The Cupcake Station is going purple this week for a good cause – to raise epilepsy awareness.

All three Cupcake Station locations, including downtown Plymouth, will participate in the second Great Purple Cupcake Project, an initiative created by the Anita Kaufmann Foundation to raise epilepsy awareness for the week leading to Purple Day, held annually on March 26.

“We had done this last year and it went really well,” Kerry Johnson, The Cupcake Station owner said. “What they did, is they put the call out to bakeries and cupcake shops around the country. And actually, they had more than 100 of them sign up this year.”

The Cupcake Station will donate $1 of each purple cupcake sold to The Great Purple Cupcake Project. Customers can choose from vanilla bean or chocolate cupcakes with purple or white butter cream frosting, topped with purple sprinkles.

According to Johnson, The Cupcake Station raised a couple hundred dollars for the initiative last year.

 “My family was affected with epilepsy years ago,” Johnson said. “So one thing I like to do is help charities and nonprofits that are close to our communities. And epilepsy affects three million people in the United States and 50 million worldwide, so no matter what community you’re in, it definitely is going to be effected.”

According to the Anita Kaufmann Foundation, each year in the United States there are about 200,000 new cases diagnosed, 45,000 of which are children under the age of 15 years old.

“It’s really important for small businesses to help out whenever possible because big corporations really don’t put a lot of money like they used to into helping charities and nonprofits,” Johnson said. “It comes back to small businesses, because if they help out, customers come in and they appreciate it. And we do a lot of charity and nonprofit work. ”

Johnson said they get about 10 fundraiser requests per day and donate to about 1,000 different charities and nonprofit organizations in a year.

“For us, that’s really how we do our advertising,” Johnson said. “We get the word out about our product and our store and we’re helping somebody else out along the way. And when I first started the business five years ago, I really felt that I had a great product that could help raise money for charity because it’s fun and it’s very nostalgic. It doesn’t have an age bracket, everybody loves a cupcake. It was just a great way to do my marketing and I’ve always done it that way from the very beginning.”

The Cupcake Station began selling their purple cupcakes Monday. So far, they sold six cupcakes Monday and two cupcakes as of Tuesday afternoon.

For more information about The Great Purple Cupcake Project, visit http://www.akfus.org/purple-day/great-purple-cupcake-project.