Better work-life balance: S’porean mum runs baking business from JB rental home

SINGAPORE – On weekday mornings in Johor Bahru, Ms Nur Syafawani, 30, steps onto the balcony of her 55 sq m rental studio apartment, coffee in hand, and allows herself to breathe a little deeper. 

Three days a week, the Singaporean mother of three lives alone in Forest City – an integrated property development in JB an hour’s drive from Woodlands Checkpoint. It costs her roughly RM2,000 (S$645) a month in rent, and she considers it one of the best decisions she has ever made for herself. 

It is an arrangement she says she needs to maintain both her physical and mental health, and the fast-growing online bakery business she runs from across the Causeway.

Ms Nur, whose children are aged 12, nine and three, is best known as the face of BidadariKek, a TikTok account she started in 2019 to document her cake decorating hobby and share baking recipes.

Over time, she began accepting orders for customised cakes and desserts from viewers who reached out via the account.

In Malay, bidadari means fairy – a name she feels reflects her willingness to create almost anything her customers request. The account gained significant traction during the pandemic years and now has more than 126,000 followers. 

“People were always asking me if I could make this and that for them, and I’d say, ‘You name it, I’ll bake it,’” she says with a laugh. 

She once made a larger-than-life lizard cake, as well as others shaped like a taco and sushi rolls.

In November 2025, she launched Frenchella Patisserie, an online bakery offering tarts, stuffed croissants and other desserts, and began selling her baked goods on TikTok Shop – the social media platform’s e-commerce arm. Stuffed croissants cost $3.70 each, while a box of chocolate chip cookies costs $18.

The move proved to be a turning point, growing her business exponentially.

With TikTok Shop, she sells around 500 tins of her signature Frenchella tarts – a soft, crumbly cookie topped with rich Nutella frosting that costs $23 a box – in a typical week.

She uses an 84 per cent fat French butter – a high-fat professional grade butter that yields bakes with a luxurious mouthfeel – in her tarts. Such butters are produced by premium French dairy brands such as Lescure and Elle & Vire Professionnel.

In November, she also shifted baking operations from Singapore to JB, citing lower operational costs, a wider and more affordable range of ingredients, as well as opportunities to collaborate with local bakeries there. 

However, the initial stages of transition proved difficult. 

As she navigated teething issues with her JB operations while continuing to manage her household in Singapore with her husband, she found herself commuting frequently between both cities. Over five weeks, she spent close to $2,000 on hotel accommodation in JB alone.

By January, after two months of juggling a rapidly expanding business and caring for her children – the eldest of whom has autism – her lifestyle felt unsustainable.

“I was losing sleep and appetite to the point where I would fall asleep in the middle of a conversation and skip meals for over 40 hours. It was the most tiring two months ever. I realised I couldn’t do it any more,” she says.

She also noticed herself becoming more irritable, which spilled over into her home life.

Eventually, she sat down with her husband – who now works with her full time after leaving his previous job as a manager in a boat company – to discuss alternatives. Her husband, who prefers not be named, manages operations in Singapore, including handling logistics and finances.

Together, they agreed she would split her time between Singapore and JB.

Winding road to success 

Ms Nur is no stranger to hard work. In 2015, at age 20, she and her mother sold cookies for Hari Raya on Facebook. It earned them around $3,000 within two weeks. 

While her parents are Singaporeans, they moved to JB when she was eight as part of their early retirement plans. Ms Nur is the fourth of five children. 

She recalls waking before dawn during Hari Raya to take public transport across the Causeway, hand-delivering containers of cookies to customers in Singapore to ensure orders were fulfilled before noon.

Buoyed by the positive response, the mother-daughter duo repeated the effort in 2016, opening pre-orders a month in advance and exceeding their $5,000 sales target.

At the time, Ms Nur was commuting weekly to Singapore to attend school at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, while honing her baking skills from home.

“I learnt from YouTube how to make and decorate desserts like brownies and birthday cakes. I’d ask my customers to let me try making them first and to give me feedback, so I could do better for future orders,” says Ms Nur, who moved to Singapore after getting married in mid-2016. 

From 2015 to 2019, she juggled two jobs – working as a tattoo artist while running a home-baking business. Both roles, she says, tapped her artistic talent. Eventually, she left her tattoo artist job to focus entirely on home baking.

In 2021, she opened her first physical bakery in Jalan Sultan with a partner, but the venture closed a year later due to conflicting interests. She then took her bakes to a year-end fair at Singapore Expo in late 2022, selling out within an hour on her first day.

Encouraged, she invested $20,000 into starting her own bakery, BidadariKek, at West Coast Drive in February 2024, hiring two full-time staff. But by September 2025, she had shut it down after struggling to balance bakery operations and her customised cake business.

“We were working till late every day. Sometimes, we had our meetings between 3 and 6am. People would always tell me to take care of myself. That was when I realised I had to close the bakery and figure out another way to earn money while doing what I love, without having to work 24/7,” she says.

After the closure, she and her husband moved operations to JB, initially planning to run a bakery from a mobile kitchen set up in a lorry container. But after hitting $10,000 in weekly sales, they pivoted quickly, selling the container and moving to a larger commercial kitchen space in JB.

The learning curve has been steep, she admits. When she launched on TikTok Shop, she had to make refunds of around $5,000 to customers after her first shipment of cookies arrived broken due to bad packaging. 

“If you include the labour costs and other fees involved, I lost around $13,000 in one day. It’s these tough times that no one really sees,” she says.

Since September 2025, she has poured more than $150,000 into her business and now works from two commercial kitchen spaces – a 37 sq m one in Singapore and a 139 sq m one in JB, with a total of 10 full-time staff.

Unconventional but necessary

It took Ms Nur just three days to go from viewing her studio apartment to moving in in January.

One of the first few things she bought for her rental place was glassware – a fragile indulgence she could not afford to have in a house full of children. A pearly white carpet and pastel-coloured rugs followed. 

“When I first shared my living situation online, I didn’t know it would inspire people. So many mothers could relate to needing their own space,” she says. “In JB, I sleep early and wake up to catch the sunrise. I can go get coffee and take a stroll on the beach nearby. When I’m relaxed, I feel more productive. It makes a difference.”

The slower pace of living has allowed her to rediscover old joys, like drawing and taking photographs, and she finds the physical distance has also reshaped how she experiences time at home.

“Since I started doing this, I don’t get mad at all at home because time with my family feels more precious,” she says, adding that her husband’s support has been crucial to making the arrangement work. The couple also have a domestic helper to take care of the household and children while they are both busy with work.

Ms Nur plans to continue this split-living arrangement for at least the next five years.

“I believe that kids need happy and healthy parents. That’s the most important thing,” she says. 

“What’s the point of being at home all the time if we’re going to be upset easily? Two things can be true: We can be there for our family emotionally and physically, and also know when to create space to regulate ourselves.”