Kyja Lee’s dreams come true with every cupcake her company makes at Sweet A Cupcake Co. in Florence and after a delectably fast-paced first year, the company has expanded to its newest location in Columbia.

Mixing quality ingredients, top-notch customer service and unique marketing has positioned the company for a, well, sweet future.

“I do believe that all I got to do is get the cupcakes out there and they’ll love it. I really feel like we’ll be successful anywhere because of the quality of our cupcakes,” Lee said sitting in a comfortable chair at the Village at Sandhill store in Columbia, which opened in late 2012.

Even though Florence didn’t know it, it was starving for a small, luxurious touch of those delicious cupcakes that were sweeping cities across the country into a sugared frenzy, ignited in part by reality TV shows. A Cupcake store had opened in the summer of 2009 in Columbia’s Vista.

Lee saw the untapped potential in Florence.

“I never baked cupcakes, I never bought cupcakes and I never ate cupcakes,” Lee admits. “But my husband and I would go to different cities – to New York, Boston, to Houston and see cupcake shops open up everywhere and when we came back I told my husband, ‘There is such a market in Florence for so many little things that haven’t been there yet.’”

So Lee did her research, drew on memories of baking with her grandmother, did some marketing and started handing out some cupcakes.

That’s when opportunity came knocking and the business began to snowball. Lee knew if she was going to execute her idea, she had to do it right. She hired Johnson and Wales-trained chef Brandon Taylor, secured a location and opened up on Sept. 27, 2011.

“It was perfect timing and I wondered, ‘Am I going to be on the end of it (the cupcake trend), is it just a bubble?’” Lee said. “But I was doing some research and everything I read seemed like cupcakes were here to stay.”

Using quality ingredients like Belgian chocolate, Madagascar vanilla and other natural ingredients, as well as the help of family recipes, personal recipes and ingenuity, the duo concocted cleverly named basics like Paint the Town Red Velvet, the vanilla butter cream White House and others, which gave way to weekly specials like the Black Pearl on Wednesdays or the peanut butter Burris on Tuesdays along with seasonal favorites like Strawberry Fields and Apple Harvest.

After a wildly popular, profitable first year, the store is still getting new customers along with its regulars, Lee said.

“We offer the best quality cupcake we can produce and equal to that is the best quality customer service,” Lee said.

Mix those two together with a creative social media-based marketing by her daughter, Kelsey, and a solid business plan from Kelsey’s husband, Greg Wood, – both partners with Lee – and you get a perfectly baked cupcake story.

“I think we just knew we needed to do a Facebook page to get our name out there to spread the word that we were opening,” Lee said. “So we started thinking of different ways to market ourselves to get people on our Facebook page.”

Sweet goes through its friends list and posts three names a day to its Facebook page of people who are eligible for a free cupcake and coffee. Friends tell other friends who end up going, and Lee says that is where the marketing comes full circle.

The steps taken in Florence will be the cornerstone for the new Columbia store. Remodeling a space slightly smaller than the Florence store and bringing Taylor, the original Sweet chef to Columbia full time, Wood believes that the consistency will help spread the gospel of Sweet to Florence’s western neighbors and beyond. “I would like to do a Charlotte- or Charleston-type thing, though there are more competitors there,” Wood said, compared to just one in downtown Columbia 25 minutes away.