Road to College Paved With Candyland Dream,
By Teresa Brumback

Leesburg Today's Loudon Living, March 2. 2001

A sweet American success story began in Ashburn with no business plan, no investors, and no capital expenditures. Eight years later, Wendy Martin's business empire still consists of two cooking pots and twelve baking sheets.

In the humble kitchen of Wendy Martin's Ashburn home, the mother of three still whiles away a couple of days each week as one of Loudon's few lucky stay-at-home moms, whipping up her tasty homemade English Toffee that she sells locally to friends and to Lavender Fields, a florist in Ashburn.
The recipe's a secret, though it appears she mixes butter and sugar to the hard-crack stage and slathers it with melted chocolate and both slivered AND shredded almonds. There's a difference in how the two types of almonds feel in your mouth, and the combination is extraordinary.

The birth of Martin's business, Tinker's Toffee, began when she heard a toffee recipe on the radio back when she was living in San Francisco in the 1980s.

"I liked English toffee, so I pulled off the side of the road, wrote it down on the back of an envelope. I made it for my family at Christmas."

Ever since, she has turned her sweet tooth into some toothsome profits. With four ingredients and a dream, she has managed to pay for her two sons' college tuition, earning about $5,000 a year in net proceeds.

Friends and family were the recipients of her toils with toffee until 1994 when she got the first of a few of her big rock-hard candy breads.

Her sister worked as a tenant manager at a large corporate park, and they ordered a hefty 800 pounds.
Big orders like that are thrilling to Martin even though she frankly admits she's still a neophyte in the business world. Fear of the business side of things is, she says, what is keeping her from expanding. The thought of having to hire people and the extra workload involved with taxes, bookkeeping, and record keeping is not a sweet one compared to her current status of being her own boss and her only employee.

"I'm right on the edge of going big time," she says. "If I go any bigger, I'll have to hire somebody. It will take me into another part of business that I don't have any experience with. I don't have any experience with marketing or employees."

She's had a glimpse of the big stage, through a friend who works as a marketing agent specializing in the sales of bulk lettuce. He pulled her toffee into Chicago's Neiman Marcus store where it did a brisk business for a while but because of snafus with that company her future work for the chain store is now up in the air.

However, her toffee is the sweet closing to new car deals at Darcy Cars, a major Chicago dealership, where new buyers get a tin of her toffee to go with their new wheels. Some real estate agents in Loudon give the Tinker's Toffee to their new homebuyers. Martin bought hand painted boxes that look like houses to put the candy in, personalized with the buyer's name on it.

Since she started she estimates she has made about three tons of toffee. Holidays are her best times for sales. Around Christmas, she churns out about 54 pounds a day, though she can't figure out why Valentine's Day is such a bitter time for sales.

Maybe an upcoming webpage will help generate more orders. Her future son-in-law boosted his status with the family by getting that project going and registering the rights to tinkerstoffee.com.

And she credits the Loudon County Chamber of Commerce with giving her the networking opportunities and the gumption to vault her into a money-making business. For $60, she received all her permit and licensing fees.

"I joined Leadshare, a chamber group that shares ideas in the morning. I met 40 people. People started buying it and giving it as gifts."

In 1998, the Chamber selected her toffee as "Product of the Year" for Loudon County.
Sweet dreams of getting her sons the finest education turned into sweet dreams of success. Even she wonders in amazement at how it all came together so fast. "I started with one batch that made one and a half pounds."