Instagram and Facebook.
“The last Saturday of Vivid Sydney in 2018, we had our most successful event ever,” recalls Michael.
8 | Food&Drink business | March 2021 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au
“ I found myself going to sleep at 3:40am every day because I had to cope with having my job, plus answering inquiries via email, Instagram and Facebook word of mouth.”
“We had made the decision I’d leave my job and then, coincidentally, Michael was made redundant. Although that sounds scary, it was a blessing, because he could work full time for the business when I needed it the most. And he had three to four months of payout we could live on while we applied for more events.”
In those early days of working together the couple set up stores at as many as events as possible, often up to six in a week. Every event was also a testing ground for new flavour experiments and which event formats brought in the most money.
“We had four fairy floss machines running and served more than 1000 glow in the dark fairy floss sticks each as big as your head in five hours. The atmosphere was amazing and the amount of excitement and joy we created was something we’ll never forget.”
THE COVID-19 PIVOT
Up until February 2020, big events like the Royal Shows and Vivid brought in more than 80 per cent of Fluffy Crunch’s revenue.
Sure, Fluffy Crunch had a lively online presence across social media and its website,