On a random Tuesday afternoon, a post flickered onto our IG Stories that felt like a localized version of a victory lap. Renee Andrzejewski, the founder and baker behind Peaches Custom Cookies & Cakes, was taking the leap. After years of quiet cultivation, the side hustle was officially becoming her full-time gig.
To the casual scroller, it looked like a dream realized: a soft-focus milestone in a town that sells dreams by the bottle. But in a region where hospitality is a billion-dollar machine, Renee’s transition is a masterclass in the unglamorous anatomy of a leap. We often talk about living the dream as if it’s a passive state of grace — you decide, you do it, you become successful — but Renee’s journey reveals it to be an endurance sport. It is a story that moves from the universal desire to own one’s time to the specific, grueling consistency of piping royal icing at 2:00 a.m.
The most striking part of Renee’s story isn’t the exit itself; it’s the math. She didn't quit her day job in a fit of impulsive passion. She engineered a slow-motion withdrawal from the valley’s elite service lines. "I started off five days a week, but then I would go four days, three days, whatnot," Renee explains. She was working 12-hour days, balancing the prestige of outposts like Press Restaurant and Monday Bakery with the growing pile of custom orders on her own counter.
"I have been pushing myself for so long because this has been such a dream of mine and I was literally willing to overwork myself to get this done," she says. It is a sobering editorial on the cost of entry: For every "congratulations" comment in her DMs, there were months where she was "not putting in the work with friendships or other relationships" because the vision required every ounce of her marrow. She didn’t wait for the dream to be easy; she pushed until the reality was inevitable.
To understand the perfection of a Peaches Custom cookie, you have to look past the flour and sugar to the ballet barre. Before the ovens, Renee was a dancer—a vocation where "good enough" is a failure of form. "It was either ballet or baking that I wanted to go into as my career," she notes. "Ultimately I chose baking and I feel like both have been very meticulous and detail-oriented."
That discipline became her primary tool for self-teaching. In a surprising twist for a Culinary Institute of America grad, Renee admits that the mastery of her specific niche (precision-crafted cookies and cakes) didn't happen in the classroom. "We didn't really learn any of those skills in school," she says. Instead, she used the forced isolation of the pandemic as a private laboratory. "It was a lot of just repetition and practice and discovering the royal icing inconsistencies, looking through social media, getting inspiration." She didn't simply want to bake; she wanted to master a specialty so specific that it became its own moat.
But a moat only works if people know where the castle is. This is where Renee’s artistic meticulousness met a modern necessity: the algorithm. In what she calls an "accidental" success, Renee became an SEO savant by simply applying her focus to the digital landscape. "I had a customer once tell me that she worked in SEO and she said that my business was—when she typed it into Google—mine was the first one that popped up every single time," Renee recalls.
There is a vital business lesson in her digital accident: visibility is an act of empathy. Renee won the Google game not by "gaming" the system, but by "putting myself in the shoes of who I want my customer to be." She didn't optimize for keywords; she optimized for the person in Napa looking for a connection. For the aspiring entrepreneur, her success offers a clear directive: Don't just build a product; build the digital path that leads a specific person to it.
The tech, however, is just the funnel. The actual architecture of her success is a level of intimacy that cannot be scaled or automated. In an era of convenience culture, Renee has become a walking archive of the community’s milestones. "You could give me a name of a customer that I had three years ago and I can tell you what they ordered and for what occasion," she says.
This leads to the most radical part of her business model: radical accountability. As she scales, she refuses to let the dream become a machine. "Even though I'm growing exponentially at this point, every single inquiry still matters to me," she says. By keeping her world micro even as her reach goes macro, she has ensured that her business remains as precise as her icing and proving that the only way to truly go all in is to stay personally invested in every single detail.