When Your Heartbreak Becomes a Headline

On Sprinkles, internet rage, and the community that made it matter

My 15-year-old looked at me and said, “Mom, I’ve literally never heard you swear this much.”

Then he added, carefully: “And you’re doing a lot of aggressive sighing.”

He was right. I was angry and I was fragile. And every few minutes, I’d take a deep, gut-expanding inhale, trying to calm my rattled nervous system.

In my last Substack, I wrote about Sprinkles closing. And I promised you more. I’m the kind of person who wants to pull a lesson out of everything and teach it forward. But I’m not writing this from the other side of it yet. I’m still very much in it.

The last few weeks have felt like living in two realities at once. There’s the public version of Sprinkles’ sudden closure - national headlines (NYT, LA Times, People, Forbes, Fast Company), online tributes, comments and anger, customers and employees grieving in real time. And then the private version, happening in the background of my actual life between meetings and school pickups… the shock, the sighs, the swearing (not a proud mom moment), and the unbelievable beauty and joy too.

The very best part has been watching the collective celebration of life that has coalesced around Sprinkles.

I’ve always believed in the power of a cupcake to bring people together - it was my mission from day one - and it’s still true today.

The Sprinkles community runs strong, deep, and wide. It’s the kind of community that brands spend years and millions of dollars chasing or trying to manufacture - the holy grail of brand building. And we had it. I think that’s why this has felt so intense - you don’t get this level of emotion unless something was truly loved.

I asked for people to share their stories, and they answered my call. My DMs have been overflowing with stories of proposals, gender reveals and late-night Cupcake ATM runs that turned into traditions. Someone told me Sprinkles became “birthday cupcakes, bad-day cupcakes, graduation cupcakes…and the cupcake I ate when my dad died.” People wrote about carrying cupcakes across the country - across the world - like fragile artifacts. Someone reminded me of when Kobe Bryant, a regular customer, came into the Newport Beach store and bought cupcakes for everyone waiting in line. The stories go on and on.

It’s felt like opening an incredibly personal box of old photos and getting hit with a type of nostalgia that cracks you wide open. It was a time in my life full of firsts - the first line out the door, the first press hit, the first celebrity customer, the first hire, surviving the first holiday season with a team that felt like family. And just like a first love, it’s all burned into my memory in bold detail. But like any beautiful memory, it has been buried over time under the day-to-day demands of life. These past few weeks have seen it all crashing back at once.

When you’re a founder in the trenches - making sure cupcakes (or now pizzas) are made and delivered into the right hands - you don’t typically have the luxury of checking in on whether you’re also delivering on your greater mission. You’re thinking about staffing, quality, inventory, payroll, and whether you’re going to make it through the weekend rush without some new disaster popping up. You’re not walking around thinking, this is going to become part of someone’s personal history. Being able to witness the stream of memories, stories, and tributes has been a rare and beautiful button on what we built.

Even if the physical form of the company has been altered… the thing I set out to create did what I hoped it would do. It became a joyful part of people’s lives.

That doesn’t make the ending easier. I wish it did. Watching something you built with that much care close abruptly is still brutal, and the senseless way it happened - fast, with employees let go without notice - was deeply disrespectful.

And then the internet did what it does best - flatten complex stories into one-note, black-and-white narratives. Sprinkles became shorthand for a bigger conversation: private equity, capitalism, what happens when beloved brands stop being cared for and start being treated like a commodity. There was so much rage at the system.

I understand why people were angry. I’m angry too.

And then it turned on me. The PE company that made the decision to close Sprinkles’ doors stayed completely silent - no statement, no context, no acknowledgement. On top of that, they took Sprinkles’ website offline and pulled its social media accounts down, and suddenly I was the only person people could direct their emotion toward, thirteen years after I sold the company and stepped away. The backlash went viral fast - the TikTok video I posted, still in shock about Sprinkles’ sudden closure, hit 7.7 million views and pulled in over 10,000 comments. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to mourn something privately while being pulled onto a public firing squad. I’ve been in business a long time, I’m not new to criticism, but there’s something uniquely brutal about being attacked while you’re already grieving.

And then (of course!) I started to wonder… what if I tried to buy it back? Customers and employees were begging me to. Some privately. Many publicly. And then the wildest part: Sprinkles customers and followers of mine started coming out of the woodwork offering to help me raise money - committing hundreds of thousands of dollars, bringing in other investors, even one of the most recognizable names in the business world reached out saying, “If you want to do this, I’ll help.”

For a moment, I let myself imagine it - not in a calm, rational way - but as a very human reaction to wanting to save something you love.

I don’t know what happens next.

What I do know is this: Sprinkles was an incredible business. It mattered to a lot of people. And it deserves to live on.

In the meantime, I wanted to do one small thing that feels right. A tribute. A love letter to the community that made Sprinkles what it was. I’ve always believed cake makes everything better, so starting later this week, we’re serving my Red Velvet cake at Pizzana Brentwood for a limited time - and it’ll roll out to all Pizzana locations throughout February.

Red velvet was always our most iconic flavor at Sprinkles. We were actually credited with helping turn it into a nationwide craze. And the funny part is, in those early days, most people in Los Angeles walking into Sprinkles had never even heard of the flavor. They’d point at the case and ask for “the red cupcake.” Or my personal favorite: “the red carpet cupcake.”

But sure enough… it took on a life of its own. No matter where Sprinkles opened throughout the country, Red Velvet became the bestselling cupcake.

So make sure you’re following @pizzana for the full announcement. And come grab a slice of my Red Velvet cake at Pizzana Brentwood and relive a favorite Sprinkles memory.

XO,

candace