Olabimpe Oladimeji: From Piping Bag To Tech Pioneer

There is a photograph that tells the whole story before a single word is spoken. A kitchen table dusted with flour. Orders scribbled on the back of an envelope. A woman trying to work out, with no software and no support, whether her most beloved creation was actually making her any money at all. That woman was Olabimpe Oladimeji, and the problem she could not solve in that kitchen became the company she built to solve it for hundreds of thousands of others.

A Problem No One Was Building For

Olabimpe arrived in the UK carrying something that formal qualifications rarely confer: the ability to see a broken system from the inside. Running a cake business, she discovered what every creative entrepreneur around her already knew but had no language for. The tools did not exist. Not for bakers, not for florists, not for artisan food producers pricing by instinct and hoping the numbers worked out. Generic business software had been built by people who had never costed a recipe, tracked ingredient price volatility, or tried to calculate whether a three-tier wedding cake was profitable after electricity, packaging, and labour were accounted for. For most people, that gap was simply a frustration to live with. For Olabimpe, it was a problem that demanded a solution and she was already the kind of person who could not leave a problem unsolved.

She was not simply decorating cakes. She was running a real business with no financial visibility, and every creative entrepreneur she knew was doing exactly the same thing. That observation became a founding thesis. The gap between passion and financial survival, with no technology designed to close it, was not a niche inconvenience. It was a gap that had gone unaddressed for too long, affecting more than 300,000 small food businesses in the UK alone

The Progression Nobody Expected

The transition from cake decorating to technology was not a dramatic pivot. It was a logical progression for someone who had been doing product thinking all along; identifying user needs, designing solutions, iterating based on feedback, and measuring what worked. Olabimpe simply had not had the vocabulary for it yet. She found it by teaching herself, seeking out communities, and applying for programmes that were not designed for people with her background. She was accepted anyway, because the quality of her thinking was undeniable. Today she is a Professional Scrum Master certified by Scrum.org, a Certified Agile Coach with the International Scrum Institute, and a certified Software Product Manager, a practitioner whose credentials were earned not through a traditional academic pathway but through deliberate, sustained self-development while running a real business at the same time

As she learned, she began to teach. She shared what she discovered with other women, other creatives, other professionals standing at the same crossroads. That instinct to bring others along became the second pillar of everything she would build.

Blooming Bud Innovations: Inclusion as Architecture

Blooming Bud Innovations Limited was not a company that added a diversity programme after its founding. Inclusion is its founding premise. Every product it builds, every community it runs, begins with the same question: who has been left out of this, and how do we change that?

The company operates across two interconnected missions that were never separate in Olabimpe’s mind. The first is product: building digital tools for industries that mainstream technology has consistently overlooked. The second is community: creating structured, practical environments where creative entrepreneurs and professionals can acquire the skills and confidence to run their businesses with the same rigour and clarity available to far larger organisations.

AgileBakersHub exists for the baker and artisan food entrepreneur who has been running a real business for years; talented, dedicated, and entirely without the financial and operational frameworks that would let her see clearly what she has actually built. The community does not teach people to dream bigger. It teaches them to see accurately and act decisively.

Agile Creative TechHub brings Agile methodology and technology thinking directly to creative professionals who want to apply digital frameworks within the businesses they are already building not to leave those businesses behind, but to run them with the structure and confidence of someone who has always known exactly what they are doing.

Members of both communities leave with something more valuable than inspiration. They leave with tangible, applicable skills and with the recalibration that happens when someone who has spent years underestimating what they are capable of finally sees the evidence that they were wrong.

CostNav: Built From Inside the Problem

CostNav is the most personal thing Olabimpe has built. It is the platform she would have paid for on day one: a complete financial management system designed specifically for bakers, artisan food producers, and creative entrepreneurs who are running real businesses without access to tools that reflect their reality.

The platform allows users to cost recipes to the penny, track ingredient price changes in real time, manage supplier relationships, run their order pipeline, generate professional invoices, and, for the first time, see their actual margin. Not estimate it. See it, with real numbers from real data, updated automatically every time the cost of butter rises.

What separates CostNav from generic business software is not a feature list. It is the starting point. Olabimpe built it from inside the problem. No competitor in this space was founded by someone who stood there, in a flour-dusted kitchen, needing exactly this tool and finding nothing. That structural difference shapes every design decision the platform makes. As Olabimpe puts it: "I did not build CostNav because I thought there was a market opportunity. I built it because I was the market and nobody was building for me. That changes now."

The gap CostNav fills is not a UK problem. It is a global one, felt in kitchens and workshops across the United States, Canada, Africa and beyond, wherever creative entrepreneurs are building real businesses without the tools they deserve. CostNav was built to change that, starting now.

Recognition That Reflected a Movement

When Olabimpe was named a finalist at the UK Small Business Awards 2025 in the Best Tech Startup category, the recognition landed with particular weight. Here was a self-taught founder, a former cake decorator, competing in a category that skews heavily toward ventures with venture capital backing and established industry networks. Her recognition as a member of the Cajigo2025 100 Women in Tech and the ForbesBLK Community further cemented her standing among the most impactful voices in inclusive innovation. She has spoken at global platforms including Tech Corner and Niyo Labs, drawing audiences who find in her a communicator who neither talks down nor overcomplicates. She speaks from experience, not theory, and every framework she shares has been tested against the reality of building for users who were not born into digital fluency.

"Technology is only transformative if it reaches the people who need it most," she has said. "That has always been the work."

The Beginning of the Most Consequential Chapter

CostNav is scaling. Blooming Bud Innovations is growing. The communities are expanding. And Olabimpe Oladimeji is, by every measure, at the beginning of the most consequential phase of her work. The pipeline she is building is not just a product pipeline. It is a talent pipeline, a community pipeline, and a body of evidence that the creative economy can be served by technology that was actually designed for it.

The problem Olabimpe could not solve in that flour-dusted kitchen, the one that became a company, a community, and a movement has a solution now. If your business deserves better tools, they exist. Explore CostNav today and discover what it feels like to finally know your numbers.

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