“Baking was kind of a hobby for me in my late teen years. I ended up going to school for general culinary, but I just really enjoyed doing baking and started doing birthday cakes and things like that when I was 18. I have now been in this business for around 19 years now.
My wife and I are both Hartsville natives. My wife was born at Byerly hospital, and I’ve lived in Hartsville since my family moved back here in the 2000s. We just really saw the good things that the city was doing by trying to revitalize the Downtown and we just fell in love with it. This was home for us and everything just fell into place for us to be here.
Griggs Circle Bakery was started in 2015 by my wife and me in our home. We attended farmer’s markets all around in order to build a client base and then it just grew and grew until it got to the point that we needed to get it out of our home because it had taken over. We participating in the Startsville program, which was an incredible experience. We were very fortunate to be one of the finalists that were awarded a grant to get started Downtown. That helped get us on our feet and rent this location and it has been growing ever since.
We enjoy being Downtown with the other shop owners and merchants. We have some really good relationships with the people and we have a lot more opportunities to get involved with things Downtown by helping to sponsor events and be a part of fundraisers and things to have more visibility from the streets.
I’m very fortunate to be able to be a part of special days for people and that is one of the things that I’m most passionate about. It is such an honor for us to get to work with people to create the perfect cake for a birthday celebration, showers, weddings, and so much more. We have done a lot of these for friends and for people that have become friends through the process.
Everything here is handmade from scratch and we have some really unique things for our customers that are all made fresh. We have a good variety of bread here at Griggs Circle Bakery that you can’t readily get everywhere like a grocery store. We make it all right here, we don’t buy anything frozen and just heat it up. We’re pretty proud of that.
One of my personal favorites here is just the chocolate chip cookie. That’s one of my oldest recipes and my mom and I developed that probably when I was like 18 or 19. It’s just been a solid chocolate chip cookie.”
– Brad Carr, Owner of Griggs Circle Bakery