When the pandemic upended cities and forced thousands of businesses to close in 2020, Daria and Oksana Kulachek bucked the trend. Armed with flaky pistachio croissants and creamy gateaux, they launched Defidu Bakery in downtown Prague.

It was the start of a rollercoaster ride for the Ukrainian-born pair, with Oksana baking coconut rolls from dawn while her daughter Daria covered everything from dishwashing to accounts. But their bet paid off, and with some guidance and tools from the Mastercard Strive Czechia program, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth’s joint initiative with CARE to help entrepreneurs thrive in the digital economy, within just a few months their business began to boom.

Now, five years later, they have an ambitious plan to find Californian franchise partners who share their passion for pastry and can carve out a niche for the European café among Los Angeles’ food trucks and high-end eateries.

Despite the initial rocky start, Daria credits the pandemic with shaping Defidu into a resilient business by forcing it to focus from the outset on building its social media profile and creating a robust e-commerce site to take orders.

“I don’t know if there have been worse conditions for business, before or after that,” Daria says. “Adopting or building the systems early on is really helpful for small businesses because it is way harder to relearn than to learn from the beginning.”

Rock-bottom pandemic-era rents also played into their hands. They were able to snare a coveted storefront in the heart of the city to sell cakes and pastries Oksana had perfected at cooking schools in Barcelona and Paris.

When Daria sent pictures of her mom’s cakes to DesignBlok, the Prague International Design Festival, orders suddenly took off, and they were able to open their second venue in a more touristy area at the start of 2021. 

Defidu, which now employees a team of eight additional staff (including Daria’s younger brother), has also parlayed its popularity into a profitable business-to-business catering venture. Defidu catering supplies large orders of sweet and savory items for company parties and events across the city — and has boosted their investments in vans and cooking equipment upgrades.

Focusing on building a new e-commerce platform that works better for its catering clients, Daria is increasingly relying to AI to streamline Defidu’s ordering processes, automate invoices and analyze product performance and pricing. While the Czech language is similar to Ukrainian, AI tools are useful to fine-tune local language marketing materials for Daria, who moved to Prague to study architecture in 2014 (her mother followed a few years later).

Today, Daria is focused on paying forward the digital support and mentorship she received from Mastercard Strive — which is aims to help at least 10,000 Ukrainian entrepreneurs displaced by the war — by helping other displaced Ukrainians get ventures off the ground. She encourages them to tap into AI as it provides a quick way for entrepreneurs to build their own apps and cheaply test drive their ideas.

“It’s way faster,” she says. “You don’t need to build all those imaginary castles in your head, invest all this effort, if not money, to develop something, and then to realize that nobody actually wants it.”

"Defidu Bakery shows us what’s possible when talent meets the right tools,” says Payal Dalal, the Center’s executive vice president. “With digital solutions and expert mentorship, a mother and daughter turned a single cake into a thriving business that inspires others. Their success is a powerful reminder that when we equip entrepreneurs for the digital economy, we don’t just support small businesses — we spark transformation."

The hunt for franchise partners has forced Daria to carefully write down each stage of her family’s recipes and streamline Defidu’s business to make it easier to potential investors to understand. More than building a successful family business, she wants to create a legacy based on Oksana’s recipes that could be passed down to future generations.

“We don’t want a franchise just to simply make money and profit from it,” she says. “There’s a lot of people who have money in this world, but there’s not many people who have the same values.”