Ti Amann: The baker from Brittany hand laminating 700 kouign-amann a week

📍 Austin, TX
🔗 hotplate.com/tiamannfrenchbakery

Lucie didn’t set out to go viral, but a simple post on Instagram Threads did just that.

A month later, she sold almost 700 pastries and grossed over $2k on a single weekly drop. She’s been hustling to keep up with demand and hand laminating each and every pastry from her apartment kitchen ever since.

How it started

“I just put that I make kouign-amann in Austin and I’m from the region that this pastry is from,” she says. The post picked up hundreds of likes.

“People kept commenting that they were so happy to have found me.”

Things blew up even more a few weeks later when an Austin-based food account, @austinfoodadventures, shared Lucie’s story, exposing her to a much larger local audience.

Ti Amann’s Hotplate subscriber list tripled over the next few weeks. She was selling out every drop, hustling to keep up with demand while ensuring each pastry that came out of her apartment kitchen met her quality standards: buttery, flakey, and perfectly carmelized. She sold almost 700 pastries and grossed more than $2,000 in her first April drop.

“I didn’t expect it at all,” Lucie told us.

Subscribers to Ti Amann’s Hotplate storefront

From bakery employee to running her own

Lucie’s baking journey began in France when she was just 15 years old. She completed an apprenticeship as a pastry chef and worked in local bakeries before moving to the United States. Wanting to share both her passion for baking and a taste of home is what inspired her to start making kouign-amann out of her apartment.

Before she officially started Ti Amann, Lucie was working full-time for another bakery. As demand for her side hustle grew, it became impossible to do both.

“I quickly realized I couldn’t keep up with my job and doing the kouign-amann at the same time. I had to quit.”

Now, Ti Amann is her full-time focus. She runs the entire operation from her apartment kitchen, producing hundreds of pastries each week.

What her business looks like today

Lucie’s prep schedule begins three days before pickups. On Wednesday, she makes her butter sheets and dough, shapes the pastries on Thursday, makes more dough Thursday night, and bakes everything off fresh Saturday and Sunday mornings ahead of pickups.

She produces 500 to 700 pastries in a single weekend, all from her apartment kitchen. Somehow, she’s still laminating by hand and hasn’t bought a sheeter yet!

Thankfully, Lucie’s husband helps set up boxes, moves dough to the fridge after shaping, and attends to customers at pop-ups.

For now, she plans to keep the business home-based.

“It’s very convenient to be able to work from home. Maybe in the future, if I have so much demand, I could move to a kitchen.”

Discovering Hotplate

When Lucie first decided to start her microbakery, she didn’t even know this kind of business was possible.

“I didn't even know that it was a thing that I could do…I just found it randomly online, I saw people that were doing it.”

Determined to not have to create her own website, she went searching for alternatives.

“I found Hotplate and everyone was saying it was the best website to use because it was really convenient.”

A lesson that shaped her approach

Q: What’s a piece of advice about running a baking business that changed how you work?

A: Plan ahead! “When I started I was not really planning everything ahead and I was rushing. I quickly realized I needed to plan ahead because it was not sustainable to be doing everything last minute.”

More than just pastries

Lucie’s business is still evolving, but she’s clear on what she enjoys.

She’s focused on maintaining what’s working: a flexible, home-based setup that allows her to keep up with demand without overextending or overinvesting.

She’s experimenting with new flavors, including a strawberry vanilla kouign-amann, and continuing to refine her processes week by week.

“I really like where I’m at right now,” she says.

To other entrepreneurs, Lucie’s story is a reminder to make that post, send the message, print the flyer. Something might catch on when you least expect it. And when it does, the challenge becomes keeping up while building something sustainable and enjoyable.

For Lucie, that means staying organized, planning ahead, and continuing to do what got her here in the first place: making incredible pastries, one fold at a time.