Walking into Pure Bliss Desserts, it almost feels like you’ve been transported to another world; elegant and classy interior decor calms the eyes, appearing in various colors of muted and matte pink, white, and black. On the wall to the left of the entrance is their motto, painted in sharp black letters: “From scratch. Small batch. Locally sourced.” The tenets that Pure Bliss Desserts lives by, according to Founder and Co-Owner Andi Vann.
Photograph by Mackenzie Schieck
Vann’s love for baking started in middle school.
“I had a pretty big sweet tooth,” Vann says, explaining that she spent a lot of time in her parents’ kitchen, experimenting with recipes. That childhood passion turned into Vann’s profession, and the rest is local history. Pure Bliss Desserts celebrates its fifteenth year on Oct. 26, but Vann says the time has gone by in a flash: “I feel like I’ve only known this, and I feel like we just started yesterday.”
Photograph by William Morton
A few milestones do stick out: the 2012 hiring of a manager to help handle the growing team; the 2016 change of locations; and the 2018 construction project to expand the dessert shop’s small footprint. Outside the bakery, the birth of Vann’s daughter in 2014 and her son in 2017 also marked a change: she realized she couldn’t keep spending 100 hours in the shop while raising a kid (and then two).
Photograph by Mackenzie Schieck
If anything, though, the additional demands on her time only increased the already high level of gratitude she already had for her incredible team of bakers and employees.
“I’ve always believed in the power of delegation and the power of a team to be truly effective,” Vann says. And the result of the teamwork at Pure Bliss is sweet indeed. 1424 Cornwall Ave., Bellingham, 360.739.1612, pureblissdesserts.com
