From a Childhood TV Habit to a Bedroom Bakery

Some entrepreneurs trace their business back to a single dramatic turning point. Deep Singh Bawa's story is quieter than that. It's a story built out of decades of small, consistent choices: a kid glued to cooking shows, a hotel management degree taken the long way round, a converted bedroom in Lajpat Nagar that eventually added up to a real, functioning bakery brand called The Pastry Man.

A Childhood Spent Watching the Wrong Channel, On Purpose

Bawa's interest in baking didn't come from a family bakery or a culinary bloodline. It came from television. As a kid growing up in Delhi, he was the type to watch Indian cooking shows the way other kids watched cartoons, picking up techniques from chefs appearing on screen long before he had any formal training. By the time he was thirteen, that habit had turned into something more deliberate; he started actually baking, using one of the household's first ovens, bought from an exhibition in the capital, and working through recipes from well-known Indian cookbook authors of the time.

It wasn't exactly encouraged. Like a lot of parents watching their teenager spend hours on something with no obvious career path attached, his family worried he was neglecting his studies in favor of eclairs and homemade cakes that, at the time, weren't widely understood or appreciated in Indian households the way they are today.

Taking the Scenic Route to a Baking Career

What's interesting about Bawa's path is that he didn't rush straight from teenage hobby to bakery owner. His family wanted him to study science first, so he did, before eventually making his way to a hotel management degree in Aurangabad a compromise between his own interest and his parents' expectations. From there, he worked at several Taj hotels across India, the kind of structured, prestigious hospitality career that would have made plenty of people stop right there.

Instead, he kept going. In 2008, he left for an MBA at Aston University in Birmingham, and it was there, surrounded by a much wider variety of fresh, high-quality ingredients than he'd had easy access to back home, that the baking habit resurfaced. He started baking again for friends' birthdays and other occasions while abroad, treating it less like a business idea at that point and more like something he simply couldn't put down for long.

After business school, he returned to India and joined a luxury hotel spa chain, working there for several years. It's a useful detail to sit with: even after a hospitality degree, hotel experience, and an MBA, Bawa still wasn't running his own bakery. The actual leap didn't come until 2012, when he decided to take a break from his hospitality career and figure out what came next.

Teaching Before Selling

Before The Pastry Man existed as a brand, Bawa spent time teaching baking to people with disabilities, starting with just one session a week. The response surprised him enough that the program ran far longer than he'd originally planned, and it ended up serving a second purpose he hadn't anticipated it gave him an entry point into Gurgaon's food scene through an online food community he became associated with around the same time.

That detail matters because it shows the business didn't begin with a polished plan to sell baked goods online. It began with teaching, community involvement, and a slow accumulation of local relationships, long before any product existed.

Delhi

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A Bedroom Becomes a Bakery

In 2014, Bawa launched what he called Deep Studio Kitchen, and the location was about as unglamorous as a launch story gets: his own bedroom in Lajpat Nagar, Delhi, converted into a workspace after some basic civil work. His mother, Seema Bawa, provided the initial investment of roughly Rs 1.5 lakh not venture capital, not a bank loan, just a parent willing to back her son's conviction even though it meant funding a bakery instead of, say, a more traditional career move.

Bawa has been candid about the motivation behind the brand: India has always had a rich tradition of mithai, but baked goods in the Western sense weren't something that came naturally to most households, and he wanted to be part of changing that. So alongside actually producing baked goods, he spent real time on the educational side partnering with ingredient and equipment brands, working with pastry schools around the country, and running roadshows simply to help people understand what baking even involved.

Building The Pastry Man

The brand evolved further in 2020 with the launch of The Pastry Man, a freezer-to-oven product line built around the idea that customers could finish the baking themselves at home. He started with puff pastry, which remains the bestseller, and expanded from there into croissants, fudgy chocolate brownies, cookies, breakfast bagels, pies, and pizza dough.

The timing turned out to matter more than he could have planned for. Launching a freezer-to-oven bakery brand right as the pandemic pushed people into their own kitchens meant a lot of customers tried his products initially out of uncertainty about whether they could pull off baking themselves and many of those same hesitant first-timers became repeat customers, ordering monthly or more once they realized the products made them look more like skilled home bakers than they actually were.

By the time the brand had matured, what started as a Rs 1.5 lakh bedroom experiment was generating upward of Rs 24 lakh annually, with customers across Delhi-NCR and Mumbai.

What the Story Actually Teaches

Strip away the revenue figure, and what's left is a fairly unglamorous timeline: a teenager who liked baking enough to annoy his parents about it, a hospitality degree taken to satisfy family expectations, an MBA that reignited the same old hobby instead of replacing it, years of working for other people's hotel chains, a stint teaching for free before selling anything, and finally, a converted bedroom backed by a mother's modest savings rather than outside investors.

There's no single dramatic pivot in Bawa's story. There's just a long thread of not letting go of something, even while doing everything his family and his resume expected of him in the meantime. The bakery wasn't a sudden discovery it was a habit from age thirteen that eventually got given the room, literally, to become a business.