Our story.

'Could we work with this? Perhaps do something that uses up these eggs? Then it hit me. Meringues!'

I started LouLou’s Ribble Valley in 2015. Back then, I was a primary school teacher, working three days a week and looking after the kids. So whatever was next for me needed to be achievable working from home. I started thinking: ‘Right, what else can I do?’

Where we were living at the time, we had hundreds of chickens and ducks. That meant hundreds and hundreds of eggs - so many eggs! We had a sign in the window that said ‘parlour with eggs’ so I wondered what we could do with that. Could we work with this? Perhaps do something that uses up these eggs?

Then it hit me. Meringues!

There’s a similar place in London who makes meringues, but there’s nothing like this up in the North West and especially not in the Ribble Valley. 

You see, I’ve always baked, always cooked and always been very creative. It just seemed so natural for me to explore something related to these passions.  

So I got straight to it. I started whipping up these eggs produced by our beloved chickens and ducks and transformed them into artfully designed meringues. My son, Harris (he’s a teenager now but he was only little at the time) helped by standing out at the end of our driveway, handing out samples of my meringues and feedback forms to cyclists and whoever went by. 

And then guess what happened? Two and a half weeks later, orders started coming in. It was fantastic! Then came some of the first marketing essentials I had to decide upon. 

The name - LouLou comes from Lucie, our daughter. And then the logo. Do you want to know a little secret about our logo? It’s actually just a bit of clipart from Google. I wanted something colourful and this one that I found was perfect. 

And so it’s stayed with us ever since. 

In the beginning, people were buying boxes of treats for £2, £3 and onwards. The more we created and sold, the more we won people over with the delicious meringues. They just started trusting us. And on and on it went until we expanded to the product range we have now.

We started off as meringue masters (well, I was the sole meringue master) and the demand from our customers grew. You lovely lot wanted more - macarons, at first so we became a little meringue and macaron shop. Then came brownies, traybakes, cakes and so on.

 And how could we ever say no? ❤️

The increase in products and orders meant we needed more staff too. So, we went from a single pâtissiere to 14. I actually hardly ever need to bake now and my team are so amazing, I know I don’t need to be in and everything will run as smoothly as ever.

It’s incredible to look back and see how far LouLou’s Ribble Valley has come. It’s been an amazing journey and I’m so excited to see what the future holds.

P.S. If you’ve read this far, aren’t you the least bit curious about our products? Check out our online shop (our treats taste as dreamy as they look, I promise!).