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After investing in the best possible ingredients, marshalling the advanced skills of lifelong bakers and spending the requisite time to create attractive products, it’s unfortunate when bakers fumble the ball on the final play by failing to give presentation the same sort of meticulous attention the product itself receives.

You won’t catch Ken and Betty Slove, owners of Lovin Oven Cakery, Round Lake Beach, Ill., making that mistake. Presentation is a key part of their bakery’s success. With everchanging displays and a flair for retail theater, the Sloves make a trip to their bakery a memorable experience.

“One of the great experiences I have when I’m on the retail floor, and this inevitably happens a few times per week, is overhearing customers say that they forgot what they came into the store for,” Ken says. “They come in with a specific thing in mind, but once they come in the store, their imagination takes over. To me, that’s when we’ve got ’em.”

One key element to their merchandising philosophy is to nurture a sense of abundance and plenty. The display cases are always full, and the feast for the eyes doesn’t stop at the top shelf of the case. Customers can be seen with necks craned upwards, eyeing Betty’s latest seasonal creations that climb toward the ceiling from the display case.

The impressive retail space earned the bakery Modern Baking’s 2010 Leadership Award for merchandising, and the Retail Bakers of America (RBA) asked Betty to speak about merchandising at the recent IBIE in Las Vegas.

Betty was honored by the recognition, but as she was only involved in her own shop, she wasn’t sure what she had done to deserve it. It took a tour of a few other bakeries for her to recognize that her merchandising methods were unique.

“For instance, some bakeries use metal pans to display their product,” Betty says. “Many take product right out of the oven and display it on the same pan–it blows me away.”

Before moving to their current plaza location, the Sloves attended a bakery convention in Las Vegas for ideas. While other bakers scoped out equipment, Ken and Betty focused on display pans. They tried different color combinations and sought feedback from other attendees about which looked best in which case.

“These pans were a main part of the convention for us,” Betty says. “They were as important to us as our flooring or our wall color. Bakers use the best ingredients, the best skills that they can in the back, but if it’s not presented the right way in the front, the hard work can be wasted.”

Sources of inspiration

And the Sloves know about the work that goes into baking. Ken is a secondgeneration baker who has been in the business his entire adult life, and as a high school sweetheart-turned wife, Betty’s been with him every step of the way. They ran the family business, Slove’s Country Charm Bakery, from 1973 until 1981 and continued in various baking jobs in and around Chicago until they opened Lovin Oven Cakery in 1989. They moved to their current Round Lake Beach location in 2000, and a year ago opened a cold storefront in nearby Libertyville, Ill. Through their 37 years in the business, Ken had been responsible for the baking and the back of the shop and Betty for the front, honing her merchandising techniques along the way.

Ideas for presentations spring from all over, but two elements seem to be constantly at work in creating new displays–seasonality, which offers a steady rotation of familiar themes from one year to the next, and popular culture, which is constantly providing new trends and fashions. One example of the two elements acting in concert was this year’s overwhelmingly popular witch’s shoe cookies. The high-heeled shoe has been a pop culture meme in recent months, so when Halloween rolled around, Betty applied the new trend to tried-and-true sugar cookies. The result was a fresh take on a seasonal product.

Inspiration also springs from shopping trips. At grocery stores, Betty selects the longest checkout line so as to have time to peruse the home decorating magazines. “Also, I’m a big window shopper. I go to places like Pier One Imports and watch consumer reactions,” she says. “People walk in with a specific thing in mind, but with all of that [seasonal] stuff, they all see what’s out and new, and they all walk away with something else, just because of the attractiveness of the displays.”

To help facilitate impulse purchases and reach different types of consumers, Lovin Oven features a lot of packaged, self-service items. Although many customers come to the bakery wanting to interact with employees, ask questions about products and choose the exact item for their needs, the Sloves also recognize the class of customers that wants to make its own decisions about products and to grab and go with as little interaction as possible. Packaged items, such as individual cookies, brownies or cupcakes, simultaneously cash in on the individual portion size consumer trend and provide for speed and convenience for on-the-go shoppers.

Although ornate merchandising displays often spark impulse purchases, they also are valuable in the long-term goal of making favorable impressions on customers, planting seeds for future sales. “I may not get sales instantly off of something on display, but I know I’ll reap the benefits down the road based on the impression that I make with it,” Betty says. Customer comments and a thriving cake business bear that out.

Products, demographics and business

And as the name implies, a cake business is exactly what the Sloves were shooting for when they first hung their Lovin Oven Cakery shingle in 1989. The idea was eventually to franchise small shops specializing in cakes.

“What we underestimated was the demand for a retail bakery in the area– a full-line bakery,” Ken says. “People came in and asked, ‘Where are the donuts? Where are the sweet rolls?’”

In the days of Slove’s Country Charm Bakery, most of the smattering of towns that make up Lake County, Ill., and Chicago’s northwest suburbs had at least one or two full-line retail bakeries of their own. But not too many retail bakeries are left, so the Sloves responded by adding items piecemeal to fill the void. Eventually, they were back to a full-line bakery format.

But cakes are still number one at the shop, representing 60 percent of total business. Cupcakes make up a sizeable chunk of cake sales, and the bakery routinely produces more than 40,000 cupcakes per month. In the summer months, that number can balloon to 52,000. And the business continues to grow, “not in leaps and bounds, but there’s a real nice, consistent growth in cakes,” Ken says.

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