One of the newest shops in Oklahoma City’s Classen Curve, SusieCakes has arrived in a flurry of confectioner’s sugar—and not a moment too soon. When is the last time you had a fat slice of grandma-grade six-layer cake? Not a big-box layer cake and not a grocery store layer cake; simple, scratch-made, diabolically delicious, fresh-baked cake? Whatever your timeframe, it’s been too long, and Susan Sarich just made it easier to get your cake on.

The idea for SusieCakes came to Sarich suddenly in San Francisco. She and her sweetie, Houston Striggow, were having dinner and when it came time to hear about the evening’s dessert offerings, Sarich remembers hearing a blur of words like peppercorn, gelato and basil. She felt something inside her crack. “I was thinking over-complicated desserts with sugar cages and smoke were not okay, especially given everyone just wanted a piece of chocolate cake!” California, she determined, was definitely dealing with a dessert deficit and, armed with her grandmothers’ recipe tins, she set out to fix it.

On the northwest side of Chicago, in the middle of the 20th century, Mildred and Madeline lived across the alley from each other. Theirs was a quintessential Chicago neighborhood of its era: heavily Catholic and filled mostly with Polish and Italian families. The women were both lifelong homemakers and brilliant bakers. They were also Sarich’s grandmothers, who sat her down with great slabs of cake each day after school. Unbeknownst to them, they’d also created recipes which would launch Sarich’s wildly successful business on hundreds of 3 x 5 index cards kept in little tin boxes. We can all picture those yellowed cards: dotted with butter stains, bent corners, careful script in fading pencil.    

“For me, it was like this full circle moment … my grandmothers — who were homemakers from humble backgrounds — taught me lessons as a girl that have never left me. They told me I could do anything I wanted in this country if I simply worked hard and was nice to people,” Sarich says.

SusieCakes is premised on that memory of grandmothers, the Sunday dinner makers and caregivers who told us we could be anything.  As for Madeline and Mildred, Sarich loves honoring them and wonders how they would feel to know that their recipes are at the heart of a $55 million company. 

The road to SusieCakes wasn’t always easy. After college, Sarich began her career in hospitality in Chicago, working for a series of prestigious companies: Hyatt Hotels Corporation; Lettuce Entertain You, a company with 60+ restaurants; and a five-diamond, five-star French restaurant. It was there that Sarich encountered a gaggle of male French chefs who pretended not to speak English, to better ignore the “woman in the kitchen,” she says. “We had an 800-bottle wine list. I learned fine dining.” She describes this job as a “juncture in her journey.” It was quite a contrast, as her previous job was working for House of Blues — a fun gig for a while, but in the end “it was too much sex, drugs and rock’n’roll for me.”    

Her next stop was Portland, Oregon, where she and Striggow, also a career restaurateur, opened a bistro in June of 2001. They’d taken over a well-known spot, and it was initially a smashing success. “The first three months we were open, we were the hottest thing in town; but once 9/11 hit, the business literally halted.” The terror attack slowed the economy and rattled consumer confidence for months afterward, and Sarich’s restaurant limped along until the couple finally sold it at a loss.

SusieCakes is another Sarich-Striggow collab. The latter now serves as the company’s chief development officer, while the former is its CEO. There are 30 SusieCakes cakeries throughout California, Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The company employs some 500+ people, 85% of whom are women. The company also pays all employees a living wage, often upward of $20 an hour. “I loved my hospitality career and wouldn’t change a thing; but I worked tirelessly and wanted to create a business where women could have progressive careers in food service without having to work 24/7. When I realized that many intelligent, driven women leave [the industry] around the age of 30, it further fueled my passion to create SusieCakes, ” she says. 

Like most businesses, SusieCakes was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. “I can’t overemphasize how horrible COVID was. We had to immediately close 20+ bakeries in California, one of the most restrictive states, and had zero revenue coming in.” She made the gut-wrenching decision to lay off the majority of her staff, keeping on a tiny crew which she dispatched to the stores in pairs, where they baked and sold two types of cake and chocolate chip cookies. 

To make matters worse, Sarich herself couldn’t be in the stores to help. “I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer during COVID but thought it would be bad for my team’s morale, so I hid it from everyone — even to point of letting them think I was breaking rules and going to the salon for great hair, when I really was in a wig.” She beat it, twice, and now jokes about how great her “hair,” which was secretly a wig, looked in Zoom meetings.

Today, with all of that in the rearview mirror, Sarich and the entire team are hyper-focused on steady growth while maintaining SusieCakes’ legendary top-tier customer service, something baked into the company’s culture. “Whether a guest spends $4 on a cookie or $400 on a wedding cake, all guests are equally important,” she says. “They are the ones keeping us in business, so I overemphasize the importance of making each guest feeling valued and special.” •

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