Starter Stories: Raina Shults and The Work Behind The Beauty of Sprinkle Me Sugar
Written & photographed by Margee Stanfield
Sometimes Raina Shults, owner of Sprinkle Me Sugar, feels like people only see the graceful swan gliding across smooth waters, but they can’t see what is going on underneath: how frantically that swan’s feet are kicking.
“It never stops. It's constant. It's just like that commitment that sometimes it looks easy, we want it to look easy,” Raina said. “But in order to have the graceful swan, you have to have the paddling.”
While Sprinkle Me Sugar definitely appears as a graceful swan — pretty in pink, sweet treats, and pocketed luxury — there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to bring you that. Starting with how the business even came to be.
Raina’s career in fashion retail ended after her twins were born two months early, quitting her job to stay at home with them. “I ended up being a stay-at-home mom. It can be a very tough transition as someone who is very career oriented,” Raina said.
Dealing with post-partum depression, baking became a form of therapy for Raina. “I was really trying to find myself again and have a way to have an outlet in between feeds and diaper changes,” Raina said.
Right before her pregnancy, she took a trip with her husband to Paris for their five year wedding anniversary and fell in love with French. Once they got home, they were excited to try and find some in the States, but none of the macarons they tried measured up. They didn’t taste like the ones in Paris.
So Raina taught herself how to make them.
“It kind of went into just sharing pictures of it on Instagram and it kind of turned into a business pretty quickly, where people were like, ‘Can you make this for me?’” Raina said.
Then the pandemic hit. And Raina was burnt out. She decided to close her business.
Sprinkle Me Sugar resurfaced in a roundabout way. Raina and her family moved to Jackson because her husband got a job here, only for him to be let go two weeks after they closed on their house. The day he was let go, Raina immediately went to the courthouse and got a business license.
“ I was like, ‘I know how to make macarons. Even if I'm just selling them to neighbors, I will not let my babies go hungry and I will not miss a house payment, so we'll figure this out,’” Raina said. “And so I thought it was gonna be a very temporary thing, just to get by. It ended up being the whole thing.”
She ended up at theLOCAL not too long after that. When Raina signed the lease there, she knew that was it. She was going all in. A leap of faith out of necessity had turned into something bigger and lasting.
“ Honestly, the week before my husband was let go, I felt like this still small thing inside of me was just urging me to, to do it. To restart Sprinkle Me Sugar,” Raina said. “Then when that happened, I just knew it was like, ‘Well, this is it.’”
Raina went through CO.STARTERS as a part of her process of becoming a tenant at theLOCAL and then heard about ScaleUp Kitchen at some point during that process.
“ I was one of the first who applied to ScaleUp,” Raina said. “Because I was like, ‘I need all the help that I can get’, you know? As someone who didn't come from a startup or having grown businesses in the past, I just wanted all the support I could have. And I think this community has a ton of resources.”
The mentorship she gained through CO.STARTERS and ScaleUp Kitchen is one of the things Raina feels was the most valuable.
”They have the speed round in CO.STARTERS where you get to talk to these professionals in town. I just got so much from that, so much wisdom from other people,” she said. “And then ScaleUp was great, because, one, it just stretched me, and it was nice getting to learn from people in the Memphis area.”
After going through CO.STARTERS, her experience as a tenant at theLOCAL unlocked a confidence in what she was doing.
“It surprised me that I could do that much just selling French macarons. That charged my belief in myself and really helped me strengthen my skills as a business owner,” Raina said.
Raina loves running her business in the Jackson community.
“ This is my home. This is where I grew up and, I think that because of that, I felt comfortable being myself fully in this business,” Raina said. “To be able to come back and know that this community needs something special and that I could possibly create a little bit of something special for people here.”
While it may have started as a way to make money for her family, Raina says it has always been more about creating something beautiful for her community,
“Jackson needs more special things. Jackson needs more beauty or more places for people to have these special moments. Like we should have a place that could be in Paris or could be in a bigger city, but it isn't, it's here,” Raina said. “It really encourages me to see people that really thrive here and want to bring good stuff here and just enjoying where I'm from. I think it starts with the love of a place, from a place of love.”
She loves curating an experience for people through her business, one that allows them to feel celebrated and indulge in luxury.
“ Everyone should have that feeling and all of us can afford that feeling. So with macarons, one of the many reasons I love them, is because to me it's more than just a baked good. It is a luxury experience in the form of a baked good,” Raina explained. “So I want the case to feel like a jewelry case. I want all the macarons when you pick them out to feel like you are having this luxury experience. Even the boxes, like the way they feel, the gold, the florals, everything. I want them to have that mini experience of feeling like royalty or a celebrity or something special when they get their box of macarons.”
You can support Sprinkle Me Sugar by following them on instagram, visiting their website, word of mouth, and — of course — stopping by the shop for a treat. If you want to apply for CO.STARTERS and see the benefits it could have for your business, apply today for our 2026 session that starts on February 3rd.
