Who Is Kendra Tamika? The Origin Story.

Before the brands, the books, and the business, there was a woman who had to remember who she was. In this first episode, Kendra Tamika introduces herself fully. Not the highlight reel version. The whole picture. From the kitchen to the farmers market to Central Market shelves, from COVID closing a chapter to building something better on the other side. This is where the Layered Love Universe begins. Pull up a chair. 

Layered Love Gourmet


Remember Her Publishing


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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, welcome to Layer's Love Universe. I am your host, Kendra Tanika. I have been thinking about this first episode for a while now. A very long while. And every time I sat down to write it, I kept trying to make it very polished and very professional and very put together. And then I would look at what I am written and think, this is not me at all. It sounds like a biopage. It sounds like I'm reading off of the script. And nobody wants to listen to a biopage for 20 minutes. So we are scrapping the polish. We are going with honest, which if you stick around, you will learn is kind of my whole thing. My name is Kendra Tavika, and I am going to tell you who I am today. Not because I have it all figured out, but because I figured out enough to know that hiding the full picture does not serve anybody. Not me, not you, not the woman who needed to hear what it's possible to be many things at once without any of those things being less real or less valuable because of others. So here's the full picture. I am a patriot chef with nearly two decades of experience. I am a published author and the founder of Remember Her Publishing, an independent imprint with 15 tiles in the catalog and counting. I am a certified scrum master and agile leader. I am a homeschooling mom to a neurodivergent princess. I am the founder of Layered Love Cormay, a luxury smallvax dessert brand based in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I am now becoming a fantasy writer. Something that I kind of just found out I love after writing my first set of books. I was like, well, you know how much I love Sky Pi. Why not? I have my first trilogy drafted, working on my second, a whole world built just for my imagination. Um, still practicing that one personally, but we're gonna talk about it in episode seven, so stay tuned. I also have a great sense of humor, a very lame tolerance for fake professionalism, and an extremely strong opinion about butter and the price of butter right now. We will get to all of that eventually. This is Lady Love Universe with Kendra Zunka, episode one. This one is just me, my story, where I came from, what I built, what I lost, what I rebuilt, and why I finally stopped pretending I was supposed to be just one thing. Pull up a chair, get comfortable. This is gonna be worth your time. Turn it on while you're driving to work in the morning or just cleaning your house. Let's start where it all started. I want to start in the kitchen because that's where most of my real life has happened. And honestly, where most of my best decisions have been made. There is nothing about flour on your hands and butter and bowls that makes everything else get quiet for a minute. Especially when I went to the house, shut down, went to everyone to sleep to just go to the kitchen, vape, or create recipes. And I've always needed that kind of quiet, that that kind of when there's so much chaos around me, that brings me peace. I've been a pastry chef for nearly two decades. Not as a hobby, not as a side thing. I picked it for fun, as a profession, as a calling. And I want to be specific about what that means. Because I think people hear pastry chef and picture son want a fancy kitchen, decorate cakes for weddings. And while I have done that, that is not the heart of it. The heart of it is this there is a moment when something you made from raw ingredients becomes something that makes the person stop everything they are doing and just feel something. You can see it in their eyes, you can see it in their body. That moment never gets old for me. Not once from when I started till now, not in 20 years. Every single time it still gets me. It puts a smile on my face, it brings a little more joy into my heart because that's kind of my love language to the world. I grew up understanding that food is love-made edible. And I mean, literally, not as a metaphor. When someone spends hours in the kitchen making something for you, they're not just making sure. They're saying, I thought about you while I was doing this. You are worth my time, you are worth my attention in my very limited time space. Especially when bacon, you're worth my mind. They're both of these scientific equations. That is a profound thing to save someone. And I have been saying it in butter and sugar my entire adult life. Now, here's what I want you to think about as I tell you this. Because this is not just a story about baking. This is a story about what it looks like when you built your whole life around the belief that the things that you make with your hands and your heart matter. Every single thing I've built, the food brand, the publishing house, the leadership framework, the podcast you're listening to right now, all of it comes from that same place. The belief that what you put into the world with intention and care and genuine love for the person on the received end is worth doing. Worth doing well, worth doing what even no one is watching. That is where layered love comes from, not just the brand name, as a philosophy. Every layer matters, every ingredient has a purpose. Nothing in here is accidental. And that is true whether we're talking about banana pudding, oatmeal cream pies, a book, or a leadership framework, or this podcast is true in every aspect of my life. Everything I make is layered, everything I make is intentional, and everything I make is made with love. Even when I'm frustrated, even when it's not coming out right, even when I have to start over, the love is already there. That is a non-negotiable degree. You can taste it when someone makes something with love. Let me tell you about the first time I built the flu business, because this story matters, and I don't tell it enough. I started doing wedding cakes, doing sculpted cakes, doing dessert tables. 2008, 2009. I would bring my banana pudding to family events, I would bring it to just um events that we had, dessert tables where I was doing sponsorships. I would have like my banana pudding. I had all that brownie bikes. I would have like cake slices. And the banana pudding was always the thing to go the fastest, the quickest, the thing that people talked about and kept talking about. Fast forward to 2016, after I had my daughter, started doing an exclusively only pudding business. At the time it was called Putting on Smiles. And then we started at the farmers market, which sounds romantic when you say it out loud, but let me paint you a more accurate picture. I'm talking about waking up before the sun, loading a car at the dark, driving to the location, setting at the table while my hand just got half asleep, standing on my feet for six to eight hours in the kitchen, making the jars while our tea was out selling the place and talking to strangers who may or may not become customaries, and then packing everything back up, driving back home, or driving back to the commercial kitchen at the time, doing my math in the head about whether I made enough to cover the cost of the ingredients and the table fee and my time and the commercial kitchen fee, and then doing it again and again the next weekend and again, the next one after that, and the next one after that. That is what building from nothing actually looks like. Not the highlight reel, not the moment when it works, the long, unglamorous, repetitive, faith requiring, middle part where you just keep showing up, but when you believe in what you make, even when you cannot yet prove that anyone else will. Every conversation with a customer, with market research, I could not have gotten any other way. Every Saturday morning, loading that car in the dark, was building the muscle memory of what it feels like to become someone who shows up for provision even when it's hard. And then something extraordinary happened. A buyer from Central Market at the time discovered my product at a farmer's market. For anyone who does not know, Central Market is one of the prestigious kind of upscale farmer's market style food retailers in that region in Texas. They're selective, they're serious, they're branched off of the HEB brand. And if you're from Texas or from that part in the stop, you know HEB and you know us Central Market. And they wanted our product on the shelves. Before this, we were in Mom and Pop's very first grocery was Blue, what was it called? Blue Royal Blue Grocery Store. I was trying to think of the name. Royal Grocery Store. That was our very first grocery store. And then we were in Mom and Pop shops around just the region or just the state of Texas. Austin, Houston, and kind of grew from there. And in the midst of that, Central Market, buyer from Central Market came to our booth, take that product. I believe it was the daughter that takes it first, told him about it. And that's kind of where it started. I wasn't setting that moment for a second because I think it deserves more than a quick sentence. I went from making things in my home kitchen and selling them off the table at a farmer's market to having my product in a specialty reset store that people drive out of their way to shop at. This is not a small thing. This is that is a validation of every early morning and in every napkin calculation and every moment of doubt that I pushed through. It happened because I showed up consistently with a product that was undeniable. And because the buyer had excellent taste, I will always give him credit when I tell the story. That in itself is a gift. And then 2020 happened. COVID shut down the world, farmers' markets closed, retail slowed to almost nothing. The entire infrastructure that small food businesses depended on just stopped. And my business, the one I had built from a home kitchen to specialty retail shelves, did not survive it. When you mix in personal things that happened in my life, it just, the company just didn't survive. I want to say that plainly and without shame because I think business closure carries more weight and more stigma than it should. I was going through a divorce at the time. I was not the only one dealing with things in my business that made or may not shut it down. So I want to say that directly to anyone listening who has ever closed something they built. That closure does not erase what you made. It does not erase the skill you developed or the relationships you built or the proof that you can do it. It just means that chapter ended. And ending is not the same as failing. What that chapter gave me was everything I needed to build what came next. Every mistake I made the first time became a lesson that I did not repeat. Every gap in my strategy became something I built intentionally the second time around. Later in love gourmet is the rebuild. And I say this with complete conviction. It is better than anything I've ever made before. Not just the products, though they are better, the strategy is better, the brand identity is better, the vision for where it is going is bigger and clearer and more intentional than anything I had the first time. Because now I know what I'm doing in a way I simply did not before. I utilized that experience to bring me to where I am now. And the only way I got there was by going through the things that I lost. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became an author, which I say casually now, but was generally one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life. And I loaded a car I load in the dark at five in the morning in January. So that is saying something. I wrote a memoir called Remember Her. And I want to tell you why, because the why matters more than the what. I wrote it because I had been carrying a version of myself that I did not recognize anymore. You know that feeling, maybe where you look up one day and realize that somewhere along the way, you got very good at being what everyone around you needed, and very out of practice at being who you actually were. That's where I was. I had made myself smaller in so many ways, and for so many years, that small had started to feel normal. It started to feel like just the way things were. Like maybe I did it wrong about who I thought I was, and this quieter, less space taken version was the real me. It was the real one. Writing the memoir for me was a process of arguing with that line on paper, and it was not a clean or comfortable process. There were things I had to sing out loud on the page that I never said out loud anywhere. There were memories I had to sit inside long enough to describe them honestly. There were versions of myself I had to look at without flinching and without making excuses. But here's what I learned about telling the truth. It costs you something in the writing, and it gives you something back that is worth more than what you pay. What gave me back was myself. Not a perfect version, not a finished version, but a version that feels real and full in my in a way the smaller version never had. I published Remember Her because I believed other women needed it. Not because I had everything figured out, but because I knew I was not the only one who had ever looked in the mirror and not fully recognized the woman looking back. And I was right. The messages I received from women who have read that book are some of the most precious things I own. I am so happy that people have found value in it. One who said, I thought I was the only one. Woman who said, I did not know I needed permission to remember myself. Woman who said, I finished this on a Tuesday afternoon and sat in my car for 20 minutes just crying and then called my best friend. That is why you tell the truth, not for yourself only, for the person who needs to hear it and does not yet have the words. I have to remember her. I could not stop writing. It was it was pretty hilarious, actually. But I could not stop writing. Remember her published and became a full independent imprint. A curriculum. Now I'm doing the fantasy series. So I'm at 15 titles and counting, all of it published under my own house, all of it owned by me, and all of it built on the foundation of the first honest book. I am a lot. I am big. I don't know if y'all heard the Mona Leah song. I'm big and big. I know I made my peace with it honestly, and so has everyone else who loved me. I am a certified scrum master, I'm an actor leader, I do corporate leadership counseling, I do corporate leadership consulting, I speak on stages to executive teams in conferences about intentional decision making and leading without burning everyone out. And I can see the past you're making right now. Pastry chef, the scrum master is not really a common career arc. I am aware. I've seen the looks. But here's what you need to understand about the arc. It makes complete sense when you once you see it in the right way. Leadership is leadership, whether you're in the kitchen, whether you're out on the farmers market, whether you're in a corporate space or just around family members. Leadership is leadership. The skills that make you excellent in a professional kitchen, reading the energy of a room, making high-stakes decisions under pressure, keeping quality consistent when everything around you is chaotic, delegating with clarity, giving feedback that improves performance without destroying morale. Those are the same skills that make you excellent in a boardroom or a conference room or on a stage. I did not become a scrum master in spite of my background. I became one because of it. Because I already understood for years of professional experience, what it meant to lead a team through pressure while keeping the standard high and the people old. I wrote a book called Pause Clear Lead that captures everything I have learned about what intentional leadership actually looks like in real life, what having emotional intelligence and utilizing it in leadership looks like. Not a theory, not the corporate jargon, just real frameworks built from real experience, leading real humans through real situations utilizing EI, emotional intelligence. The pause method is a signature framework at the center of that work. It is a five-step process for making better decisions under pressure. And the clear framework is about how you lead people through change once the decision is made. Together, they form a complete leadership system that I've used in corporate environments and in my own business and definitely in my own life. I bring my whole self to leadership work, not just the professional version, all of it. The patriot chef who learned precision and creativity and pressure, the author who learned to tell the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, the entrepreneur who learned what it costs to build something and what it teaches you when you lose it. The mom who learned that leading a family requires every single leadership skill that leading a team does, plus a higher tolerance for noise and patience. A lot of patience. That is what makes the work land differently. There's a lot of leadership content out there. I am not giving you a framework I read in a book. I'm giving you a framework I built from actually living it. There's a difference and you can feel it. Trust me. So why the layered love universe? Why a podcast that tries to hold all of this at once? Why not just pick one thing and go deep on that one thing, the way everyone keeps suggesting? Well, because I have tried thinking one thing. I tried showing up in separate rooms as separate versions of myself. The fleet person in one room, the author in another, the leadership consultant somewhere else, the homeschooling mom in a completing urban space. And every time I did that, I felt like I was lying. Not intentionally, but by omission, by showing people. A slice of blue I am and letting them think that was the whole picture. And here's why I know about operating from a partial version of yourself. It is truly exhausting. Exhausting. Because you're always managing the gap between who you are in this room and who you are in that room, keeping that mask on between the spaces. You're always making sure the pieces do not show up in the wrong place. You're always shrinking something so something else can expand. And at the end of the day, you're tired in a specific way that has nothing to do with how much work you did and everything to do with how much of yourself you held back. The layered loan universe is my answer to all of that. There's a place I built where all of me gets to show up at the same time. The page time and the scrum master and the author and the mom and the entrepreneur and the woman who wrote a fantasy series, because apparently that was always inside of me. And she just needed to give permission to come out. Why keep bringing up who I am? And more than being a space for me, I built it because I believe there are women listening right now who are doing the same thing, showing up in separate rooms as separate versions of themselves, hearing pick a lane and trying to decide which lane to pick. When the honest answer is that they were built for the whole road. Every episode is going to pull back a curtain on what it actually looks like to build a full layered unapologetic life. Not a perfect one, not a finished one, but a real one. With all of the joy and all of the mess and all of the pivots and all the things that do not go as planned and somehow turned into something better. That is what Layered Love Universe is. That is what this podcast is, and that is what I am committed to giving you every single week. So as we close, I am Kendra Tabika, Patriot Chef, author, agile leader, scrum master, hollow school of mind to a beautiful divergent princess, entrepreneur, fantasy writer, woman who decided that the full version of herself was worth showing up as. Welcome to the Lair Love Universe. I am truly, genuinely glad you found your way here. If this first episode gave you something, share it with somebody who needed to hear it today. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It takes about 40 seconds. And it helps more people find the show. And come find me at kenfeaksomiga.com and remember her publishing.com. Everything is waiting there for you. Episode two drops tomorrow. We are talking about the nurturer. I'm going to ask you directly whether you have been feeding everyone else while running on Etsy. So come back ready to have that conversation. I'll see you tomorrow. Trust me, I am already excited.