We recently connected with Ludivine Ryon and have shared our conversation below.

Ludivine , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Le Parfait Paris started about 8 years ago.

My husband had the idea one day after coming back from work. He then started studying the market in San Diego. It was definitely a little niche that none so far had really done in town; An authentic French Bakery and Pastry Company.

He convinced me to be part of this project together. Our goal was to first open our commissary kitchen, start on farmers market and wholesale and then open our stores. With his background in finance and real estate, he will be in charge of doing all the target analyze in order to open new stores and work on the design and construction. With my background in the hospitality industry, I will be in charge of the operation of each store.

This is exactly the path we followed.

From the time we opened our commissary kitchen and my husband got this brilliant idea, it took about 1 year. In February 2014 we received our Health permit and we were allowed to start selling. This is then than we started introducing our concept to San Diegans over several farmers market all the way up to San Diego County. After 6 months being on farmers market and stabilizing our process in our commissary kitchen, we also started to introduce our French Pastries and Baked goods to hotels and restaurant to get wholesale account. In October 2014, we opened our first store in Downtown Gaslamp 92101.

After several month we decided to stop being on farmers market and to focus on our wholesale account and our first store that we just opened. It was definitely a new challenge to have a daily production done and to go from 5 employees to now 15. My husband and I were pretty young when we started Le Parfait Paris. Lots of people. would come to our store and they would openly tell us that we won’t last more than 6 months. They saw us as both 25 years old kids that didn’t know what they were doing. It was pretty hurtful at first, we then learned to change that feeling into way more motivation and. ambition to succeed and prove those people wrong. It was also a challenge towards our employees that would too often see us as friends because of our young age.
For the next two years we focused on growing our wholesale account and stabilize the growth of our first store.

In 2016, we opened our second store inside the Liberty Public Market. It was a big hit. We never thought we would be so busy from the first day. We had a new important question to deal with; should we keep our wholesale account?

With the new high demand from two stores, and the numerous wholesale accounts we had from places like the Addison, The Westin, Sheraton and much more it was becoming difficult to keep up with the production. Having wholesale account was amazing, yet it is products that you are selling at little price and in big quantities. We realized it was making more sense to us to choose our battles and focus on the retail and the catering. At the beginning you want to be everywhere to spread the word about you, the more you grow and the more you realize you must also decide which direction you want to take and be the best at it.

Therefore in 2018 we opened our third store inside the Fashion Valley Mall. At the same time my husband was working on a new project in Del Mar Highland Skydeck with an opening goal for 2020.

In 2019, we had for new goal to open our online store. We wanted to start shipping our macarons all over the US. We then created our personal online store and got Le Parfait Paris to be on the popular platform; amazon. It was definitely a new logistic we had to work on. Find the correct traveling packaging that will keep the macaron in one piece, fresh and refrigerated.

We stayed opened in Fashion Valley until March 2020. With the new upscale and redesign mall of UTC, Fashion valley saw a decline in traffic and they realized they also had to renovate their mall. We were in the upper section of the mall which is where they first started the renovation and asked us to close during that time. It ended up being a great timing for us with Covid 19 happening right after in April 2020.

Covid 19 was a new challenge, we had to close our Liberty Station location for several month due to the restriction. Yet we never closed our downtown location. We completely adapted our offering to the new demand. in addition to be your French Café selling French pastries, brunch and. baked goods, we also took on new roles; We became a grocery store selling fruits, vegetable, toilet paper, and a meal prep company selling already made dishes. We also added our business to any third parties you could find to increase our exposure and began the curbside pickup. Finally, we changed our regular offering to lots of new packages such as our Brunch Combo deal, our breakfast box etc…

Our online store exploded during Covid. 19, we saw a tremendous increase in sales and had a hard time to pick up with the demand due to packaging shortage and staff shortage. A lot of our team member either had to leave back to their hometown to be close to their family or were too scared of this new unknown virus.

My husband and I never stopped keeping our doors open and grow our business even during a pandemic. We took all the opportunity we saw to adapt our business to this extremely challenging time.

In May 2021 we opened our first store in Anaheim inside the Anaheim Packing district. This was our. First location outside of San Diego. It was definitely a new logistic. Between adapting the delivery route to the distance making it harder to access this store from us on a daily base and therefore trusting fully our Manager and team in operating the store.

The Skydeck project was delayed due to Covid 19 and we finally opened in July 2021. With the staff shortage we’ve been experiencing, it made the opening more difficult than usual but still a success.

It was definitely a really good accomplishment for both my husband and I.

Ludivine , 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?

I’ve always felt really lucky to know since my young age that I wanted to work in the hospitality industry. My grandma, who is my model, has always been passionate by food. She is an amazing cook and she could have certainly opened her own restaurant. Since I was a kid I would spend all my days with her in the kitchen, working on new recipes with her. Not only I loved cooking with her but I also loved the generosity and the gathering that food would symbolized. Therefore after my high school degree in France, I decided to pursue my education in Culinary Art and Restaurant Management. I went to a renown French school called Mederic in Paris. During that time I worked for several restaurants in Paris in the Kitchen but also in the Front of the house. I started in the bottom by washing veggies and stocking the walking fridge and freezer, to handling my own fish department in the kitchen organization. My goal was to gather as much experience to understand the BOH & FOH operation and management. After my three years degree in France. I wanted to study the other side of the restaurant industry, the business side. Therefore I decided to move to the United States and especially San Diego. I completed a Bachelor in Hotel Management with an emphasize in Revenue Management at San Diego State University. While I was attending school, I started to work in the front desk department of Marriott and Starwood hotels. After my graduation I moved up to the corporate Revenue Management department with Starwood. I loved my time in this field and learned a lot on how to maximize your revenue and study your market.

In 2013, my husband approached me with his brilliant idea to open together a French Bakery and Pastry company in San Diego. With his Finance and real estate background and my background in the hospitality industry, it was the perfect fit. In all honesty I was a little hesitant at first, not because I was not believing in this project but more because I wasn’t sure on how working with my husband will work. It ended up being the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. We now both have the same passion, objectives and dreams.

When we started Le Parfait Paris, we both had for goal to bring to San Diego an authentic French Bakery and Pastry company. We wanted to stay away from the typical cliché you could find but instead open a modern ensign like you could find in the street of Paris. In addition to the design, the authenticity of our product line was also our main objective. Providing quality is the most important aspect of our business. All I want when my customer enter my store is for them to escape the time of a bite to the street of France. We are not afraid to use quality product such as French Isigny butter for our croissants, or French Chocolate for all our cakes. Not only we work with high quality ingredients, we also make absolutely everything from scratch daily.

I believe that what sets us apart from others is we always stick to our roots and goal. Since we opened in October 2014 our first store, we have always enhanced our product line, worked with even better quality ingredients and provide authentic French product that also stick to our time. We are not the traditional French bakery making the basics eclairs and baba au rhum pastries. We want to play with our customers taste buds and have them discover desserts with flavors that they would never find elsewhere but only at Le Parfait Paris such as our 4lb Filled Croissant with Chocolate cream, our newest pavlova made with rose, raspberry and lichi or our Gluten Free crème brulée, hazelnut praliné and chocolate Rocher dessert.
We also like to work with the season and have as much as possible a rotation in our offerings.

What makes me the most proud, is to see smiles on my customers face. I love seeing families, friends or couple gathering at our stores and taking the time on our tables to enjoy food together. If there is one thing that always makes my day is when a customer tells me “they felt like they were in France while eating our food”.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

In my opinion it all comes to quality and consistency.

It is “easier” to open a business than to remain opened.

Being rigorous in keeping and enhancing your quality days after days and staying consistent are for me some of the most important aspect to succeed and build your reputation. When we first opened, my husband and I were both around 25 years old and only few people believed in us in the industry. Yet after seeing us working hard to always provide new and better products to our customers, winning awards from journals like San Diego Magazine years after years, having a strong social media presence and opening more stores, definitely enhanced our reputation in the San Diego hospitality market.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Having a strong presence on social media via post/stories, and using all the different adds tools available for business have definitely been an effective strategy for growing our clientele.

Studying the influencers and groups that best fit our business and reach out to them to work on partnership is also a really good tool to bring brand awareness to potential customers.

The key is to really understand your target market, understand your clientele, their interest, age and hobbies to be visible as much as possible on their social media page.

It is something that I found really interesting and enjoy doing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://parfaitparis.com
• Instagram: le parfait paris
• Facebook: le parfait paris
• Linkedin: le parfait paris
• Twitter: le parfait paris
• Yelp: le parfait paris
• Other: you can also find us on amazon, we ship our macarons all over the US

Image Credits
they all belong to Le Parfait Paris