To Build a Bakery is an ongoing series from Craft to Crumb featuring the stories of growth for bakeries of all scales. From establishing a first brick-and-mortar location to multiple shops and beyond, the series connects with bakers from across the country about how they’re scaling up their businesses. If you would like your bakery’s story to be considered for the series, please email Annie Hollon at annie@avantfoodmedia.com.
MONTGOMERY, AL — No two bakers’ journeys are alike and for Lorraine Richie, owner of Lorraine’s Bake Shop, the road to establishing her brick-and-mortar cookie shop in Montgomery, AL, was a long one that began more than a decade ago on the East Coast.
The mother of five is a self-taught baker who made her first batch of decorated sugar cookies in 2012. Over time, she learned how to work with royal icing and decorate the cookies by studying YouTube tutorials. From there, she began making cookies from her New Jersey home for local distribution, documenting her progress and receiving orders via social media.
A DM-turned-opportunity
The turning point for Lorraine came in the form of an Instagram DM in 2014 from Evan G. Cooper, an event planner and floral designer based in Montgomery, AL.
“Evan messaged me on Instagram about shipping my cookies to Montgomery,” Lorraine recalled. “I started shipping cookies there and built my own client base.”
The message is what Lorraine would later call a “serendipitous connection.” Evan joked with Lorraine about when she would move to Alabama to open a shop. Unexpectedly, the stars aligned for Lorraine and her husband, Bill, to do just that.
“It just so happened that my husband [Bill] had gone through a layoff,” she said. “He had exhausted the job search in our area and so that lighthearted, somewhat joking question took root.”
The couple pondered the possibilities available with possibilities available by moving to a new state. With an established customer base in Alabama, the Richies took the leap and sold their home in New Jersey, making the move to the South in March 2019.
Making the move
“The point in moving to Montgomery was, in part, to pursue opening a brick-and-mortar, so that was in our mind as part of the plan when we moved there,” she said.
Once in Montgomery, Lorraine received her cottage food license and began hosting pop-ups on the front porch of her home, its white picket fence and exterior a nod to the American Dream.
Yet, one year later, the pandemic took its toll, delaying Lorraine’s plans to lock down a location for her shop.
“We moved here and then COVID happened, and everything shut down,” Lorraine shared. “That put a little bit of a halt to pursuing the bake shop at that point.”
In the meantime, the Richies began saving money in a business account for the future business.
Despite the delay, Lorraine continued looking for a place to rent and eventually found her ideal location — a vacant Subway shop on historic Dexter Avenue.
“The spot was exactly where we wanted it to be, and we figured out that if we scaled back to the bare minimum — a convection oven, freezer and refrigerator — I had enough in savings to cover it,” Lorraine recalled.
With this compromise, she signed her lease in May 2023 and started prepping the store for opening day. Even with the hardships inherent with settling into a physical storefront, the built-in customer base helped make Montgomery a soft place to land.
“We felt like even though it was 900 miles away, we were moving to another home,” Lorraine said. “We knew people here from our visits, and I had the customer base already. They had been watching the journey through social media and were waiting for us to get here, so that was a huge help.”
Beyond the baked goods, Lorraine also found support in the relationships she developed from her online involvement in the city’s vibrant art scene. After visiting Montgomery, Lorraine took notice of who was driving the city’s downtown revitalization efforts and tapped into social media to establish relationships with small business owners and artists in the area. In following them online and engaging through comments, a digital relationship turned into a real-life community.
“We really got connected to Montgomery through social media, and that has helped a lot because the community here knew who we were and knew we were coming,” Lorraine said.
With the opening of Lorraine’s Bake Shop on Sep. 1, 2023, Lorraine turned the page on 11 years of her life as a home baker and began a new chapter as a bakery owner.
Community-based at the core
Since opening the bakery doors, Lorraine’s Bake Shop has grown from a two-person team — with Bill mixing the dough and baking the cookies and Lorraine doing the decorating and detailing — to four. Moving forward, Lorraine looks to pull from the local home baker community to build up her bakery team.
“That was something else that I wanted to do once I got here; I wanted to reach out to other home bakers that specifically did what I did,” Lorraine said. “Through my journey to Montgomery, I really learned that community is more important than competition and that there truly is enough business for everyone.”
Lorraine’s focus on community is a driving force for the business, so much so that it’s part of the bakery’s tagline: Cookies created for community. She often refers customers to other area bakers if she’s at capacity with orders. And she’s helped form a community of other female small business owners, driving this belief home even further.
“We really seek to uplift our community, whether that’s local small businesses that are our neighbors or finding a way for the businesses on Dexter Avenue and the streets around us to really come together,” Lorraine said.
Through this whole process, Lorraine’s greatest lesson as a baking entrepreneur is, simply put, to trust the process.
“If you have that dream in your heart, placed in your mind, pursue it,” she said. “It’s going to take time, it’s not going to be easy but, in the end, it’ll be worth it. And even if my ending was not a brick-and-mortar, the things that I’ve learned and the way that I’ve grown throughout the journey would have been gift enough.”
