The Hong Kong bakery working with Ralph Lauren, Loewe and Richard Mille: beloved by luxury brands, Dough Being’s bomboloni, panettone and mooncakes sell out in seconds
- Like notoriously private fashion designer Martin Margiela, the two sisters behind Dough Beings keep a low profile – but were still courted by big brands, from Ralph Lauren and Roger Vivier to Piaget and Loewe
- One sister is the chef while the other has a canny background in marketing – today their Insta-friendly filled bomboloni sells out as fast as their trademark panettone, known as the ‘Everest of baked goods’
Dough Beings are the Margiela of the Instagram world. In an age when it’s almost mandatory for a founder to proudly become the face of the company and share his or her personal story, the two sisters who launched this online-only bakery prefer to remain blissfully anonymous – much like the eponymous designer of the French luxury fashion house Martin Margiela (renamed Maison Margiela after he left).
It also happens to be basically the hottest bakery in Hong Kong, with 33,000 followers and limited-edition “drops” that sell out in minutes. The sisters who run it say the restrictions on orders and the choice of monthly flavours are more due to managing quality than marketing strategy, though. They also ask to remain nameless and would only reveal that one learned her craft at culinary school and is the creative eye behind the photography, while the other learned the art of branding and marketing from working at Lane Crawford.
The business started pre-pandemic, in 2019, when a friend approached them to make a batch of goodies for an office party. “We were making quite a variety of pastries at that time,” they say. “It was a lot of different elements and flavours, and it took quite a long time – much more time than we expected to be able to make the order, which was how we realised: OK, maybe we should focus on one thing first and perfecting it.”
The filled bomboloni were always by far the favourites, and so that’s what they chose. Today, Dough Beings offers such sophisticated flavours such as kinako cinnamon mochi, rose framboise, lemon basil meringue and even French onion gruyère – though such savoury options were at first met with scepticism, they are now strong contenders in terms of popularity. They also serve up unconventional panettone – known to pastry chefs as the “Everest of baked goods” – such as October’s pandan pineapple white chocolate flavour.
If the fun flavours and flawless execution weren’t enough (the bomboloni are amazingly light and fluffy, with gooey centres made of dreams), the aesthetic is on a par with any luxury brand’s – a product of the sisters’ obsession with art, design and beautiful branding, and the intersection of creativity and functionality.
“Working at Lane Crawford was my first exposure of branding guidelines and how precisely it had to be kept to in order to maintain the look of luxury – how the logo is placed on the marketing materials, the size of it, the position and the colours,” says one sister. “For our own branding, we wanted it to be timeless and versatile, and we started taking photos of our food – how we wanted it to be served and eaten and served in natural light – and that inspired the direction of the photography. We also looked at how fashion brands have changed their logos towards a more minimalistic feel, but it still looks clean and sleek and has that luxury touch to it. All of these are things we personally feel very interested in.”