From baking yeast to baker’s dozen: LaMontagne ’00 celebrates Georgetown Cupcake‘s fourth year

Georgetown Cupcake, the famous Washington, D.C.-based dessert seller featured on TLC’s DC Cupcakes and founded by Sophie Kallinis LaMontagne ’00, is coming to New York.

Founded four years ago this month, LaMontagne’s cupcake store opened a third location in SoHo on Saturday, part of a new expansion that will bring the store to Boston by this spring. The popular television program, in its second season, features LaMontagne and her sister’s ventures in the dessert world.

LaMontagne’s emergence in the industry was not a straight shot.

“When I was a freshman at Princeton, I never would have predicted that I would be baking cupcakes on television,” LaMontagne said in an email.

A molecular biology major at the University, LaMontagne took a course in healthcare policy her senior year that made her rethink her career interests. After graduation, LaMontagne took a position at The Lewin Group, a healthcare policy group in Washington, D.C., founded by Larry Lewin ’59. After a couple of years at The Lewin Group, LaMontagne jumped to Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, where she worked on biotech issues.

LaMontagne said her time in finance was a fit for her background and experience.

“For me, this was the perfect mix of both of my interests — since I got to work with early-stage start-up companies in the biotech space,” she explained.

LaMontagne had always loved baking, however. In fact, molecular biology professor Frederick Hughson noted that this passion was evident in her academic work.

“For her thesis, she studied baker’s yeast, actually, which is a premier model organism for cellular and molecular biologists and is also an essential ingredient for cupcakes,” he said in an email.

LaMontagne and her sister had always thought about starting a bakery together, she said, but never imagined baking becoming a career. But her past experience in the business world convinced her to give it a shot.

“After working in venture capital and witnessing how passionate entrepreneurs were about their young companies, I decided to take the plunge,” she said. “It is a very scary thing to quit a stable job that you love for something relatively unknown,” she added.

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Four years ago yesterday, the pair quit their jobs and started Georgetown Cupcake. Today, the shop has become a small chain, with its namesake location in the iconic Washington neighborhood and a second in the suburb of Bethesda, Md. The two additional locations in Boston and New York are the first outside the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Hughson said that he was not surprised by his former student’s accomplishments in the industry.

"Sophie is a great 'people person,' so her business success doesn't surprise me at all. It's a wonderful feature of a Princeton education that ... a molecular biology major can become a cupcake mogul!"