The Business of Cake: Whipped Bakeshop

How does a bakery business change over the course of 10 years?

Zoë Lukas and her husband Brennen started Whipped Bakeshop in 2009, and she’s got a whole lot of valuable insight about the business of cake.

Located in Philadelphia, the team at Whipped Bakeshop bakes up some of the city’s most amazing custom cakes and cookies.

Read on to find out Zoë got started, how her business systems have evolved over the years, and how she finds creative freedom knowing that cake will always be eaten!

Can you tell me about your history? How did you learn to bake and how did you get started with the bakery?

I guess I’m mostly self taught baking, my mom was always a very good cook and baker. But I think I started baking and cooking more myself in college. Then after college once I had jobs I would always bring treats to the office I worked in.

And I’ve always been an artist. I went to a liberal arts college first, and then after one semester I was like “why did I do this?” I mean it was great, but it wasn’t the right fit. So I transferred after one semester to the Maryland Institute for a degree in painting.

So that’s my first passion or love, I’ve always drawn and painted. And I just love to work with my hands, I love to make things. So that’s why I do what I do.

I had other jobs before starting Whipped Bakeshop. I worked in admin, I worked with an exhibit design firm in DC, and I worked as an assistant.

My husband (we own the business together) and I started the business during the financial crisis, and we’ve been doing it full time the whole time. He had a grant based job with Visit Philly and that grant ran out, and I had a restaurant job which I was not happy in, and I left.

So I worked out of my house for about a year while we were building the shop. And my husband did the business plan, because I never would have done it without him, that’s not just me. I’m an okay writer, but that type of thinking and writing I’d have been like forget it, I don’t need this!

So now we’re almost 10, in the fall were turn 10, which is hard to believe.

Well you don’t look like you’ve been in business for 10 years! It’s very inspiring to see someone who looks so happy.

Yeah, we like it! I will say you go through periods where you’re like oh my god, what are we doing? I mean we’re still learning, we didn’t have experience in food business, we didn’t go to business school. My husbands an English major and has a degree in creative writing. So it’s like were both creative people that ended up in a business where we could use those skills which is awesome, but it was probably a little bit more unusual at the time.

Sometimes I think we need a behind the scenes of behind the scenes. Because I see people saying oh I’m so stressed out, I have a hundred emails to answer, and I’m like, I still think I want to do that. But do I really want to do that? Or are they just making it look fun?

I mean I definitely still enjoy what we do, but sometimes I go in and I wish I was just one of the decorators. But I also get to be my own boss. We get to drive the ship where we’re going, you know? We get to decide, are we gonna make that thing? No I don’t wanna make cake pops. Nope sorry! You can do what you want, so it’s exciting in that way.

So how do you figure that out, how much time you as an owner spend decorating cakes versus working on the business?

Usually, it’s tricky, it depends on the week. I will say, I don’t really have a percentage. We’re doing a 52 cakes giveaway right now, so I’ve been decorating all those cakes.

So the team will actually put them together, assemble them, and then I’ll finish them. Or if there’s a special project that I really want to work on, I will do it, but a lot of times it’s the team, and I act more like a creative director. You know, like we need to change that color or that needs to be done more cleanly.

We have an awesome team and we certainly would not be able to do what we do without that. So I give them a ton of credit. I mean obviously I used to bake and take all the orders when I worked at home, but if you’re trying to run a business where you make more than a few cakes a week you need a team to support you. Otherwise you would be burned out so fast.

The way we have our business set up we do fully custom cakes. I do the wedding tastings, deal with the wedding inquiries, meet with everyone one on one, and do phone calls and things like that. And we have a similar process for custom cakes but that’s shared between the decorators. So we have a different process for each thing, but its tricky to answer because I feel like I have so many hats.

It sounds like you’ve built up a sort of intuition, like you kind of know what is everybody going to be able to handle, and where you need to step in?

I think that’s true, I work kind of intuitively myself, both creatively and in the business so it’s interesting. But we all work together really well because we’re a small team. So with that support, I can call on one of the decorators or our bakery assistant or the baker to say help me out, what flavors do you think are gonna be good for this event? So I don’t have to answer everything myself.

I also design and decide on what products we’re selling. We have a signature section of the website with defined products that come as they are. That’s something I’d like to have more time to develop, so that we could have more of those options.

And its probably been really fun with the 52 cakes giveaway, giving you a lot more excuses to create stuff.

Totally, I get a really good creative leeway. We’re partnering with a lot of local brands, so that gives a starting point for inspiration. But we get to make what we want.

A really unique perspective that you have is that you’ve been in business for so long, What was it like opening a business at that time? You kind of had the internet, but it wasn’t like it is today. How did you figure out what to do?

Well I had worked in bakeries after I had admin jobs. I worked at a really old bakery that used to be in Old City that was probably one of my favorite baking jobs. So I did have a little bit of experience to say alright, I need a menu, I need prices, and I need to make this cake. But you’re right, it wasn’t like it is now. I think one of the first platforms we used to get the word out was Twitter. We still have a Twitter account, we don’t really use it that actively, but that was definitely instrumental in getting people to come.

I think we just took it day to day. We had a website, we had a customer base that we started with. And then we were able to start with kind of bare bones team. We had a baker and two decorators pretty much right away, but I worked in the shop more frequently then. Then it just kind of shifts and changes and you have to adapt.

So that’s a hard question to answer, how did we know what to do. Some things have take much longer to sort of smooth out and figure out while other things are more intuitive.

Do you feel like you get a lot of customer leads through Instagram?

I think so. We have a little over 30 thousand organic followers on Instagram, so obviously not all of those people are direct customers, but it gives you credibility.

So you guys just knew you had somewhat of a customer base to start off, so just opened the doors and let them come?

Yeah let them come! And we were lucky to get some really good press initially too. Like Daily Candy before we opened the shop, and then also we won Best of Philly our first year open, which really helped us as well. We got Best Cupcake that year, so that was really fantastic.

But we didn’t do a lot of paid advertising for many many years, and we do very little now still. So we kind of advertise ourselves basically, through Instagram. Occasionally we’ll do some other things , but we just sort of let it work.

So you’re not really actively advertising but it sounds like you’ve really built up a social network throughout the city.

Yes, and it’s very important to connect with the people that you know send you customers.

I really like the core beliefs written down on your website:

We believe in family and friendship

We believe that life is worth celebrating

We believe that cake makes people happy

We believe in baking from scratch and decorating by hand

We believe in the joy of modern, original designs

We believe that details matter

Right, and that was always key. I always wanted to make delicious food and also, since I’m an artist, I wanted things to be beautiful. And then I always wanted to work in an environment that was enjoyable to work in, so when we hire people, we hire them for our culture. We’re a little bit more relaxed but we’re also serious, love what we do, and our craft is important to us.

So what do you think the biggest change has been in how you run your business from now versus when you first started?

Well we have a lot more influx now of inquiries, so I think one of the big changes has been how we deal with and process those. When we get them we’ll send a survey and kind of get a better feel of their needs, and then we’ll either schedule a call or send them to a specific product, or if it’s not a good fit, we’ll recommend someone who could do what they want.

So I think getting systems down, over the years. That’s probably the biggest change we’ve been working on over the last four or five years. Even all the boring internal stuff, like what are our policies, what should the order forms look like, what’s our turnaround time. All those little things, you’re like oh, I’m gonna have to figure that out. When are we booked, how long do we tell people when we need to know an order? What’s our deposit situation? We’ve had a lot of things in place for the whole time but improving all those pieces, and making sure you can manage and share that with your staff so everyone’s on the same page.

Customer experience is very important to us, so we’re always trying to figure out how can we make that part better. So I think that’s something that we’re consciously working on now so that it can be really an amazing experience.

So it’s probably much better to be working on those systems now, like you wouldn’t have even known when you first started, right?

You don’t, exactly. And like I said, 10 years down the line we’re still figuring things out. You don’t go into it knowing, unless you’ve maybe had a number of years working in a business that had all that stuff down. And usually it’s a corporate environment that’s gonna have very specific systems in place. Like training, and this and that, but it takes a really long time, at least for us, it took a while to get there.

I think a lot of people (myself included) get stuck over-planning and being worried about doing things the “right way.” What advice do you have in that regard?

Sometimes you just have to put it out there and figure it out. Then you’re like okay, that didn’t work, and then you change it. You know part of any kind of failure is that learning experience.

When you own a business yourself it’s like I don’t know, is one thing right or wrong? Well not really, its just how do YOU want to do it?

It’s really easy to look at other people starting their businesses and think that they always knew what they were doing, that all their decisions were very deliberate .

I think that’s a common perspective. You think all these other people around you, they just know what they’re doing. But I think no one knows what they’re doing, at certain points, and they just are doing it. Then they figure it out. And then that experience will teach them how to do that thing again the next time either better or not do it again, or do ten of those things, because that one worked great.

Can you tell me where you get inspiration from?

So sometimes i like to pull from a starting point, and then I can kind of diverge off of that. Even just being in here, look how beautiful the textures on the wall are. It could just be something as simple as that. Nature , flowers, there’s all the obvious things, buts its tricky because there are so many options for me that I get a little stuck.

I have ideas that get stuck in my head, like they’ll be in there for years sometimes. And then eventually I’ll be like, I’m finally gonna do that thing!

You know, its weird, but cake and pastry I like because its sort of this fleeting thing. People are gonna eat it, its gonna go away, so you don’t have to take it super seriously. I mean i do take it seriously, but to a point. I want it to be beautiful and delicious, but its gonna be eaten at the end of the day. So then it will disappear, and you can kind of let that go.

So it gives you a little bit of freedom?
Yeah, I mean there will be photos of it, usually its a celebration piece for some event, but its meant to be enjoyed and it gonna go away, so there is freedom in that.

Do you have a favorite cake decorating technique or a favorite part of the cake making process?

I do like painting cakes. When I paint for myself at home, I paint abstractly, so I really do like kind of more organic processes. So even if it’s something based on nature, it might be a little more impressionistic or loosely done.

I like experimenting with techniques, like what would the fondant do if I let it dry for a half hour? And then try to make it into something. I like being a little bit experimental and just kind of playing around with the materials, because I see icing and fondant and gel color, you know all that stuff is just like a different art material for me. I just like to play around with it.

What was your biggest baking fail and what did you learn from it?

Occasionally there are little fails, like the icing fell off cookies when we shipped them. Like you know if your royal icing is the wrong consistency it’s gonna chip off your cookie. Stuff like that, and you’re like well, you get a refund!

And a good small lesson from that is when something goes wrong in a customer facing way, sometimes you end up with a bigger fan in the end. If you’re like what can I do to make this right? And then they’re really appreciative of that because things happen, and then they’ll come back because they know you took care of them.

When I was still working from home, I remember I made a five tier wedding cake, and I had to make batches and batches of orange curd and it kept breaking. And everything was made in a 4 ½ quart KitchenAid. But it’s one of those things where you’re like I’m just gonna do it until its right, go get me another bag of 50 oranges please! I think my husband went to the store like 6 times.

Do you have any other advice for people who are thinking about starting a baking business?

I think go for it. If it’s something you love, you should definitely try it. I think its good to talk to as many people as you can, or if you can, shadow for a week. Or have a job where you’re doing it for a while to see if you really like all the pieces.

Yes it’s fun, more fun than probably a lot of other things. But there’s also dealing with people and customers and pleasing people. And Yelp exists. So I mean you kind of have to think about all the elements you have to deal with.

I think just talking to people that do the thing you want to do is really smart, so that you can kind of get a feel. If you would regret not having done it, just try it. And if it doesn’t work out, try something else, now you know!