Two of Philly’s pop-up bakers teamed up to split rent. The result? Pure joy and deliciousness, and regularly scheduled baked goods

A real-life buddy comedy has been unfolding in a Philly bakery recently, and those tuned in to the right Instagram feeds have been reaping rewards sweet and savory: garlic bread croissants, chocolate cheesecake danish, spicy focaccia with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe, espresso croissant crunch cookies, and elderflower syrup-soaked vanilla cake with passionfruit curd and vanilla bean buttercream.

That’s just a sampling of the creative output and cross-pollination that’s resulted from two itinerant Philly bakers basically becoming roommates. Earlier this year, pastry chef and soft pretzel whiz Em Wilson and Bake Bake Philly’s Christina Lower, known for her Big AF cookies and whimsical custom cakes, signed a lease together on a workspace in Frankford’s Globe Dye Works. They shared the cost of outfitting the space with speed racks, refrigerators, a freezer, and a convection oven; Wilson invested in a pastry sheeter. They’re splitting rent and utilities down the middle.

Now, the pair of pop-up bakers are freed from the search for commissary kitchen space and each has a permanent home for their respective businesses — even if customers won’t necessarily be able to tell the difference.

Wilson, 29, and Lower, 33, don’t offer a traditional retail experience, and they don’t really plan to. The best way to order from them remains their websites (emwilsonpastry.com and bakebakephilly.com), and the best way to keep track of when and where you can find their wares is still Instagram (@bakebakephilly and @eemilywilsonn). In other words, their baked goods will remain somewhat inaccessible to those who aren’t internet-savvy.

Still, the new space allows each of them to get into a better production groove, and they’re opening it up to the public for preordered pickups and events. Wilson launched regular pretzel-making classes (on hiatus till July while she recovers from a recent Lyme diagnosis), and Lower has dabbled with cake-decorating workshops.

This coworking arrangement is in some ways intuitive — splitting the rent always helps — but in other ways, it’s a little head-scratching to the outside observer. Lower and Wilson both eschew brick-and-mortar dreams, instead relying on direct orders and wholesale work. Might the overlap cannibalize their customer base? At the very least, don’t they run the risk of stepping on the other’s toes?

“It’s so crazy to me how confusing this is for people to wrap their head around,” Wilson says while braiding mini chocolate croissant-muffins during a recent interview. “My parents were the first people to be like, ‘What are you doing sharing a kitchen with your direct competition?’”

Lower and Wilson reject that premise. They specialize in different baked goods for the most part (though both make killer cookies). And each has separate followings, with Wilson being a fixture in West Philly’s food culture and the Bake Bake brand having a well-established presence at Riverwards Produce in Fishtown and Old City. Besides, they say, Philly’s demand for pastries and desserts is practically bottomless.

“There’s such a need in this city,” Wilson says. “There’s room for all of us.”

Even their schedules complement each other’s, with Wilson coming in around 5 a.m. to make pastry dough, and Lower whipping up cakes and various frostings closer to 9, affording each a window of alone time.

Not that they mind hanging out. In fact, the two acknowledge they occasionally have so much fun clowning around in the bakery, they’re not as efficient as they could be. Some of their antics are broadcast on Instagram, where they’ve posted about their seltzer habit and their concern about the dearth of women-led pizza shops. They celebrated that sad truth by selling pizza-themed pop-up boxes with slices of tomato pie and provolone — and broccoli rabe-topped focaccia, meatball danish, pretzel nuggets, and tiramisu. (They donned fake mustaches to underline the gender imbalance in the pizza industry.)

That box counts as one tangible outcome of what’s becoming an increasingly symbiotic relationship. Wilson and Lower are using up the others’ leftovers — as was the case when Lower’s passionfruit curd wound up in Wilson’s twice-baked double-chocolate croissants — and becoming mutual sources of inspiration.

“I’ve become the annoying idea guy, where I’m like, ‘What if we put a burger on a danish?’” says a laughing Lower over the drone of a stand mixer beating Swiss meringue buttercream.

They executed on that idea last month at West Philly’s Porchfest, serving flaky danish filled with Cooper Sharp cheese sauce and topped with beef patties, shredded lettuce, Fishtown Pickles, plus a Big Mac sauce knockoff. Lower’s husband, a Philly restaurant industry vet, made and flipped the burgers. (You can catch the burger danish again at Lower and Wilson’s joint appearance at Port Richmond’s next Richmond Street Flea, on June 29.)

The creative collaboration is just one upshot of their relationship. Both Lower and Wilson say sharing the space has brought better equilibrium to their lives, making it more sustainable to run their own business.

“This is the first place I’ve been able to maintain work and life balance, have control over my capacity, and also not be in danger,” Lower says.

Wilson agrees. “To have the ability to take time off to go to a baby shower because somebody hasn’t booked up my weekend for me is a beautiful thing,” she says, adding a word of warning to any would-be pop-up bakers thinking about leaving their day jobs. “This took so much calculating. The back-end side that you don’t see from the cute little pop-ups is so much work.”

Wilson and Lower have known each other only for a little over a year, but they’re both seasoned bakers.

Lower, a West Philly native, studied painting at Tyler School of Art and started baking professionally at age 20. (Her art skills have always come in handy: “I was the resident Disney Princess buttercream decorator in a bakery.”)

She inherited her mom’s German-immigrant work ethic, juggling multiple jobs at once for years. After working as a manager at the legendary Salumeria stand in the Reading Terminal Market, she went to work at Flying Monkey Bakery. Lower praises owner Elizabeth Halen as an owner, a mentor, and the first person who saw her potential as a baker.

“She took me so seriously, it was a breath of fresh air. I have never been immediately respected before,” Lower says. “She ran an incredible ship. I don’t think I’d be able to do this without her.”

After her father died in 2015, Lower left Flying Monkey for a steadier paycheck working at Temple Health, but she stayed in the industry with bartending gigs and other part-time work, including at Liberty Kitchen. In March 2020, she decided to go full-time as a manager at the sandwich shop, where she started a pastry program that laid the groundwork for Bake Bake.

She left Liberty Kitchen in 2022 — she cites the work environment as her reason for departure — and formally launched her own business, building out a large selection of specialty cakes, cheesecakes, and cookies.

Wilson grew up in Wayne and broke into baking at an artisan doughnut shop in Jacksonville, Fla., working her way up to vegan recipe developer. She learned on the job at a few other bakeries there before she ran out of money and came back home. That’s when she landed a job at Malvern Buttery, “which is where I really learned viennoiserie,” she says.

Wilson built on that knowledge base, going on to work at Machine Shop and Mighty Bread, where she headed up the wholesale pastry program. She then went to Honeysuckle Provisions, at the time in West Philadelphia, where she started another viennoiserie program, turning out beautifully laminated pastry in iterations traditional (pain au chocolate) and offbeat (pimento cheese and ham danish).

She said she left after several months due to workplace culture and has since vowed she won’t return to the restaurant industry or work for anyone besides herself. (Wilson has been vocal about wages and working conditions on Instagram, posting her previous jobs and hourly wages in her stories.)

In August 2023, she started holding community bake sales in front of her West Philly apartment, raising money for her rent. Before moving into Globe Dye Works, Wilson was baking croissants, danishes, turnovers, and cookies in bartered church kitchen space in Wayne, then transporting them to West Philly. (Home-based food businesses are illegal in Philly.) Wilson began selling out in minutes, and the bake sales morphed into weekly community events as other vendors started lining up on the 4600 block of Cedar Avenue.

“I physically couldn’t make enough,” Wilson says. “I kept inviting bakers to come pop up with me because people were getting upset, like waiting in line and not getting anything.”

That’s how Lower and Wilson met in 2024, after Wilson messaged her on Instagram. The two became fast friends, bonding over work experiences and traumas. They started passing customers to each other and collaborating on pop-ups, offering a sampling of both of their wares in one box.

Lower, the self-titled “mom” of the pair, had been eyeing production spaces of her own but knew the rent would be a heavy lift alone, so she pitched Wilson: I’ll help you get a business license and we can lease a space together. Once they started dreaming of the possibilities a space of their own would allow, both were sold.

They found Globe Dye Works after another friend from the Philly pop-up circuit — the owner of vegan Peruvian specialist La Llamita Vegana — tipped Lower off to a space opening up in the 160-year-old converted factory at Torresdale Avenue and Worth Street. Within a month, they were moving into their new work home, down the hallway from Lil Pop Shop and Fishtown Pickle Project. (Follow the smell of garlic and vinegar to the end of the hall and you’ll find Lower and Wilson’s studio.)

Lower had been bouncing among commissary kitchens in Philly before moving into Globe Dye Works. That meant lots of setting up and breaking down and hauling ingredients and finished product from place to place. Now, with a home base, she finds she has more time and money.

“Somehow we open this and I have one job — like, what is happening?” she says. “My husband is so sick of me.”

For Wilson, getting out of the church kitchen has put her in a better headspace, so much so that she’s offering regularly scheduled twice-weekly pastry pickups in Frankford and West Philly. She deals with the opposite problem of her old jobs: She likes coming into work too much.

“The first month we were here, it was trying to not spend 12 hours here because it was so amazing and energizing,” Wilson says. “When I was in that church basement kitchen before this, when Christina was in the commissary working odd hours to be out of the way of other people, it was really isolating.

“I don’t want to work for somebody else, but I want that community of working with people and idea-sharing,” Wilson says.

It seems this pair of bakers has found the best of both worlds.