Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Benz
Hi Lauren, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
The White Flower Cake Shoppe is celebrating 18 years in business 3/1/2025
and now has 4 locations!
Lauren Benz and Marianne Carroll met in 7th grade Junior High in Mentor, Ohio. The two quickly became friends, and stayed friends through high school where they both worked at a Dairy Queen and were introduced to the idea of cake decorating when they were asked to help decorate the ice cream cakes.
After High school, the pair went to separate art colleges. Marianne studied oil painting and graphic design at The Columbus college of Art and Design and Lauren studied movie make up and Industrial Design at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. During college and afterwards, they worked in various bakeries and worked out of their homes creating custom cakes for friends and family. The home business grew quickly, and word of mouth helped create a huge customer base all over Northeast Ohio! It was in 2006 that they decided to start The White Flower Cake Shoppe, a bakery specializing in custom wedding cakes, and cakes for all occasions.
In March of 2007, they opened their first location in Laplace Shopping Center in Beachwood, Ohio, and quickly became Northeast Ohio’s premiere cake shop specializing in delicious custom made cakes.
In 2008 they were invited to participate in their first of four Food Network Challenges– A Cirque du Soleil Theme competition. Then shortly after were invited back to participate in a Horror Cakes competition, A 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street competition, and a Newlywed competition. The White Flower Cake Shoppe was Cleveland’s first and only bakery to ever appear on the Food Network Cake Challenge!
In 2010, The White Flower Cake Shoppe was chosen out of hundreds of bakeries nationwide as one of four featured on an entire 9 episode season of WE TV’s Amazing Wedding Cakes. This show was filmed over 3 weeks, and featured wedding cakes of local couples, in prominent Cleveland venues like The Ritz Carlton, The House of Blues and The Silver Grille.
In March of 2014, White Flower Cake Shoppe opened its 2nd location, in Solon, Ohio. This location features all of White Flower’s delicious Cakes, French Macarons, Cupcakes, Brownies, Truffles and more.
The Solon location also offers custom cakes as well as a Gift Boutique with Hand made pottery and Gifts.
In July of 2018 The White Flower Cake Shoppe was featured in 2 episodes of Food Network’s Ridiculous Cakes. The episodes featured 2 very large, 100% buttercream birthday cakes delivered to TownHall and Cedar Creek Grille. The show documented the making of these large cakes from start to finish, and showcased how fabulous cakes can be made using 100% buttercream.
In August of 2022, The White Flower Cake Shoppe opened its 3rd retail location at Cleveland’s Historic West Side Market featuring a full Ready to Go Menu of Cakes, Macarons, Cupcakes, Brownies, Cookies, Vegan and Gluten Free Options.
In April of 2023, White Flower Cake opened it’s 4th location in Strongsville Ohio. This location features several cases of ready to go Cakes, Macarons, Cupcakes, Brownies, Cookies, Vegan desserts, Gluten Free desserts and more! This location also offers custom cakes as well as a Gift Boutique with Hand made pottery and Gifts.
In August of 2023 White Flower Cake MOVED its Flagship LaPlace location to Eton Chagrin Boulevard, a much larger upscale Shopping center.
The Eton location offers custom cakes, buttercream wedding cakes, a large variety of cupcakes, macarons, ready to go cakes, brownies, cookies and so much more. The shop also features local favorite Pierre’s Ice cream scoops every day!
Over the years, the duo contribute their success to a lot of determination, hard work, an amazing production team, supporting and loving families, and their true desire to be the best at what they do.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Like many businesses we had and continue to have bumps along the way. We have learned to adapt our business model often and make changes when needed even if it rocks the boat a bit.
Having a very hard working, supportive and loyal team that believes in us and supports our vision really helps to ensure operations run as smoothly as possible.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about The White Flower Cake Shoppe?
We pride ourselves on being a locally owned family business specializing in all things BUTTERCREAM. We use our artistic backgrounds to create beautiful works of edible art that not only look amazing, but taste incredible too.
We offer a wide variety of items for walk-in purchase at all 4 locations. You can also place specialty cake orders through our online gallery found on our website, we typically ask for 5 days notice.
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
During Covid we learned the true meaning of team work! Seeing so many businesses, especially in the food service industry, closing down was terrifying. How can you not panic and think are we next?
We decided at that point to push through and offer contactless curbside pickup and phone/online ordering options so our customers were still able to enjoy our products. We were able to keep all of our staff and definitely got a lot of extra steps in by running items out into trunks of cars. Of course large parties and weddings were canceled, but everyone still had birthdays, anniversaries and so many other reasons to celebrate. We believe CAKE brings such joy and happiness to any occasion and we were proud that we could navigate through such a difficult time and still provide our customers with Buttercream LOVE.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Whiteflowercake.com
- Instagram: whiteflowercakeshoppe
- Facebook: The White Flower Cake Shoppe ETON Chagrin
