Even if they don’t recognize the name Gina Butler, plenty of folks are familiar with her nickname — and her cupcakes.
“I’ve always been Gigi,” Butler explains. She grew her eponymous cupcake shop into a baked-goods empire with more than 120 locations before selling the operation to a Texas-based venture capital company in 2016. Butler still maintained her original Gigi’s Cupcakes store in Midtown Nashville until she finally closed it in February of this year. A serial entrepreneur, Butler is now starting from scratch again with the opening of her brand-new venture, Pies by Gigi, operating out of a storefront in Brentwood at 330 Franklin Road.
The winding tale of how Butler got here sounds a bit like a country song, an unsurprising fact considering she came to Nashville in 1994 to make it big as a singer and songwriter.
“I was singing and writing music, working at Red Lobster and cleaning houses to make ends meet,” she says. “I built up my cleaning company by working for a lot of stars, like Taylor Swift’s family, Lee Ann Womack and Lee Roy Parnell. I remember I was cleaning Taylor’s house one day when I was almost 30 and she was 15. She was on the bed practicing her guitar, and she played ‘Teardrops on My Guitar.’ I asked her if she wrote it, and she told me yes. I cried the whole ride home and wondered how I was going to make it in music if someone so young could write a song like that. I decided to quit, and I felt like a loser.”
But Butler didn’t give up on Nashville completely. She devoured business books and decided to double down on her side gig. “I figured if I’m going to have a cleaning business, it’s gonna be the best cleaning business,” she says. “I hired five girls to work for me and learned how to manage. I discovered that if you can do the small things very well with integrity, great things will come to you.”
Then another opportunity came her way in the form of a phone call from her brother. He was visiting a bakery in New York City in 2007, during the height of the cupcake boom, and called to tell Gigi that she should open a cupcake shop. “I’d never made many cupcakes,” she recalls with a chuckle, “but I come from a long line of bakers. I decided right then to open a shop.”
With a recession looming, Butler was stymied in her search for backing. “Four banks laughed in my face, so I took out $100,000 in cash advances and had $33 left in my account when I opened my first store.” Operating out of a 999-square-foot space formerly home to a Steak-Out, Butler worked under a business plan that anticipated selling 250 cupcakes a day. To her surprise, she far exceeded those expectations.
“I was killing it,” she says. “We were selling 1,000 to 1,750 cupcakes a day. Even in the middle of the recession when money was scarce, people would come in and treat themselves. I appealed to everyone, and I saw it was replicable.”
Her landlord had some experience in the franchise arena, so Butler consulted with him on the next steps. “The hardest thing was letting go, but the franchises came to me. They came out of the woodwork. People came to Nashville and saw what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it. During the financial crash of 2008, people were scared to death of the stock market and wanted their own little nest egg. We had great food costs, so it was a great place to put your money. I was in the right place at the right time, and stepped through the door that was opened.”
Sales remained as high as the icing on top of one of Gigi’s cupcakes, and new franchises came on board at a furious rate. Butler even made an appearance on the CBS reality show Undercover Boss in 2015, including a segment featuring a bit of a “Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory” fiasco at her frosting supplier. That moment actually turned out to be sort of a high point in Butler’s reign as the CEO of Gigi’s.
As franchise growth continued to explode, Butler realized that she couldn’t maintain the pace: “I had a child by myself during all this, and after 65 stores I couldn’t keep up anymore. I wanted to spend more time with my daughter, and we were at a store opening every week. I wanted to get her off the road, and I really wasn’t creating anymore.
“We grew so fast and so strong, and I felt so blessed,” Butler continues. “But a lot of the business acumen I’ve acquired has come from mistakes I made. I sold out to a Texas company named KeyCorp, and that turned out to be not a good thing.”
Butler stayed on with the company in a franchise-relations role and continued to operate her original store, but the new owners of the company were not faring as well as she had.
“It was the hardest four years of my life,” Butler says. “I thought I was selling to people who could grow my company like I couldn’t anymore. In 2018 they refused to pay me the rest of the consulting fee they owed me, and then they went into bankruptcy. I saw so much backlash on social media saying I was letting the people down. I was chastised, ridiculed, followed by cameramen. I was the face of the company because I am the creator.”
But she stuck with it. “Sales plummeted, and last February I finally sold my store,” she explains. “It was time to close that door, but it was also time to start something new from scratch, even in the midst of COVID. I needed to re-create myself. If I’m not creating, I don’t feel alive.”
Butler turned her attention to another baked-goods project. “Pies are my true love,” she says. “I always said if I could have just one pie shop where I could offer people comfort and minister to them, I’d be happy. I was listening to the news and everybody was making masks. I can’t sew, but I can cook!”
She put a menu together of pies, casseroles and pot pies — what she describes as “comfort food, but healthy” — and started taking orders for pickup from the Whole Foods parking lot in Franklin. “I would post the menus on Instagram and deliver them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” Butler says. “I know what people like, and I already have a name they can trust.” Her parking-lot venture has now expanded into a bricks-and-mortar operation in a 2,700-square-foot space. (“Mama’s grown up!” she jokes.)
The new Pies by Gigi offers a wide variety of sweet and savory items, from biscuits and quiches for breakfast, to muffins, scones and two casseroles per day for dining in or take-and-bake, and of course eight different pies per day, plus mini pies. Butler is especially proud of her dessert bars, listing them off like Forrest Gump’s Bubba Blue talking about shrimp dishes: “We’ll have lemon bars, peanut butter fudge, apricot crumble, Black Forest cheesecake, almond toffee and a gluten-free Mississippi mud bar. I’m going to be famous for my bars.”
The location also operates as a small mercantile with items like Jams by Gigi, Gigi’s Jamming Spices, tea towels, candles and rolling pins. The store features a tea bar and a coffee bar, and Butler hopes people will take advantage of her WiFi to sit a spell and work. A woman of faith, she also plans to offer the space to churches for nighttime Bible studies. She hopes to start shipping her pies nationwide in the fall.
Butler is working on her second book — a follow-up to 2018’s The Secret Ingredient — about starting over from scratch and fighting fear in the business world, personal lessons she takes to heart. “Gigi’s grew so fast that I wasn’t able to stop and smell the roses,” she says. “Now that I’ve grieved and suffered, I can appreciate all the things that we’ve done right. I travel the country speaking about fighting fear. If I don’t take my own advice right now, then who am I? Then I’m a fraud. If I say go out there and step on faith and be brave, and God will get your back, and now I don’t do it, then who am I?”
Butler wants people to know one more thing: “Even though you’re afraid, and it’s a scary world, you still have to fulfill your purpose while you’re here on this earth and keep moving forward and re-creating yourself. After what I’ve gone through with Gigi’s, I have to start over again, and I want to!”
From scratch.
