Nathalie Glazier wasn’t surprised when she heard the news. Rather, she felt satisfaction and validation upon winning Best New Product in the Giftware, Novelty & Non-Food category at Kosherfest a couple weeks ago.
Her winning Hebrew lettering stamps are comprised of arrangeable plastic tiles that allow bakers to imprint custom phrases on dough and fondant.
“And I know it sounds arrogant, but it’s well deserved,” Glazier said of the win. “We invented something that just didn’t exist.”
Glazier, 51, lives in Newtown and is a member of Lubavitch of Bucks County. For the past decade, she has sold custom kosher cakes and desserts under the name Au Bon Cake. A few years ago, she branched out into selling homemade Jewish-themed cookie cutters after noticing a lack of them on the market.
“You can find at Bed Bath & Beyond one set of three cutters for Chanukah and that’s it. That’s all there is,” Glazier said. “I can buy Christmas and Valentine’s and Easter things all day long anywhere. There’s like a million sellers of them. Try to buy something Jewish — forget it. It doesn’t exist. So this is why I decided to do this.”
Glazier uses a 3-D printer to turn eco-resin into a variety of cutters shaped like menorahs, dreidels, challah, kippahs and so on. She sells more than 70 products in her Etsy shop, including the Hebrew lettering stamps that took that prize at Kosherfest in Secaucus, New Jersey. It’s the largest and most attended show of its kind in the world, according to Yeshiva World News, and is estimated to have drawn more than 6,000 visitors from 21 countries.
Glazier was one of more than 400 exhibitors at the show held Nov. 12-13 at the Meadowlands Convention Center.
Outside of the show, most of Glazier’s customers, like Rachel Lebovits of Highland Park, New Jersey, discover her products through social media.
Lebovits runs her own custom desserts business, Sprinkled Pink NJ, and uses Glazier’s customizable letters in her baking. Lebovits said she previously relied on chocolate molds and paper templates to get the look she wanted.
“Because it’s such a small niche market, companies don’t focus on it,” Lebovits said. “There’s really not a lot of nice Jewish fonts, even if you go to an Israeli website. There’s very little out there in general.”
Glazier came of age in Casablanca, Morocco. At 19, she moved to France and met her husband, a United States citizen who happened to be on vacation.
“Most people bring back a little Eiffel Tower keychain,” Glazier said. “He had to bring back a wife.”
Glazier got into baking years ago as a hobby. It was a way to spend her newly found free time as her three kids grew older. Another hobby was ceramics.
Eventually, she found a way to merge the two with the discovery of fondant, “which is basically like Play-Doh, but delicious.” From there, she began creating artistic cakes, cupcakes, cookies, Moroccan pastries and French macarons. Friends took notice and her operation grew into a full-blown business.
Glazier takes great satisfaction in the fact that the opportunity for artistic expression results in something others can enjoy.
“What I enjoy most is to make people happy,” Glazier said. “I just love the look on their faces when they come pick up their cake, and they see these custom cakes with the thing they wanted, and they’re just so happy. I just love that.”
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