Michele Hester
Inventive Artist
Interviewed By: Sheridan Sechter

“It’s not that hard to invent something,” says Michele Hester. In the case of her latest creation, SugarVeil Confectionery Icing, she studied old patents, called a Vice President of DuPont who willingly answered her questions about viscosity and then did what inventors and scientists have always done. She tried. She failed. And, she repeated the cycle many, many times for nearly two years until she realized her vision of creating a delicious, artistically-pleasing cake icing that has revolutionized the art of cake decorating---an industry where no innovation had taken place in nearly three hundred years! It doesn’t sound hard to me either; it sounds impossible.

The invention of SugarVeil Confectionery Icing is just Michele’s latest achievement. She has been helping artists express their creative vision since 1987. Michele’s mastery of the complicated French “serti” technique for painting on silk generated so much acclaim and so many requests for information on using it that she was forced to invent radically simple methods and tools for creating the amazing serti effects because there just wasn’t enough time to teach it.

In 1988, she formed the Silkpaint Corporation to distribute her patented formulations for environment-friendly, water-soluble alternatives to the traditional solvent-based chemicals. Silkpaint products have received accolades and endorsements from top U.S. textile artists.

A few years later, Michele’s work with devorŽ techniques, which create an exciting lace effect on mixed fiber cloth such as silk/rayon velvets, led her to invent the patented “Fiber Etch Fiber Remover”, a gel for devorŽ effects on velvet. This creation was selected as the Innovative Product of the Year by the U.S. Craft Industry. Paper Etch, which creates similar effects on cellulose paper fiber, soon followed.

Textile artists have used Michele’s products to create breathtaking works for the covers of Glamour and People magazines and to create sets and costumes for major motion pictures such as, “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”, “Constantine”, and “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

A Kansas City native, Michele is also an internationally-regarded textile artist. Her remarkable work has been displayed around the world for decades. Her soft-sculpture dolls, “The Yonavich Family,” the miniature settings she created for the dolls and the children’s book she wrote about them are part of the permanent collection of the Munchner Stadtmuseum (the City Museum of Munich, Germany).

What’s next for Michele? Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be beautiful or delicious; or, hopefully both.

Please tell me about SugarVeil.
SugarVeil is a new form of icing that lets you decorate cakes, chocolates, and desserts easily and without professional training. It’s a glossy white icing that can be finely piped, combed into lines, stenciled, or spread into a very thin layer onto parchment paper to easily make unique decorations that, when set, can be peeled from the paper and applied to a dessert like a decal, ruffled like fabric, tied into knots, cut with decorative-edged scissors and wrapped around the sides of a cake, or used to decorate cookies or a dessert plate.

The electric SugarVeil Icing Dispenser fits in the hand like a pen to effortlessly draw lines finer than can be piped with a cumbersome piping bag. You control it by placing a finger over a hole on the pen, like a musical instrument, and then just start drawing. You can trace intricate bridal lace, monograms, company logos, or other detailed patterns and transform them easily into beautiful, edible decorations. Or just draw your own designs and patterns.

How would you describe yourself and your work?
I’m an artist, inventor and entrepreneur. A few years ago, I had an idea for decorating a cake, but regular icing wouldn’t do what I needed it to do. So I invented SugarVeil. And it does what I had in mind and a whole lot more. The surprising part is that lifelong pastry chefs who’ve seen and tried SugarVeil can’t understand why, after over four hundred years of pastry, no one’s invented anything that can do what SugarVeil does. And amateur dessert makers are just thrilled to be able to create beautiful, professional-looking desserts without any training or complicated techniques. So my work is about helping other artists realize their dessert visions.

Before that, I developed a product for people to realize their visions in creating individual designs on fabric (Fiber Etch¨), and more recently I developed a product for customizing and distressing denim and other types of clothing by simplifying a centuries-old, but extremely complicated process. It’s called Denimolitionª and we’re in licensing talks for that too.

Do you have a philosophy?
Life is like a cake. It’s up to you to decorate it. Seriously, we’re all artists in creating and orchestrating our lives.

How did you get started?
As I mentioned earlier, I tried to decorate a cake in a new way and discovered that regular icing wouldn’t work. Rather than giving up, I did some research and decided to try to make an icing that could make decorations “off the cake” and that would handle like fabric and be flexible enough to drape onto the cake for placement. So I dove into the research, reading everything on icing I could find, going to trade shows, spending tens of hours in the library archives of the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas, and talking with people in the dessert and food industries. By the way, Linda Hall Library is a hidden jewel in Kansas City. It’s a science library as well as a U.S. patent depository. It’s a terrific place to learn.

One of the things that I learned is that very little has changed in 400+ years in regards to cake icings. Marie Antoinette ate the same type of cake icing we eat today.

Then I started making icing and testing it. And then doing this over and over until I finally got the icing to do what I wanted. Along the way, I kept raising the bar and refining the definition of what I was looking for, such as, it had to be easy to work with, and that working with it would not require special tools. It took a couple of years, but I was determined to make it work. At one point, I even had a 50 pound bag of sugar in my bedroom.

What is your biggest challenge?
Finding my next challenge. In the meantime, I’m working on finding a licensee for SugarVeil. Once people in the baking industry realize that it lets people with less training turn out spectacular cakes and desserts without special training, they get very excited.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about starting and managing a business?
That building a better “mousetrap” didn’t automatically mean people will be beating down my door. It takes a better-marketed mousetrap to be successful.

What is your vision for Sugar Veil’s future?
Licensing SugarVeil by industry, in various marketplaces and in a variety of interpretations. For example, as a ready-to-use product, and a ready-made, pre-packaged dessert garnish, to name a few.

What is a typical day in your business for you like?
I start the day checking website stats, as well as checking the daily Google traffic for our products and perusing e-mail orders. I then take a core sample from the paperwork mountain on my desk (we get a lot of fan mail and orders). The remainder of the day is spent meeting with prospective licensees, and helping them make zillions of dollars with Sugarveil.

What do you do to bring balance to your life?
Even though my pleasure is my work and my work is my pleasure, I try to find time to take a walk, talk to friends about anything other than work, and sketch out my latest idea. Things like that.

What advice do you have for those just starting their careers?
Most important: don’t take no for an answer. Be polite about it. But don’t accept reasons why something can’t be done.

Nobody really knows anything. At one point, every great idea was something that couldn’t be done. And it took someone who defied the odds and went for it anyway to make it happen.

What advice do you have for those just starting their careers?
Go for it. It’s the only way to find out if you’re going to be successful.

Don’t try to do everything by yourself. There are many local resources, usually free or at very low cost available to the entrepreneur, such as the Small Business Development Center and the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies and Development at CMSU in Warrensburg, MO.

Read everything, no matter how far it might seem from your business. This is invaluable for sparking ideas. Ask lots of questions. Every day do one thing that scares you. And support fellow entrepreneurs.