Sprinkles, known for celeb fans and cupcake ATMs, shuts down abruptly

Morgan Hardwick had hoped to get one last Sprinkles cupcake. Instead, the 18-year-old arrived at the Georgetown shop midday Thursday to find the pink storefront shuttered for good.

“It felt very simple. It felt very homey. It has a very cute aesthetic,” said Hardwick, a student at the University of the District of Columbia. “It didn’t feel too over the top. It felt like somewhere cute you could go and have a nice treat.”

After 20 years of shaping American dessert culture, Sprinkles has officially closed all of its stores nationwide, marking the end of a brand that not only helped spark but also outlasted the U.S. cupcake craze. As of New Year’s Eve, every Sprinkles location has shut its doors.

Sprinkles founder Candace Nelson confirmed the closures in a post on Instagram, calling the moment “surreal” and offering sympathy to employees.

“I started Sprinkles in 2005 with a KitchenAid mixer and a big idea,” she wrote, noting that she sold the company in 2012 and has had no operational involvement since. “It’s not how I imagined the story would unfold,” Nelson said.

The sudden closure has left fans – and employees – reeling.

“I thought I was being punked,” Leslie Wynter, Sprinkles bakery manager at the Georgetown location, told the Post on Thursday. They put “heart and soul” into their cupcakes, she said. The location had 22 employees.

D.C. general manager Marissa Valle said she was given the news Monday evening and began sharing it with staffers on Tuesday. “All they’ve told me was that another company was supposed to buy us out. That didn’t go through, and then I guess whatever company owns us now decided not to continue,” Valle said. (Nelson sold Sprinkles to private equity firm KarpReilly Capital Partners in 2012.)

Cupcake enthusiast Eliza Zelnick started visiting Sprinkles as a teenager growing up in New York City, and she continued going to the D.C. location in college. The 24-year-old said she felt “surprised and nostalgic” about the shop’s closure.

“Sprinkles cupcakes were a fun part of celebratory moments” such as getting into college and birthdays, she said.

Zelnick, whose favorite flavor was red velvet, added that Sprinkles cupcakes just tasted better “and more consistent” than its competitors. She also wondered whether a cultural shift toward healthier eating habits had pushed customers away from buying cupcakes.

“Food trends are constantly changing,” Zelnick said. “Even if they taste great, cupcakes may have had their popularity peak.”

The rise of the gourmet cupcake

The early aughts ushered in a cultural moment for cupcakes. That distinctly pink era also coincided with the phenomenon of “Sex and the City” and its tutu-clad heroine Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker.

Suddenly, Manolo Blahniks, cosmopolitan cocktails and cupcakes were all the rage. The latter was fueled by a Season 3 episode in which Carrie discusses her dating life with Miranda while noshing on a pink-frosted cupcake outside the Magnolia Bakery in New York’s West Village. The Bleecker Street shop – known for its thick sugary frosting in pastel shades – became a pilgrimage site for fans and even a stop on the “Sex and the City” bus tour.

A spate of cupcake-first bakeries entered the market tout de suite, including the outrageously garnished Crumbs Bake Shop in New York and celebrity-friendly Sprinkles in Beverly Hills. Both brands took off at a moment when early social media, food blogs and neighborhood newsletters were just beginning to shape tastes and trends. Both saw rapid expansions fueled by private equity: Sprinkles grew to more than 20 locations across six states and Washington, D.C., while Crumbs had close to 70 outposts.

Before the early aughts, cupcakes were mostly reserved for kids’ birthday parties and supermarket bakeries. But former investment-banker-turned-pastry-entrepreneur Nelson believed there was room for a chic, cupcake-only bakery that had adults in mind. The first Sprinkles was decked out in a soft-pink aesthetic that was playful and sophisticated.

It quickly won over celebrity fans like Katie Holmes, Martha Stewart, Barbra Streisand and Paris Hilton. In a July TikTok post, Nelson recalled sleeping on the bakery’s kitchen floor, recruiting friends to bake on weekends and even taking a red-eye flight to hand-deliver 300 cupcakes to Oprah Winfrey.

By the time Instagram arrived in 2010, D.C.’s homegrown Georgetown Cupcake and New York’s bite-size offerings from Baked by Melissa had joined the pack. The nation was experiencing peak cupcake, with the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars” and TLC’s “DC Cupcakes” reflecting the nation’s latest cultural obsession. The Sprinkles Cupcake ATM, introduced in 2012, delivered not only 24/7 sweet treats but also novel and visually compelling content to social media feeds.

But the sugar high wasn’t to last. The “Gourmet-Cupcake Market Is Crashing” read a Wall Street Journal headline in 2013. The report cited plummeting stock prices for Crumbs, which would eventually close all of its stores.

“The novelty has worn off,” an investment banker told the news outlet.

Consumers chase novel flavors

The rise of social-media-driven food trends, increased labor costs, delivery fees, changing retail economics and declining foot traffic for specialty brick-and-mortar shops have squeezed the dessert industry.

Cupcakes, analysts say, have become vulnerable in a tighter spending environment. “They’re labor-intensive, dairy-heavy and typically sold as single-serve indulgences at premium price points,” Nandini Roy Choudhury, a senior consultant at Future Market Insights, said in an email. While consumers are still treating themselves, they are increasingly gravitating toward grocery bakeries, multipacks and delivery-friendly desserts that feel like a better value, Choudhury said.

Choudhury also noted that dessert trends now rely on constant novelty. “Today’s leading dessert concepts operate closer to ‘drop culture’ than traditional bakeries. Weekly flavor rotations, limited-time collaborations and social-first launches now drive repeat visits,” she wrote.

Choudhury added that people will still be indulging in cupcakes in 2026, just in new ways. She expects to see more bite-size, portable desserts such as cake pops, and a rise in premium flavors – think pistachio, speculoos and matcha-inspired treats.

Claire Conaghan, a trendologist and associate director at Datassential, echoed that sentiment. While older generations would buy a dozen cupcakes or a whole cake for a dinner party, “that younger consumer really goes out of their way to try a new and different treat,” she said.

As a result, flavors now become trends. Conaghan pointed to tres leches as an example: “Tres leches evolves from a cake into a flavor profile that shows up in churros and other sweets,” she said. Other globally tinged flavors such as matcha (Japanese green tea), London fog (a latte made with Earl Grey tea) and Dubai chocolate (usually filled with pistachio, tahini and crispy phyllo pastry) are now popular riffs for a variety of desserts.

Christine Tan, who runs a home-based online bakery called Superette Baking, stopped by Sprinkles’s Georgetown location with her daughter Wednesday evening to buy some cupcakes.

The following day, she returned to purchase some of the bakery’s equipment, including a speed rack, some full sheet trays and a few mixing bowls.

“We’re sad to see it go, but there are a lot of little guys out there who are working,” Tan said. “There’s tons of bakers in town and small businesses that need a lot of support, and they don’t have the resources that these bigger places do.”