Founder Stories

From San Francisco Pop-Ups to Taking Over Johnson City: A Conversation with Maren Close of Lazy Lady Bakery

Eight years in, seven retail spaces, and a philosophy built around baking with the intention of selling out. Maren Close came back to Johnson City from San Francisco and built Lazy Lady Bakery into something worth studying.

By Emma Ayala April 24, 2026 Johnson City, TN

My freshman year of high school, I moved to Rogersville from Hollywood, Florida, and I immediately noticed what was missing. No specialty bakeries, no real coffee shop culture, none of the little spots I had grown up around back home. So I did what any food-obsessed teenager would do: I waited. I waited until junior year when I could finally drive, and then I pointed my Chevy Volt toward Johnson City and told myself the mileage was basically free since the car plugs in anyway, so I might as well spend that money on the chocolate chip cookie I had been drooling over on Lazy Lady's Instagram for two years.

I was so excited to finally experience a bakery like the ones back home, right here in East Tennessee. I got there, walked in ready, and they were sold out of cookies. I went home with a croissant instead, which was honestly incredible, but I came back the next time with a plan, got there early, and got my cookie. That's the kind of place Lazy Lady is — people will make the trip, and they will keep coming back. I live in Johnson City now, and I'm there at least once a week.

So when I had the chance to sit down with Maren Close, the founder and sole owner behind Lazy Lady, I had a lot of questions. Not just about the pastries, but about the business she's been building in Johnson City — seven retail spaces, a retail storefront, and a team she fought herself to put together. It's the kind of story we cover at FoundersForge: a founder who came back to this region on purpose and figured it out from there.

She Didn't Start Here, But She Came Back for a Reason

Maren was living in San Francisco when Lazy Lady first started to take shape, doing small pop-ups around her neighborhood, feeling out the concept and building her footing. But she was clear-eyed about what San Francisco actually is as a market. The competition is relentless, and unless you catch a social media wave at exactly the right moment, carving out a name for yourself there is hard. She knew that going in, and when her mom bought a building back home in Johnson City and offered her a space, she decided to make the leap and open a brick-and-mortar.

"There wasn't too much competition at the time, so I thought it was a little bit of an easier landscape to set myself up in."

Maren Close, Founder, Lazy Lady Bakery

That instinct turned out to be right. Johnson City has been growing steadily, and that population growth has worked in Lazy Lady's favor. Hailey Swindler, founder of The Bush House, even said: "This area is a business gold mine if you have a vision for something that doesn't exist yet." Maren came back from San Francisco and found exactly that.

Eight Years In, and Still Just Getting Started

Lazy Lady has been around for eight years in total, with the current retail location hitting four years this year. That timeline matters because a lot of what Maren has built — especially the retail program — didn't happen overnight or all at once.

The retail side of the business actually started at the Jonesboro Farmers Market, where the Corner Cup approached her about carrying Lazy Lady products. From there, it grew organically. She's been in places, left places, added new ones. Right now, Lazy Lady is in seven retail spaces, including most of the coffee shops in downtown Johnson City, one location in Bluff City, and a new restaurant partnership in North Johnson City.

"I love working with restaurants too," she said. "They're kind of doing a little bit more than our typical pastries, so we get to explore a lot more." Her near-term goal is to hit ten accounts soon, and fifteen to twenty beyond that. "I just want to take over Johnson City — in retail, that is."

Stop Trying to Do Everything Yourself

Maren is the first to admit she held on too long before hiring. She's a self-described control person, and she said it with the knowing laugh of someone who has made peace with that part of herself. "I think a lot of business owners will tell you they have some control issues and like to have everything under their control," she said.

For a while, especially when Lazy Lady was primarily a retail operation without the retail shop, she could manage most things on her own. But when the brick-and-mortar opened and they were doing laminated pastries on top of retail volume, that math just didn't work anymore. "It was hard to let it go a little bit," she admitted. "But it was definitely time." The moment that made it click was crossing four retail spaces while simultaneously opening the storefront. She brought on their first baker right before opening, and the team has grown from there.

Her advice to other founders is direct: don't be afraid to hire. Lora Eshbach of The Generalist wrote about this same tension — the moment a small business has to stop operating like one person and start building like a team. Maren got there the hard way, but she got there.

The Numbers Are Not the Fun Part, But They're the Foundation

Here's where Maren said something I think a lot of early-stage food business owners skip past, usually because it's not the fun part of the conversation.

She said one of her biggest regrets early on was not pricing her items correctly. "I think for a really long time I wasn't taking pricing seriously," she told me. "Just learn how to price your items and add in your labor and what you think you should be making. It's gonna be really difficult to grow a business if you don't know everything that's going into it." Pricing yourself is something I genuinely struggle with too — most people do. Maren is just willing to say it out loud.

If you don't know how to price — ingredients, labor, overhead, what you actually deserve to make — it's going to be really hard to grow. It's one of the first things we work through in Avante Bootcamp for exactly that reason.

"Getting a CPA is probably one of the biggest steps. It's all the unfun stuff that I feel like you should focus on first before you can really get into the actual fun part, which is the baking."

Maren Close, Founder, Lazy Lady Bakery

Those details — knowing your write-offs, tracking your labor costs, having your numbers dialed in from day one — compound over time. It's the same reason Avante Bootcamp puts the financial fundamentals first, before the exciting parts take over.

Baking Hundreds of Pastries a Day, and Still Running Out

On a busy weekend, Lazy Lady is moving a couple hundred items a day. The croissants alone account for a solid chunk of that. And still, some Fridays and Saturdays, they sell out of what people came in for.

Maren's take on that: "We bake with the intention of selling out, because every pastry leftover is a loss." She finds the median — the number she's confident will sell on a normal busy day — and bakes to that. "I try to explain to people that we're still a pretty small team and we're baking as much as we can, but with the understanding that slow and busy days happen."

The hard part is managing the disappointment of someone who came specifically for one thing. But overbaking and throwing away money every single day isn't an answer either. "It fluctuates so much and it's hard to tell from week to week whether it's gonna be busy or slow. That's one of the biggest issues we face every week." She's making a judgment call every single time.

The Moment That Stuck With Her

I always ask founders for one moment that made them feel the weight of what they're building. Maren's answer was about a cake.

A customer called to confirm a pickup. They were taking it to a funeral. Maren was already rushed, and the cake wasn't coming together the way she wanted. When the woman's husband came to pick it up, she offered it to him for free. "I'm so sorry, I just want to offer this cake to you for free because of everything that's happened. I just don't feel great about the look of it, and I know what you're going through right now." She wanted to take a little bit of the weight off in a moment when she could.

"I feel like every day there's always a little small moment here that always feels really nice. I'm happy that we're like a part of the community here."

Maren Close, Founder, Lazy Lady Bakery

Maren keeps coming back to the community piece when she talks about why she does this. That's true of the founders we profile at FoundersForge too — Calli Hall of Calli Rose and Kevin Sommers of Some Apparel both talk about Johnson City the same way. The business is part of the place.

What She Loves Most

Maren went to culinary school at AB Tech in Asheville, baking and pastry focused — a program she highly recommends — and she's been doing this professionally since 2010. She came from a long line of really good cooks and bakers, and she sees Lazy Lady as her contribution to that lineage.

What she loves most about the craft is unexpected flavor combinations. She changes the menu every month, building it around what's in season and what's available locally. The R&D at the end of each month — testing recipes for the next one — is one of her favorite parts of the job. It keeps the creative side of baking alive even after all these years.

Maren moved back to Johnson City on purpose, got her numbers right, hired before she was comfortable doing it, and built a retail program from a farmers market table to seven accounts. Lazy Lady Bakery isn't a cute story. It's a business, and Maren Close is running it like one.

Go early. Get the cookie.