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The Business Marriage by Jyl Benson
MARRIAGE IS TOUGH. So is running a business. When you combine the two, things ratchet up exponentially. One little flicker and everything—business, marriage, home, family, and finances—can go up in flames. Inside New Orleans spoke to five couples who are both business and life partners who successfully manage thriving businesses and happy homes. LAUREN AND RYAN HAYDEL FLEURTY GIRL & HAYDEL’S BAKE SHOP
Lauren and Ryan Haydel, of Fleurty Girl and Haydel’s Bake Shop. 22
She of Fleurty Girl, he of the Haydel’s Bakery, when they married five years ago, Lauren and Ryan Haydel came to embody a merging of contemporary and historic New Orleans cultural icons. With his family, Ryan runs the large-scale bakery business (a wedding and king cake kingdom) his grandparents founded in 1959. Lauren oversees Fleurty Girl, the growing New Orleans-centric t-shirt and novelties empire she founded in 2009 as an online store that has grown to six physical locations. Seemingly
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indefatigable, she also hustles real estate on the side through NOLA Home Realty Group. Together the New Orleans natives opened Haydel’s Bake Shop, an oldfashioned coffee shop and sidewalk café on Magazine Street in 2018. Ryan oversees day-to-day business at the shop and Lauren plays a developmental and creative roll. She also designed the look and feel of the business. “His strengths are my weaknesses and vice versa,” Lauren said. “It makes us a good team.” “Because we both have other business interests and we run the bake shop together, we share ideas for it when we are just hanging out,” Ryan said. “She comes up with new ideas and concepts, such as adding a micro-line of gluten-free king cake to our offerings.” In their private time, the couple manages a blended family of five children and spends time in Bay Saint Louis where Lauren opened a Fleurty Girl shop in 2020. “People keep asking when we are going to open a bake shop [in Bay Saint Louis],” Ryan said, “but I don’t know about that. I think of this as the place where we will retire.”
