At just 21, Adelaide entrepreneur Tom Oswald has already taken a pop-up café from the Adelaide Hills to the CBD, built a global social media following around the realities of running a small business and created a brand that has grown up alongside him.

Now, he’s going back to one of the products that helped start it all.

Oswald is behind Cinnamum, a new cinnamon roll micro-bakery by Homeboy.com, which has found an unexpected home at 91B Walkerville Terrace, Walkerville, in the same space as previous business, The Yoga Social.

The concept marks another chapter in a hospitality journey that began when Oswald was still a teenager.

Homeboy started as a Hahndorf pop-up in July 2023, with Oswald documenting the highs, lows and often unfiltered reality of young entrepreneurship online. His candid approach attracted hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok and Instagram, with an audience well beyond South Australia following along as the business evolved.

By 19, Oswald had taken another significant step, launching a permanent Homeboy café on North Terrace in Adelaide’s CBD, serving coffee, sandwiches and the cinnamon rolls that had already become synonymous with the brand.

Those original cinnamon rolls also have a particularly personal connection to Homeboy as they were homemade by Tom’s mum.

Now, Cinnamum puts them front and centre.

Rather than another traditional café, the Walkerville project embraces a micro-bakery model.

It’s an approach that feels fitting for a business that has largely grown by bringing people along for the journey.

While Cinnamum may appear small in scale, it follows several years of Oswald experimenting with what a modern hospitality business can look like, from pop-ups and social media to a bricks-and-mortar café and now a highly specialised bakery concept.

There’s something beautifully uncomplicated about the concept of cinnamon rolls.

But behind the simplicity is another opportunity for Oswald to learn, experiment and continue evolving Homeboy.

The Walkerville micro-bakery provides a space to test ideas, discover what customers respond to and build a community around a product that has been part of the Homeboy story almost from the beginning.

At an age when many people are only beginning to determine where their career might take them, Oswald is already several chapters into his entrepreneurial journey.

It’s about taking something people already loved, giving it its own identity and seeing just how far it can go.