Today we’d like to introduce you to Sophia Lee.
Hi Sophia, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve loved baking since I was a little kid, not just the making, but the giving. Watching a neighbor unwrap something I made and seeing their face change was everything to me. It was never about the food. It was about the moment.
When I graduated from Purdue University and moved to Austin in 2023, I thought I was starting a new chapter. What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to find my footing. I ended up working in Round Rock, then Taylor, and the environment wasn’t what I had imagined. I didn’t know anyone. I was building a life in a place that didn’t yet feel like mine. So I baked. Every night after work, I baked.
That year, sourdough was everywhere on social media, everyone talking about their starters, feeding them like pets. I started one too, and if you know anything about starters, you know they get out of hand fast. Pretty soon I had more sourdough loaves than I knew what to do with. So I did what felt natural, I walked them over to my neighbors. They started asking if they could buy them. I posted on Facebook Marketplace. And somehow, people actually bought bread from a stranger on the internet. I was shocked. I didn’t even know that was a thing. That quiet rhythm, baking alone at night, giving it away, getting feedback, that was how My.Boulangerie was born. Not from a business plan. From loneliness, and from love.
The name itself is simple and a little impulsive, which honestly fits. Boulangerie is French for bakery, so My.Boulangerie is really just My.Bakery. I named it the way so many Korean cafés do, with a French word that just felt cute, and I didn’t think much further than that. I was a hobby baker, not a brand strategist. But looking back, it feels right. There’s something about being Korean American, building something in Austin, naming it in French, it’s a little everywhere at once. And maybe that’s the point.
Around this time, my mom immigrated to the United States and became my biggest supporter. Having her here changed everything. She believed in what I was doing even before I did.
My first pop-up happened almost by accident, I walked past a café in Georgetown and something told me to ask. They said yes. Standing there, watching people pick up something I made, pay for it, take a bite, I felt something click. This was the environment I wanted to be in. I didn’t just love baking. I loved this.
Then in early 2024, everything shifted in a way I never saw coming. I baked salt bread and milk bread, pumpkin and chestnut, almost on a whim. Within days, the Austin Korean community started flooding my Instagram. It turns out these were flavors trending in Korea that simply didn’t exist here yet. People weren’t just buying bread. They were finding something familiar in a city where they, too, might have been looking for a piece of home.
That’s when I understood what My.Boulangerie actually was.
I’m a veteran, a woman, and a proud Korean American, and My.Boulangerie carries all of that without trying to. The discipline and resilience that came from my service, the flavors and bakery culture I grew up with, the determination to build something real in a new city with no roadmap, it’s all in there, baked in, you could say.
Today, My.Boulangerie does weekly drops through Hotplate, and we sell out consistently. We’re known for our rotating salt bread flavors, alligator pie, Korean corn bread, and seasonal desserts made with ingredients like black sesame, mugwort, and chestnut, flavors you’re not likely to find anywhere else in Austin. We do drop-offs at Dam Coffee Bar and Lau Lau ATX, and we’ve found a real home in this city’s baker community.
What started as one girl making too much sourdough in a Round Rock apartment turned into something I could have never planned. A community of people who come back not just for the bread, but for the feeling it gives them.
That’s still what it’s about. The moment when someone tries something unfamiliar, and then immediately asks when the next drop is.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Honestly, smoother than I expected emotionally, but physically and logistically? The kitchen has humbled me more than once.
The biggest ongoing struggle has been production. I’m baking out of a home kitchen, and there’s a ceiling to what that allows. We’ve had moments where the oven shut down just hours before a preorder pickup. We’ve had batches where the quality wasn’t quite where I wanted it because I was pushing beyond what the space could realistically handle. A home oven takes nearly double or triple the time of a commercial oven, so what sounds like a manageable order count on paper becomes a very long night in practice.
The hardest part was finding the balance. If I kept quantities small, customers would be frustrated that they missed the drop entirely. If I pushed volume to meet demand, I’d sometimes notice the consistency slip, and that bothered me more than the sellouts ever bothered anyone else. Quality is personal to me. I’d rather disappoint someone on quantity than hand them something I’m not proud of.
We even tried moving into a commercial kitchen to solve it, but it didn’t work out, bread, especially the kind we make, is sensitive. The environment matters. So for now, we’ve learned to work with our constraints rather than against them, and we’re very intentional about what we take on.
It’s not a perfect system yet. But every limitation has taught me something about the craft and about running a real business, not just a hobby that got bigger than expected.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
By day, I’m a software engineer, I work in tech, building systems and writing code. It’s a very different world from baking, but honestly the two aren’t as far apart as they seem. Both require precision, problem-solving, and a constant willingness to debug what went wrong and try again.
My.Boulangerie is what I do in every hour outside of that. And what we’ve become known for is bringing flavors to Austin that you genuinely can’t find anywhere else here, rotating salt bread flavors, Korean corn bread, alligator pie, and seasonal desserts rooted in Asian ingredients like black sesame, mugwort, and chestnut. Our menu rotates, our flavors are unexpected, and we sell through weekly drops that regularly sell out.
This started as a coping mechanism and became a community. I wasn’t trying to build a brand, I was just a girl in a new city who didn’t know anyone and needed something to do with her hands. The fact that people now look forward to our drops, that the “Austin community” found something familiar in what I was making, that I’ve gotten to meet so many incredible bakers and small business owners through this journey, that’s what I’m most proud of. I didn’t set out to create belonging. It just happened through bread.
Honestly? The combination of who I am. I’m a software engineer running a home bakery powered by Korean flavors in the middle of Texas, there’s no blueprint for that. I approach My.Boulangerie the same way I approach a technical problem: I research, I iterate, I pay close attention to feedback, and I don’t stop until the thing works the way it’s supposed to. That obsessiveness about craft, whether it’s code or a milk bread dough, is just how I’m wired. And I think people taste that. They taste that it wasn’t made carelessly; that’s what sets us apart from others.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a mentor, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a great networker even today. I think that’s worth saying out loud because a lot of people in my position probably feel the same way and wonder if they’re missing something everyone else has figured out.
What I can say is that the community found me more than I found it. Baking publicly, showing up at pop-ups, posting consistently, those things put me in rooms I never would have walked into on my own. I’ve met other bakers through those moments who have been genuinely generous with their time and knowledge. Not everyone. Some doors I knocked on didn’t open. Collaborations I reached out about never went anywhere. That’s real, and I think it’s important to normalize that rejection is part of the process even when you’re not doing anything wrong.
The handful of people who did show up, fellow home bakers, small business owners in the Austin food community, made a bigger difference than any formal networking event ever could have. It was never about volume. It was about the right people at the right time.
So my advice, such as it is: just keep making the thing you make, and make it well. Be genuine about where you are in the journey. The right connections tend to come through the work itself, not through chasing them.
And if someone reaches out to you asking for help someday, pay it forward. That’s really the only networking strategy I believe in.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hotplate.com/my.boulangerie
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/my.boulangerie/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18h3pRh72A/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/my-boulangerie-round-rock
- Other: myboulangerie23@gmail.com
