T
here is an art to icing cupcakes, and on a crisp winter morning Lidey Heuck ’13 and her boss Ina Garten are deep into discussing technique.
“I think it’s important you see the cupcake on the
outside so you know what kind is underneath,” Garten explains as she slathers a generous scoop of frosting onto one of her signature coconut cupcakes. “Very often the icing is too thin,” she adds. “It’s really an icing vehicle—an icing delivery system.” Heuck’s life has been replete with these tips and teachings since the summer of 2013 when she started running the social media efforts of the Barefoot Contessa, Garten’s culinary empire. But the gig has provided Heuck with much more than a cooking lesson. Garten is an accomplished chef but also an accomplished businesswoman. She has grown her operation from a gourmet food store in East Hampton, New York, where she still works and lives, into a powerhouse in the culinary world— complete with her own Food Network show and nine cookbooks, the most recent of which was published in 2014. To work with Garten is to have a window into what it means to be a successful entrepreneur. “Just seeing the way she chooses what to do—people are always offering her opportunities,” Heuck explains. “She says no most of the time.” But Heuck also has helped take the business to the next level. Since coming on board in 2013, she’s increased Garten’s Facebook followers by some half a million to more than 700,000 and got Garten on Instagram, where she now has a fan base approaching 200,000. “She’s taken our social media from zero to 100, which has had a huge impact on the book,” Garten says of her most recent cookbook, Make It Ahead. “Publishers Weekly was asking why the book has done double what every other book has done. It’s because our social effort has been so effective.” The formula for how Heuck landed the gig is one part initiative, one part luck. The spring of her senior year, Heuck had no idea what she wanted to do, but she did have one qualifier: “I wanted to do
18 BOWDOIN | WINTER 2015
something fun and see where it led rather than go into a corporate job,” she says. That requirement steered her toward jobs with organizations like the music festival South by Southwest. But a bell went off for Heuck when she was home over the holidays. As she used one of Garten’s cookbooks, she remembered that she had a link to the Barefoot Contessa. Garten’s attorney is the father of Peyton Kelley ’13, one of Heuck’s friends. Heuck asked Kelley if his dad might pass along a letter to Garten since she loved her cookbooks and unconventional career path. (Garten never went to culinary school and at one time was a White House nuclear policy analyst in the Carter administration.) Kelley’s dad agreed, with the caveat that she shouldn’t get her hopes up. But the letter stuck. “What I loved about it is that Lidey didn’t just say ‘I want a job and I’ll take