We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Kitchens recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, thanks for joining us today. One thing we always find fascinating is how differently entrepreneurs think about revenue growth and cost reductions – both can be powerful ways to improve profitability. What do you spend more of your time and energy on?
As COVID has changed virtually every industry and it’s really had an enormous affect on the wedding industry. Weddings scheduled in 2020, pushed their wedding dates to 2021. This more than doubled our gross revenue last year and we don’t see a change in the trend for 2022.

The growth of revenue came out of nowhere and I was not prepared or even expecting this to happen. My challenge was to grow the business while keeping my profit margins steady and not over-working myself and my staff. As the revenue grew I wasn’t able to keep costs down like I normal can. However I was able to keep my profit margins steady which allowed me to save money for a large expansion for the bakery. We have taken over the lease to the suite next door to Fancy Cakes which will almost triple our square footage so I can hire more cake designers and bakers.

The size of Fancy Cakes is limited. So we had to be very careful in choosing which clients to work with. As you can image, a lot of potential cake orders had to be turned away, and if you do that math, it’s over $100,000 of lost revenue simply due to our constrained space. As a business owner you’re left with a huge decision to make. Do we keep the size of business small and continue to turn down work or do we expand our space, hire more staff, take on more overhead in order to take more cake orders? It’s all in the math. And the number that really matters is not the gross, it’s the net, your bottom line.

Throughout the year my CPA and I would analyze the Profit/Loss statements to see how the higher costs were cutting into the net profit in relation to the orders coming in and the orders we turned down. The only thing that made sense was to expand, take and risk, and grow the revenue. Now I know that costs can remain steady even with the increased overhead. The money spent for the expansion will be a great return on investment.

Lauren, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
For folks who may not have read about you before, can you please tell our readers about yourself, how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft etc,

I’ve always been creative. I’ve always been a dreamer.

When I was young I didn’t really understand what that meant. And as a kid with severe attention deficit disorder, I really had no idea of my potential because school was practically impossible for me. I felt stupid. I skidded through Ursuline graduating with barley-passing grades. Then onto lonely community college, then SMU where I found school a bit more helpful because of the access I had to my professors. I was able to ask for more guidance and help. My grades got a lot better but the amount of work I had to do was about double of most other students. Writing class notes, then re-writing them twice to memorize them… making appointments with professors to help me find a different way to approach the subjects so I could do my best work. This is where my work ethic was born.

College created lonely five years of studying. There wasn’t a lot of time for friendships because I was so focused on school. But what I did have was cake. I watched cooking shows on PBS when I was a kid in the 80s and I became obsessed with the pastry piping bag. What was this phenomenal contraption creating the most gorgeous sweets I’d ever seen? I knew I wanted it…I almost needed it as I didn’t have any other outlets of creativity or self-care.

My senior year in high school I made my first cake. A Barbie doll with a bundt cake around her legs to look like her ballgown. It was tragic (compared to my standards today), but my friends went nuts. I had never inspired a reaction like that before. It was intoxicating. It was like I was seen for the first time. But I didn’t associated cake with a career. I majored in Film Theory and Art History at SMU, all the while making cakes, getting better at it, and sending them home to all my friends who had moms in the Park Cities. This was the beginning of Fancy Cakes.

The moms loved these charming cakes and began to order them from me. After graduation, I got a job at my favorite cake decorating supply store running the cash register, learning all the tools, and peeking into cake decorating classes. The regular shoppers were appalled that I had a Bachelor’s degree and I was working at minimum wage as a cashier. “Aren’t your parents furious at you for throwing away your education?” My parents were not furious. They were nothing but supportive to see their girl find her own path and create it for herself. And I had no space for shame. I was on a mission. And that mission became clear that year when some one asked me to make their wedding cake.

Weddings! I hadn’t thought of weddings and had no idea of a wedding industry. And from that wedding cake came another. I left my cashier job after one year and got a part-time job at a wedding cake bakery finishing their wedding cakes, learning how a commercial kitchen works, and understanding the overhead involved. Two years later, with the co-signature of my parents, the SBA gave me a startup loan to build my commercial kitchen. It’s been 20 years and I’m still in the same kitchen.

what type of products/services/creative works you provide,

Fancy Cakes has always been a “By Appointment Only” wedding cake studio from day one. Dallas is one of the only cities in America where this would work. Every cake we make is customized to each each event. There is no catalogue of cake designs you have to choose from, there are no limits. We can do it all, from simple to jaw-dropping and unbelievable. Because so much time is spent for each order, the client feels close to us. They feel special.

While weddings have been 90% of our work, party cakes pick up the slack between wedding seasons. Fancy Cakes will never be a full-service bakery with a pastry counter offering up cupcakes or cookies on demand. That’s why I call Fancy Cakes a “cake studio” not a bakery. From small parties of 4 to giant weddings of 1,500 guests, we can make it happen.

what problems you solve for your clients and/or What sets you apart from others.

I can’t explain the overwhelm my clients have when designing their weddings. We have clients will all types of wedding budgets ranging from $50,000 to $2 million. The pressure is on at any budget. And I’m there to help while they are planning the biggest, most important party of their lives.

This is where I shine. I’ve always known that Fancy Cakes is about the client. It’s not about me, my pride, nor my accomplishments. I don’t work from ego. I work by the needs of each client. They need to feel comfortable, pampered, and heard. We don’t just make cakes, we build an experience for each client that they won’t forget. After bridal appointments, if a client says to me, “This is the most fun we’ve had planning this wedding” then I’ve done my job well. Now we just have to make cake.

I want each client to feel special and to meet with me personally and see how I treat my staff, my space, and myself. When a wedding vendor is great, it calms the client. Just knowing they don’t have to worry about the cake because of the service they received, along with our reputation, fills me with satisfaction. The quality of the cakes must be equal to the quality of your service in any market. As a business owner, if you can provide both great quality and service, you have nowhere else to go but up.

What are you most proud of and

what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc

Through the years I’ve been very lucky. My hard work brought me to places I never knew existed. From being a multi-gold medal winner on the first televised cake competition series on Food Network, to teaching cake decorating classes around the world, garnering a status in the cake world as “an expert,” and creating wedding cakes for high-profile celebrities, nothing makes me more proud than creating a reputation in my own industry as a reliable, helpful, consistent, and inventive artist in demand.

What I’m most proud of is what I’ve built for my clients. And I continue to make changes to create an even better experience for them. My most fierce competitor is myself. I want each year to be better than the next.

I still love making cakes, I love working with talented cake artists, I love my fellow wedding industry vendors, and the clients feel it. It creates an air of trust from a vendor they just met and will only see for an hour. I’m incredibly proud of myself for that ability.

I’m not afraid to say no to a client if they want something that can’t be done. I will find another way that is even better. It’s critical to say no at times. It will save the integrity of your product, and it will show the client that you’re experienced enough to know what will work and what won’t. This approach builds trust.

As a business owner you create your own world and the experience you want to offer. You listen to your instincts (and your accountant). My success is due to hard work and focus. It’s great to have talent but if you cannot implement that talent into a well-functioning business then what good is it?

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I think what helped me build Fancy Cakes’ reputation is my ability to disarm people and connect with them. Yes, the cakes are great, but if people hate working with you, what’s the point? From my staff to other wedding vendors, and especially for each client, creating that connection is vital. It offers a comfortable, trusting, and safe space for people. This is the space where everything thrives.

It took me a while to get there because you need a ton of confidence to do this, and you really need to like people. Sometimes when I’m not doing so well personally, or when a wedding season looks bleak and it’s getting me down, I have my bridal appointments or my lunches with wedding planners, or my sweet and funny staff to lift me up. It’s funny how work became my own personal safe-space. Sometimes I wonder if my identity is too woven into my work which leaves me vulnerable. If your business doesn’t work does that mean you’re not valuable as a person? Certainly not. But I do get tangled up in that quite a bit.

Being a business owner and an artist leaves you with a feeling of “never enough.” You’ll never get to the finish line of success. Not because you can’t but because it does not exist. You just keep going and going, all the while attempting to establish some sort of life balance. I”m still waiting for that feeling of satisfaction and “I did it!” It’s never gonna come. So I try hard to take each day one cake at a time.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
Before I started the business in 2001, I had a plan for advertising. It was killing me that I had signed a commercial lease but didn’t have the orders to support the overhead. 6 months before I opened my doors I bought advertisements in all the major Dallas wedding magazines. It was expensive, but as soon as they hit the shelves my phone rang off the hook.

Ok, so, I don’t have a bakery. I don’t have a showroom. What do I do with all these potential clients?

I told the clients that we were going through renovations at the bakery and couldn’t meet there. I offered to meet them at a Starbucks or to have them come to my parent’s house for their wedding cake appointments. It was uncomfortable and odd, but it had to be done, even though I felt like a phony. I couldn’t have gotten off my feet without swallowing that pride of not have a space ready for clients yet. But it worked! By the time I could actually work in my bakery, I had several wedding and birthday cake orders on the books.

I look at social media now with jealousy. If only I had Instagram before I started my business, I really could have gotten my name out there. People starting a new business have it made in the shade with the power of social media marketing. All I had was print, and it was expensive.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.FancyCakesbyLauren.com
• Instagram: Fancycakesbylauren
• Facebook: Lauren Kitchens and Fancy Cakes by Lauren
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC7STC2vVBLygtN8WMxzwzrg (use this link to go directly to my youtube channel)
• Other: All of my Food Network episodes can be seen in full-length on my youtube channel.

Image Credits
Photos by John Cain Photography Jeremy Bustos Photography Carter Rose Photography Sarah Kate Photography