Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Young.
Hi Lauren, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Food brings people together and I grew up in a large family. We came together over Sunday night suppers and holidays. I was given free reign in my kitchen growing up testing recipes and making sweets. Sharing the treats I made was one of the best parts of the process.
In college, I took a job as a cashier at a bakery and witnessed firsthand how a bakery creates family out of its employees and customers. There is a familiar cadence in the exchanges as you learn people’s favorite foods and chat about what they are celebrating. I absolutely loved the connections I made in that space. As I made my way back home to Memphis, married and expecting my first baby, baking became my therapy. I’d become a victim of a carjacking at seven months pregnant and the restlessness it brought was poured into mixing dough, rolling and cutting out cookies, and watching the transformation take place under the coils of the hot oven.
I went on to have my second child and realized the connection between food and telling stories. We came around the breakfast or dinner table often as a family or with friends and talked about our days, our challenges, and our dreams. I began to believe baking cookies could be a story of change. I was busier in my career and as a mom and my restlessness persisted. I built a formal partnership with a local juvenile reentry program and began to bake cookies out of their commercial kitchen and employed their graduates.
For all of the exact ingredients that are required to come together in making the perfect cookie, I knew we could create the recipe for change and help young people see their renewed purpose. We baked together for four years and did all the good we could. We told a lot of people about the stories of change that can take place with the right support. We saw several young people change and thrive and we saw several leave this world too soon. Through the process, I began to discover other social enterprises doing amazing work through workforce development.
I rebranded our mission to Make Life Sweeter and brought along local entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs in our first brick-and-mortar store in 2019. We help tell their stories of change by showcasing their products in our store and creating fundraisers when we can. We have expanded our sweets to include custom-designed cakes and cookies.
We offer a full espresso bar along with breakfast and lunch and we host parties and classes in an open kitchen to help inspire the young baker in everyone. We believe we built a table big enough for us all to come together and help our community grow stronger because when we work together, we rise together.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Baking requires a level of talent and knowledge around the science of how ingredients come together. I created a lot of recipes in my early start but learned the dough I created had to be refrigerated to maintain the exact shape of the cookie cutter and the temperature in a room may not allow the icing on the cookies to dry fast enough before we can package.
Orders get delayed and customers lose patience. I’ve invested in more mixers than I care to admit and although half trays are necessary when baking out small orders, they often get missed on the rack and they are the first to fall out the backside because they weren’t seen. A lot of cookies have been thrown out as a result.
When we moved from being a made-to-order business to a brick-and-mortar business, we realized we had to track the habits of people and be prepared for huge rushes in the store around the holiday seasons and guess how much of which items might sell. It’s an exhausting effort when you are a first-time business because you have no data to make your decisions with. We also have made a few mistakes along the way in capturing custom orders.
We’ve learned not all colors are seen the same and not all visions are executed with what the customer had in mind. We have had several orders our team was so proud to create but the customer reacted completely opposite and was not happy at all. In the end, we have to do what we can to make it right, even if it means starting over.
Working in this industry the days are long and feel a lot like the same day over and over but it’s our customers that truly make us want to work harder and smarter to become the best at what we do.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Sweet LaLa’s Bakery?
Sweet LaLa’s Bakery is a family-owned and operated business originally built as a social enterprise to help tell the story of change in young people’s lives. It evolved into a much larger vision of working with local entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs to tell a bigger story about the great things taking place in the city of Memphis through workforce development and community change.
Our bakery is designed with the community in mind and was built to inspire young bakers by putting the kitchen on display. Our team works to showcase how products are made and we offer classes and training so our customers can become have fun, get messy, and become experts in the kitchen too. We hired the best of the best in creating sweets and have an expert team of custom cake and cookie designers who make insanely amazing creations such as pet portrait cakes, three-dimensional football stadiums, and more. We believe in making you feel like part of the family when you walk through our doors.
We do our best to give you great service, a beautiful space to spark conversations or creativity, and find ways to connect with others over food. We are also proud to partner with community organizations to create special fundraisers to help elevate their mission and bring in the resources they need to grow their programs. We want people who have experienced our food or our space to be inspired to Make Life Sweeter.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
I love words and I’m a big fan of doing word searches and my favorite game to play is Boggle. I’m also interested in historical fiction and have enjoyed several books by Kate Quinn.
Contact Info:
- Email: hello@sweetlalas.com
- Website: sweetlalas.com
- Instagram: @sweetlalasbakery
- Facebook: @sweetlalascookies
