Lexington Bakes

0:00Lex Evan:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Lex Evan:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator-powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf-level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most.

1:35Lex Evan:If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now, let's dive into the new episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today, I have a founder who I genuinely love following his brand on social, following how he's building, how he's doing things differently, especially in a competitive space like baked goods. Lex Evan, the founder and CEO of Lexington Bakes is on today. And Lex, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. I am so happy to be here. I've listened to your podcast for months.

2:22I never thought that like I would be a subject. So it was really cool that this happened.

2:27Lex Evan:I'm so happy this is happening. And also thank you so much for listening. It really means so much because I love having this space where people can share the behind the scenes of their brands and how they're looking at things because this industry is really hard. It's not easy. And I think sharing these stories, you never know who listens to it or how it helps them, but it really does. So I'm really excited to share your story too. So let's first start with Lexington Bakes. What is Lexington Bakes and what was the space in the baked good market that you were like, okay, I'm going to put my stamp on this.

3:09Lex Evan:I'm going to do something a bit different. I would love to hear the behind the scenes. So Lexington Bakes started by accident. It wasn't an intentional, I want to go start a brand that's going to be sold in grocery stores across the country. I had a career in brand strategy and design for about 15 to 20 years now. I still do that for the brand. So it's hard for me to be like, there was a definitive stop. Right. Well, what a great background to bring into a founder story. Yeah. I still love design and it was, it's, I haven't let go of it yet. So we can get into that later, but I had picked up baking as a hobby while I had my design career.

3:54And for years, I would just bring in baked goods like every Monday I would come into the office and be like look what I made this weekend I taught myself how to bake with the internet I bought a KitchenAid mixer one day and just picked macarons the hardest thing to make oh my gosh that's one of the hardest

4:16Lex Evan:I'm gonna make macarons from scratch how hard can it be wow that's very hard yeah but within a couple weeks, like I mastered it. And I was like, wow, this is fun to like make things with your hands and have them taste delicious and have people love that. Um, what else can I make? And like, I also loved the show how it's made as a kid. So I genuinely have this curiosity for how the world works and how things are made. And I love dessert and sugar and branding and all of those interests converged into Lexington Bakes. But I spent like a good 10 years just having fun with baking. I never wanted to turn it into a business.

4:58I really loved my design career. I worked at Johnson & Johnson for 10 years straight. I got to work on iconic brands from my childhood, like Neutrogena, Aveeno, Clean & Clear. And not just in the US, I designed the products for like 80 different countries around the world. So I really got to study human behavior and consumer behavior in all the countries.

5:24Lex Evan:That's super cool. So you were working on design projects for 80 plus countries within the Johnson & Johnson portfolio? Yes. My role was specifically on brand strategy and packaging. So the regional marketing teams would handle all the like commercials and meta ads and print ads and all that stuff. We were responsible for how the brand shows up and looks on shelf in 80 different countries. How do you build a consistent brand for the world taking into account all these like regional nuances of how you need to market in different countries. For example, when we did a lychee cleanser for clean and clear, the lychee visual in the minds of people in India is very different than the lychee visual of the minds of people in China or Japan.

6:23So we had to really dive in and be like, what does a lychee look like to you? A lychee illustration, what does that look like to you? Is it the outside of the fruit? Is it the inside jelly part is it and we had to do like two different versions of the lychee design because a single illustration of a lychee did not resonate for both markets you really have to understand how people think of things in their minds for it to connect and hit on shelf of like what what am I

6:53Lex Evan:looking at what is that I can nerd out with you for hours just on that because my background is marketing and international business. So I love the nuance of different markets and what makes sense and what resonates. It's so fun. So, okay. Knowing all of that, it sounds like you had a really cool job that was interesting and touching upon the things that you were already um enjoyed doing what what then brought you to building a baked goods brand like what was what was that transition I got lucky in the sense that I fell into the thing that I love right in college and I got I got to have a full 20-year career in one field but like we're human we we don't just like one thing so yeah I think it was a combination of not peaking because I don't think I've peaked in design but like in in the sense of that type of job working in big CPG in design like I had done it all after 10 years at J &J like the biggest CPG company on the planet.

8:13If I wanted to pursue or continue pursuing a design career, I would have had to make some drastic change of like starting an agency or going to an agency, working in a different field of design, like away from packaged goods. But I was also just like, I have all these other hobbies. Like I really love baking. And after 10 years of baking for fun and getting this feedback from people consistently over the 10 years of, I don't really like macarons, but I like yours. I don't really like this, but I like your version of it. I'm like, okay, what am I doing differently? And I've come to learn that it's my palate in refining the recipes that I was finding, making them taste how I wanted them to taste is what connected and resonated with people when I served baked goods whenever I made them.

9:05And there were a few life things that happened too. So I broke my spine in 2019.

9:12Lex Evan:Oh my gosh. That's like a whole other. You broke your spine? Yeah. I was doing a deadlift at the gym. I herniated a disc and then I like couldn't really move. Like I was at the gym for like an hour trying to like breathe and like not embarrass myself but also like I was so young and didn't realize like ask for help right right right but I had like scans and they're like oh actually you have a herniation and you have a fracture and you have this degenerative condition and like you need spine surgery immediately we're going to put metal in your spine and I was like I'm not even 30 y 'all need to calm down I need to understand what's happening with my body um so that took me out of my like everything like that my soul 2019 19.

9:58Yes. So for eight months, all I focused on was like trying to alleviate this most excruciating pain I'd ever encountered in my life for eight months. And finally, I agreed that I needed surgery to get better. I did that. And then I recovered. And then in January of 2020, J &J was like, hey, we need designers to move to LA. And I was like, sure, I'll do it right after spine surgery. And then COVID happened in February of 2020. So that also like put a pause in like career, like every, we all just, right. Um, I think a year after COVID is when this whole thing started with Lexington bakes, where I got back into baking after like spine breaking, moving to LA COVID.

10:47I got back into baking. I was like, I really love this. and everyone on my Instagram could see that. And I had moved from New York to LA and all the people that I had been giving free baked goods to for years in New York were like, hey, we really miss your stuff. We saw your baking brownies. Can you ship them to us? And that's when the aha moment came to me of like, sure, I wanted to open a bakery because that's fun, but it wasn't like the big life-changing investable idea. It was like, okay, I'll have a design career and then one day I'll open a bakery and I'll retire with that.

11:19Lex Evan:Right. and it kind of just clicked that like, oh, you don't need a storefront to do a bakery. You can do it online now, and because I'm a designer, I built the brand quickly. I built and coded the Shopify site. That Instagram demand from like one random post that wasn't even like, hey, I'm starting a business. It was just like, I made brownies again. They're like, cool, we want to buy them. I was like, what? Long story short, it ended up in like five days. is I pre-sold$5 ,000 for a$10 brownie that I hadn't even like made packaging for. It was just like, okay, if you want me to do this, here's what it's going to cost.

11:57We have to ship you four brownies because we're not going to ship one brownie.

12:00Lex Evan:They were big at the time. They were five ounce, like huge brownies. And all these friends and family and like even new people I had met in LA from the short time I was here were like, yeah, we want this. This looks amazing. Like, let's do it. um so yeah i had five thousand dollars in my venmo in five days and i was like all right if you guys hit this goal i will buy christmas that year get you these brownies so i did it we pre-sale pre-sale pre-sale five thousand dollars i put in another five thousand dollars of my own money and i was like all right let's go get a commercial kitchen let's get licenses let's get packaging equipment ingredients um i had done all that operational work like really fast because i also am a nerd math nerd and just like love spreadsheets um and another great quality for a cpg founder math is my favorite subject in high school that's awesome i've never had to study for it it was great except when we got to like uh geometry and pre-calc i was like oh this isn't math anymore this is like vocabulary memorizing right um so yeah once i shipped out 500 brownies and all the feedback came in of like because people bought these without having tried like they tried other baked goods I've served so they knew I could bake but then when they tried the brownies they're like holy f dude this is the best brownie I've ever had that's when I was like all right this this can go a little further so like I inched along curiously into what this could be I didn't really have a grand vision from the beginning that this was going to be a CPG brand that was going to aim to be in over 20 ,000 stores by the time I'm done.

13:42We're not there yet. That's the goal. But I was like, all right, we have the first product. The website looks kind of like dinky with one product. What else I got? I had this amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe that I had been making. And I tweaked it to make it into a square format because the brownies were, I designed custom boxes for the brownies and the brownies were square. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to make different boxes for round cookies. So let me do square cookies. And then I can fit them in the same box and the same configuration. Like we do two cookies, two brownies, four, four brownies, four cookies.

14:18It was an efficiency thing of packaging, but the chocolate chip cookie was the second product I launched in January of 2022. And that's when I formally like officially launched. I'm doing this like full fledged brand.

14:32Lex Evan:I was going to ask what was that timeline? So that was 22. you it was november 2021 was when that instagram post thing happened and then by christmas that year i shipped all 500 brownies that was my first quick yeah it was six weeks from idea to delivery um i had never worked in a commercial kitchen before so i had to like get my bearings around bearings around that um but i did it and it was fun and exhilarating and then i had my second product and that surpassed the brownie people were like wait the brownie was good but like dude this cookie is something else and I also learned that um square cookies are actually if you think of cutting out a square of the middle of a really thick cookie right that's what you have it's a really gooey center part of the cookie every time and it freezes really well because of how thick it is.

15:30Lex Evan:Wait, that's brilliant. Yeah. So from day one, I also was like, I'm not going to create a website where people can just go and order and have like custom orders and unlimited quantity. It's like, nope, I'm going to make product and we're going to sell that product. So I was very mindful of shelf life from day one. And because you have to refrigerate brownies to cut them cleanly there was also this aha moment and for making macarons like macarons need to go in the fridge to mature and let the the filling kind of saturate the cookie um and let all the flavors meld but that happens in the fridge so i kind of had this experience with the fridge and like refrigeration extending the shelf life of baked goods so when i did that with brownies to cut them cleanly I was like oh we refrigerate them to cut them but what if you just keep them in the freezer how long can they stay fresh and it turns out it's like a year so we have a year shelf life frozen for all of our products um of course they never get like we sell them months after they're made you never really go past six months of something in the warehouse but when you think about scaling cpg to 20 000 doors a one-year frozen shelf life is going to be amazing to allow you to do that.

16:50Lex Evan:So are you shipping them out frozen? They ship frozen. They thaw in transit and they arrive ready to enjoy. You can re-refrigerate them on arrival for up to 60 days. You can freeze them for a few more months. But because they have like a 14-day ambient shelf life, we ship with two-day shipping. We don't use ice packs. We don't use insulation because there's also an environmental environmentally conscious component to to what I'm doing which was we started with really big brownies and cookies because it reduced packaging waste if you're wrapping one ounce brownies like that's a lot of wasted packaging when I can just give you a five ounce brownie and you can just put it back in the pouch um we've changed from the five ounce brownie because in retail like it just doesn't work yeah but there were there was all this big great ambition to like really change how food is packaged to really like make a dent in reducing packaging waste but as you scale and kind of like how people shop dictates that more than you can control so we're not going to make one ounce brownies but now we're down to like two ounce brownies.

18:05So we're still twice the size of most things on shelf. So yes, we are still reducing packaging by 50 % because we're giving you twice as much in the same pouch that would fit a one ounce brownie. I've digressed so much. No, but I love your passion for packaging and

18:25Lex Evan:sustainability. I totally am following you. So what has been the path and the strategy to grow in retail? Because you just touched upon that of what you were doing D to C, getting organic momentum. But what has that look like then going to retail? So we went from November 2021 to December shipping the first 500 brownies. Then in January, we launched a cookie. In February of 2022, I had the third flavor, our limited edition Valentine's Day, like raspberry velvet brownie. By March, Foxtrot Market was like, hey we love what you're doing we want to put you in all 22 stores and I was like amazing I couldn't comprehend what that meant at the time because retail was never in my mind as to like what I was doing I was doing this small online bakery it was a side project like I wasn't going to quit my job so you were still working full-time in all of this I kept my job at Neutrogena for about the first two years of Lexington Bakes.

19:30And I self-funded the whole thing. Like I was bootstrapped for the first three and a half years. We only raised money this year, which is life-changing, by the way. Like I, my life, I finally have a life again because I can hire help.

19:44Lex Evan:Right. But bootstrapping for three and a half years was insane. But it really was Foxtrot that gave me the courage and empowerment to really believe that I have what it takes to build the CPG brand that can go the full distance. And we launched at Foxtrot June of the first year in business, like six months into business. And we were on shelf in 22 stores, not even trying to be. And Foxtrot within the first week was like, hey, we need to reorder in every store. This sold out like within a couple days and i'm like you're telling me a ten dollar brownie sold out in the first couple days like i wouldn't even have thought a ten dollar brownie would work in retail and they're like no we think it tastes amazing it's gonna work and they were right um granted we had a little help because we were on an end cap that said up and comers finalists and winners like foxtrot put this stamp of approval yeah but they put this stamp of approval on lexington Bakes of like Foxtrot in its heyday were like purveyors of good taste in Chicago and they had a really strong community following that that trusted them and when Foxtrot said Lexington Bakes is it Chicago was like yep I'm trying it this is it we love it um Chicago DC Dallas Austin like everywhere it was great and then from there I think Erwan may have seen us at Foxtrot or seen that and air one approached us and they're like hey you're in la um we really like what you're doing your ingredient standards your quality your radical ingredient transparency like no one else is doing that we we need to have you in in our shelf set and you're 100 organic like most organic brands don't go the full distance do only organic ingredients there's some ingredients that they can get away with not having ingredient uh organic um there's different like tiers of organic and we're the highest tier of organic there is.

21:42Lex Evan:So are you certified organic too? We just got organic certified. Okay. Can I ask you about that? How was that transition going from using all organic ingredients to being organic certified? It's been like a crutch or not a crutch. It's been a limitation because we've been using 99 to 100 % organic ingredients, but we couldn't tell anyone that it was only on the back of pack that it says all the ingredients are organic so on shelf it's been a hurdle to justify our price when we don't have the organic seal or we can't put the word organic anywhere on the pouch except the back so it was thank god word of mouth that like our taste and experience is so phenomenal that people were like don't worry about the price you you have to buy this and then it's like these little hidden eggs it hidden easter eggs that people uncover as they buy the brand and experience the brand they're like wait not only does this taste amazing and like okay wait we paid because it tastes amazing but like it's 100 organic and they only use fair trade ingredients for any ingredient that can be fair trade certified it all those extra layers build loyalty and community and retention because anyone can make something taste great but to make it taste great with no natural flavors with no artificial preservatives with no what we call no naughty ingredients that is just like there's so many layers to uncover so we have this like messaging hierarchy and the very first reason people will love lexington bakes is because we are the best tasting products on the market for what we make but then they discover that we're also all organic and we're fair trade and we have no naughty ingredients and no preserve no artificial preservatives and no no natural flavors it's just the gift that keeps on giving and it just it really helps build retention because every time anyone second guesses the price they're like yep nope the price is justified look at all xyz right was part of your fundraising to get the organic certification part of the fundraise was to kick off our our transition to our manufacturer because we're still self-manufacturing oh okay so we've been working with the manufacturer for about a year we've made the products they're they're great but in order to really kick off we had to buy a new piece of equipment we had to buy ingredients at scale like pallets of ingredients because you need to have ingredients on hand to to make the products you need to make for like six months because when you're ordering pallets they don't come overnight right time so right we needed capital to kind of secure all the ingredients.

24:39The other thing is chocolate, butter, eggs, those prices are fluctuating all the time. So if you really want to map out your like annual sales goals, you need to lock in those prices. You can't have them fluctuating every month that you're ordering ingredients. So if you order ingredients for the year, phenomenal, or like at least get a contract to lock in the pricing for the year. So you have some more stability in what you're working with towards your goals.

25:06Lex Evan:That's a great point. And thank you for sharing that. I know also too, you're working on a YouTube baking channel for the brand. Can you give us a little sneak peek? Cause this will air the first week of 2026. So I want to give like a sneak peek of what Lexington bakes has cooking up in the new year. So the way I think of Lexington Bakes goes back to how it started. I didn't set out to build a CPG brand. I wanted to just build the next great American bakery. And it just happens to be sold in grocery stores. And what a lot of other bakeries have done is they've built the bakery first, and they've built dozens of retail storefronts.

25:50And then they realized that like the CPG is how you scale really massively. right but what happens is they cannot deliver the quality they've established in the brick and mortar

26:02Lex Evan:in grocery and it keeps failing and I'm from New York like I used to wait an hour in line at Leven to get those incredible cookies when it was just a basement bakery right I used to go to Milk Bar when it first popped up and there were only two locations in New York both of those brands have put products into Whole Foods and I've seen the products come and go different iterations different product types something isn't clicking and it's because you have this super high handmade quality perception and experience in the brick and mortar and you're selling that as the CPG experience and the CPG experience doesn't live up to that.

26:47So what I'm doing is so hard. I'm starting CPG first, and then we will have brick and mortar later to expand our offerings because we can't do pies as a CPG product. We can't do cakes. We can't do all these other things that bakeries can do. What we can do really well is packaged cookies and brownies. And we've, we've figured that out. And the, the experience we can deliver in a bakery for brownies and cookies is the same experience we're delivering in cpg so that's like one of the different ways we're building this brand but going back to that kind of like how do i establish lexington bakes as a bakery before we actually have bakeries that's where the idea for the youtube baking show came and it's it's showing the world like what lexington bakes as a bakery will offer before we actually go out and build the brick and mortar stores.

27:42And it works twofold in one building kind of hype and excitement for like, yeah, I am going to build a brick and mortar Lexington Bakes. But in the meantime, I can share some recipes, I can talk about our products, I can build awareness for the brand CPG and I can I can get into the homes of all Americans faster with this content before we go into 20 60 ,000 stores so it's it's kind of like a digital delivery of the product that's free because marketing is so expensive and so expensive I know like no it's it's really clever thank you you're welcome like i've been i've spent months kind of on the programming side of like i think of content as programming like as a netflix executive would be like all right what shows are we gonna do next year that's how i think of our content which is why i haven't really done a lot of content like if you go to our socials it's it it's really non-existent um and it's i don't know if it's because i'm a designer or millennial but like i don't vibe with the like off the cuff, like IRL in the moment, just go and shoot content.

29:03Like that to me is, it works for if you're Gen Z and that's native to you, or I don't know, whatever, it works for some brands. It doesn't work for what I'm building. So I've built a set. I have, this is our kitchen. We've got lights and everything. And like, I'm a designer. I want to make really beautiful art and I'm a baker and I want to make really beautiful, delicious, extraordinary baked things. Those two converge. And this is kind of how it's coming to life through this baking show. And I also have put out on LinkedIn that like, we're a brand that has aspirations to be on Netflix. So what does the future look like for Lexington Bakes as a Netflix show?

29:44And the YouTube show is kind of like a test or preview of that.

29:48Lex Evan:Right? No, I'm obsessed. I'm all in. I'm really excited about this rollout. I love the integration. I love also self-producing a kind of like a first taste of the bigger picture and getting people to be on board with what you're building. And then you never know who watches or who hears about it, who gets shared the link with. I just believe in putting it out there and seeing how it comes together. But you have the vision and now you're really then executing on so many different ways and thinking outside the box and getting creative is that a piece of advice you would share with someone who's in the really early stages of if everyone's going one way see how you could go the other one of the very first lessons I learned in design school was uh we were we were tasked with designing like a juice box and everyone like went to the aisle and like oh okay juice boxes are yellow we're gonna make yellow juice boxes it's like you need to not think like that if everything on the shelf is yellow make your juice box blue which is the complementary uh yeah complementary color wait i'm forgetting all my color study stuff it's the opposite of yellow which is going to make it vibrate, it's going to make it stand out in a sea of yellow.

31:11So in a sense, yes, do the things that other people aren't doing. Because if you try to do the same content as other brands, it's going to blend, it's going to blur, no one's really going to notice you. So I'm betting on the fact that there is so much lo-fi content out there, that this highly produced show of mine is going to stand out on TikTok as brand content because it's different. But if you're a startup founder and you don't have endless funding, like I can't tell you that this is a priority. This is easy for me because I'm a creative person. I'm a designer. I'm not paying anyone for this show.