From Corporate to Opening Her Dream Bakery: How Laetitia Loefti Brought Sundays’ Scrolls to Bondi

At 22 years old, Laetitia Loefti traded the corporate grind for her dream bakery – and it was all kickstarted by one small but pivotal moment.

“I went on a university exchange in London where I fell in love with this little bakery that specialised in one type of pastry. I felt we didn’t have that here at home,” she says.

After coming back and graduating, she spent a year working a “repetitive” office role while constantly testing her cinnamon scroll recipe. The process takes three days, from making the starter to baking the final scrolls. “I remember testing and baking and not being able to perfect the recipe until I called my grandma in Indonesia,” she says. “She gave me the missing piece.”

With the puzzle complete, she soon signed the lease on her Bondi Road shopfront and started spreading the word on social media. More than a year on, she’s glad she took the leap of faith.

Her pillowy-soft cinnamon scrolls – with rotating monthly flavours – are a proven winner in a crowded market for baked goods. “I remember on our opening day at Sundays, I was thinking, ‘There’s no pressure, if people come then they come.’ When I opened the door, there was a line around the corner and onto the next street.”

But with the crowds came the challenges of managing a small business. Because Loefti had prior experience working in hospitality and her parents have worked in event planning, she already had a good grasp on the administrative hurdles and hidden costs inherent in running a business. 

What came later was keeping her scroll-loving community happy – even when the queue travels further than the eye can see. To avoid falling behind, Loefti has reduced the backend hassle when it comes to her customers placing orders. Enabling frictionless payments, including those made through Mastercard, is one of the key ways small business owners like hers keep lines moving in the middle of peak service. 

“Sometimes we have really long lines so we can’t afford to have a system that’s slow … With our terminal, we’re able to process payments seamlessly and efficiently so we don’t hold our customers up,” she says.

Another challenge Loefti still faces is quelling customers’ disappointment when scrolls sell out early. “A lot of people don’t understand why we can’t just make more,” she explains.

But Loefti treats this less as an obstacle and more as an opportunity to educate her community on how much work it takes to create a high-quality product. “I show a lot of the behind-the-scenes on social media so people can see the whole process, from making the dough to what comes out on the table.”

She adds: “Connecting with my community is part of the fun. I love showing everyone how I’m actually making the cinnamon scrolls and inviting them to give me ideas for future flavours.”

Among all the chaos of running her own business at such a young age, Loefti says it’s “an amazing feeling” to have the freedom to bake for her community in Bondi on her own terms. “I think if we were a huge bakery, we wouldn’t have the strong sense of community that we do.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Mastercard. Every small business starts with a dream. Mastercard provides the infrastructure that helps businesses grow with confidence, so ambition can become something priceless.