Haley Thompson is not your typical teenager. At 19 years old, she is one of the youngest business owners in the region—and a successful one, too.
As 225 details in a feature in the current issue, the Prairieville native opted to forgo scholarship offers—including one from the Louisiana Culinary Institute—after graduating from East Ascension High School in 2015. Instead, she decided to start her own bakery.
Thompson opened Bliss Patisserie in Prairieville that September. The popular shop offers cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, Italian ices and cake jars—the latter being Thompson’s own creation, Mason jars filled with cake and icing.
Thompson hails from a family of entrepreneurs. Her sister opened her own bridal shop when she was 17, and her parents own a real estate business. With that in mind, it’s not surprising the teen was confident enough to open a second location of Bliss less than a year after the first. The new location opened at the Mall of Louisiana in April 2016.
“The first day we opened, I didn’t know what to prepare for. I thought, ‘Do I make 100 cupcakes?’ I thought I’d overshoot it, so I made 450. We opened at 10 a.m., and by noon we were sold out,” she says. “We had to close for a couple of hours so I could make more.”
