Paulina Filimonova, founder and creative director of Pauline Cake Dubai, shares how she turned a passion for pastry into a growing business
How would you describe your journey so far?
I would describe it as a journey of constantly outgrowing the version of myself I had become comfortable with. I started as a pastry chef, doing almost everything myself – creating, baking, filming content, talking to clients. Social media completely changed the scale of what was possible for me, but eventually I realised that having a large audience and building a real company are two very different things.
Moving to Dubai became a new chapter. I had to build a business in a new country, understand a new market, create a team and learn how to become not only a creative person, but a founder and a leader.
Today, when I look at Pauline Cake, I see much more than a cake atelier. I see years of experiments, mistakes, risks, viral moments, long nights and a lot of growth.
Why did you decide to launch Pauline Cake?
Pauline Cake actually grew very organically. I never woke up one day and decided, “I’m going to build a cake company.”
It started with my passion for pastry and creativity, then social media gave me an audience, and that audience created demand. At some point, I realised that if I wanted to take it seriously, I couldn’t remain a person making cakes alone. I needed to build a system around the creativity.
When I moved to Dubai, I saw an opportunity to create something more ambitious – a cake atelier where cakes could become part of fashion, events, art and storytelling. Dubai is a city where people are not afraid of big ideas, so it felt like the perfect place to build Pauline Cake on a completely different scale.
What do people often get wrong about building a business?
I think people romanticise entrepreneurship a lot. From the outside, you see the launches, beautiful projects, numbers and success stories. You don’t see the hundreds of small problems behind every result.
Another misconception is that a founder should be able to do everything better than everyone else. I used to think being strong meant doing everything myself. Now I think the opposite: one of the most important skills of a founder is learning how to let go.
If the business cannot function without you controlling every detail, you haven’t really built a business – you’ve built yourself a very demanding job.
What’s changed most since your early days online versus running an atelier now?
Responsibility. In the beginning, almost every decision affected only me. If I wanted to change something overnight, I could. If an idea failed, it was mostly my problem.
Now every decision has a much bigger impact. There is a team, clients, production, logistics, salaries, deadlines and a reputation behind the brand. At the same time, I’ve gone from asking myself, “How can I make this?” to asking, “How can we make this at the highest level, repeatedly, without losing what makes it special?”
That shift from creator to founder has probably been the biggest transformation for me.
How do you stay hands-on in the creative process as the business grows around you?
I delegate execution, but I don’t delegate taste. I don’t need to personally make every element of every cake anymore, but I still want to be very close to the creative direction of the brand – the concepts, references, visual language and the feeling behind a project.
For me, the goal of building a team was never to remove myself from creativity. It was to remove myself from the things that prevented me from being creative.
I think my role has evolved from making everything with my own hands to creating the vision and building a team capable of bringing that vision to life.
What’s a lesson from scaling Pauline Cake that other founders should know?
Don’t scale chaos! When something works on a small scale, the instinct is to grow it as quickly as possible. But growth multiplies everything! Not only your strengths, but also your weaknesses.
If your processes are messy with ten orders, they will be much messier with a hundred. If the team doesn’t understand your standards when it is small, hiring more people won’t automatically solve it. I learned that sometimes the smartest thing you can do for growth is actually slow down, fix the foundation and then accelerate.
How do you think about virality versus long-term brand trust?
Virality can introduce millions of people to you overnight. Trust is what makes them stay. Social media has been incredibly important to my journey, and I love creating things that people want to share. Some of our projects have reached millions of people, and that visibility can completely change a business. But I never want Pauline Cake to become a brand that only looks impressive on Instagram. A viral video may bring someone to us once; the quality of the product and the experience determine whether they come back.
For me, the strongest brand is able to do both: create moments that capture attention and then deliver something that deserves that attention.
What’s next for Pauline Cake, any new launches or projects on the horizon?
I think the next chapter is about turning Pauline Cake into something bigger than a physical atelier. For years, I’ve been building not only a product, but also an audience and a community around pastry, creativity and entrepreneurship. Education has always been an important part of my journey, so I see a lot of potential in expanding that side internationally.
At the same time, I want to continue pushing the creative side of Pauline Cake in Dubai – working on bigger concepts, collaborations and projects where pastry goes beyond food and becomes an experience.
Ultimately, I don’t want Pauline Cake to be defined only by cakes. I want it to become a creative brand with its own recognisable world.