We were lucky to catch up with Emily and Drew Crain recently and have shared our conversation below.

Emily and Drew, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

We came up with the name for our business while sitting at a park in Portland, Oregon on our honeymoon. We both always loved the words Lovely and Dapper and thought it would be fun to put them together to describe our bakery.

Emily and Drew, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Drew started as a chef in Milwaukee WI in 2001 and eventually moved to Seattle WA where he worked as a chef at The Sitting Room on Lower Queen Anne (where he came up with the idea to make Tin Can Cakes) and also as a baker at Neilsons Pastries. He then went on to work at Le Panier in Pike Place Market. Emily started working at Le Panier about five years after that and that’s where we met, fell in love and the rest is history. Emily went on to graduate from Seattle Centrals Pastry Program and after four years of working at Le Panier, left to further her baking journey as Baker and eventual Pastry Chef at Volunteer Park Cafe. We then followed eachother around, working together at various bakeries in and around the Seattle area until starting Lovely and Dapper Desserts September 2021.

For Emily owning a bakery has been a dream since she was a small child helping her parents in the kitchen. Ever since we met Drew and I have shared this dream to eventually open up our own spot. We could not be more thrilled to be living our dream together and with our two awesome kids. We want to be able to show them that you can always reach your goals/dreams with enough perseverance, hard work, and passion.

We love seeing the joy our little cakes bring to our customers, it’s so fun to see people reactions. We have a lot of fun creating new flavors and designs. We also love collaborating with other small businesses such as our friends at McCmormick Jam Co.

We have over 50 unique flavors that can be special ordered for parties work events, weddings etc, including lots of gf, df,v options.

Our eventual goal is to have a brick and mortar shop where we will offer a wide variety of different desserts and pastries as well as our original tin can cakes.

We regularly sell at the Sunday Fremont Market, as well as the Thursday Burien Farmers Market and we do lots of pop-ups and events in and around the Seattle area. We will be adding more markets this year so stay tuned.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We are still a very young company but so far the best strategy we’ve found for growing clientele is doing events in all different parts of the city and surrounding areas. Every time we do a new event we gain followers on Instagram and in the last few months we’ve heard a lot of people say, oh I’ve seen you before, or oh my friend told me about you. That always feels really good, to know that we are making an impact and creating a real presence.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We had been thinking of starting the business for awhile but never really knew how or had the courage to just go for it. We had been working through the pandemic getting no sleep (at a job that started at 2am) and finally we just decided to go for it with lots of encouragement from one of our best friends. We had some savings and we were lucky enough to have a lot of supportive friends and family who donated to a go fund me that we set up. We quit our jobs August 2021 and took a couple of weeks off with our kids and ever since then we have been hustling hard. We have two small side jobs that we have kept for a little more financial security but other than that our business is funding our life. It’s scary as hell but also extremely rewarding and the best decision we ever made.

Contact Info:

• Website: lovelydapperdesserts.com
• Instagram: @lovelyanddapperdesserts.com
• Facebook: @lovelyanddapperdesserts.com