Zoe's Café

Looking to enhance their brand in the twin cities, Zoe’s Bakery & Café, a Minneapolis bakery specializing in pastries and coffee, reached out to Element to expand into a second location from their original Lake Street space.

Through strategic conversations in the early stages of planning, Element worked with the Zoe’s team to distill the priorities for the second location.  Primarily, the new location would be a brand new space that could serve as a model and “flagship” for the Zoe’s brand.  With their bakery business and capacity in place, Zoe’s looked to Element to source potential locations that could balance their financial and location objectives.

Having successfully launched their first location in a second-generation space, the Zoe’s team felt comfortable on the operations side of their business.  In order to further conceptualize their new fresh space, Zoe’s needed an experienced architect and contractor to help make their flagship vision a reality, as well as a landlord motivated to compete for their young and exciting concept.  The central goal of finding the right space, owner, and team during the 2020 pandemic made for an especially unique challenge.  Balancing the existing demands of running Zoe’s existing store, which was continually growing at that time, added to the obstacles of the project.  

However, Element provided the focused attention needed to allow Zoe’s to reach their growth goal without missing a beat.  The result was securing a dedicated team that was able to transform a clean retail space at the brand new mixed-use Marquee building into the clean, chic, flagship Zoe’s Café that they envisioned. The new Loring Park location had a successful grand opening in the summer of 2021, complete with tasteful branding, delicious pastries, and friendly neighborhood charm.