Alexandra Lourdes, co-owner of Cafe Lola, poses for a photo at the coffee shop’s Rainbow location Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023.
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Las Vegas small-business owner Alexandra Lourdes shares her life on social media — from picking up her kids at school and traveling with her family, to making donuts for celebrities like Bad Bunny and Karol G or mixing new drinks for customers at one of her cafes.
One video, which shows Lourdes and her eldest daughter gifting leftover donuts to a local fire station instead of throwing them away, has received more than 11 million views on Instagram alone.
Her secret recipe: Just be authentic.
“I feel like they’re my family — I get up every day and I’m so excited to tell them something,” Lourdes said of her social media following. “I think about my followers all the time, and I think about them in a way where, if I’m excited, that’s who I want to tell.”
It all started when Lourdes was working at UNLV, where she earned a doctoral degree in higher education. There, she met her future business partner, Lin Jerome, and the pair quickly realized how well they worked together.
They decided to leave their jobs and open a marketing company within just a few weeks of meeting each other. They would do their work out of coffee shops, and Lourdes said they soon discovered a gap in the market for both “female-focused” cafes and ones where people could not only get coffee, but breakfast and lunch as well.
They set out to create a space like no one had “ever seen before,” she said, where women could come in and work for as long as necessary. The result was Café Lola.
“So you can work, stay here and eat lunch here,” she said of Café Lola, which now has five locations across Las Vegas, all decked out in flowers and murals and shades of pink and purple. “And you can just hang out and also be in a place where there’s good light and really good vibes. And so that really was our goal.”
Cafe Lola’s first location opened in Summerlin in 2018, when Lourdes said she’d already gained tens of thousands of followers on Instagram just by sharing her experience as an entrepreneur. There was a line out the door opening weekend.
“After that, we just fell in love with the restaurant industry,” Lourdes said. “I really gravitated to customer service, because I just love that people side.”
Lourdes, a self-described lifelong foodie, said her perspective not only as a creator but also as a consumer helped her when she began making drinks and food for Café Lola, because she knew they shouldn’t only taste good — they should look good too.
She started adding gold flakes to lattes or decorating cookies specially, in case customers would want to take photos of their order and share it on social media. The goal was to make anything look like a piece of art, she said.
“It’s a little bit more than just four walls,” said Lourdes, who added that Café Lola was named for her beloved childhood dog as well as Jerome’s mother. “We want you to come in and know who designed it, which was us. We want you to know that there’s more than just the pretty flowers on the wall — literally our heart and soul went into these places, and we hope people feel that.”
Five years later, Lourdes and Jerome own not only Café Lola but also Saint Honoré Doughnuts & Beignets — which boasts a secret pizza shop beyond the bakery — and their newest venture, Three Little Chicks, a restaurant named for Lourdes’ two daughters and Jerome’s daughter.
Lourdes credited the growth of her and Jerome’s businesses not only to their own ambition but also to their husbands — who have both begun working for the chain of eateries full time — their team of employees and the support of Las Vegas locals.
“It’s almost surreal because everyone’s like, ‘Can you believe how much you guys have done?’ ” she said. “And I literally can’t even stop to think about it because we just keep moving. But it’s amazing.”
While Jerome and Lourdes’ husband, Michael Santos, primarily work from the office, Lourdes and Jerome’s husband — Steve Jerome — are out in the different cafes, helping prepare food and drinks, working with staff members and more.
It’s extremely special to not only build a business from the ground up, Steve Jerome said, but also be in each restaurant and help it move forward.
“I think to see where we started and where we are now — and where we’re going, I think, is even more exciting — the trajectory of our growth is incredible,” he said. “ … I don’t think I could ever have been involved in anything that’s so rewarding because it’s really us doing it every day.”
Lourdes said her social media presence began taking off during the pandemic, when she shared her experience as a business owner at the height of the COVID-19 spread, as well as helpful tips like how to make lattes from home during quarantine.
Before long, she began sharing more educational videos, anecdotes from her personal life and more.
“I provide that kind of behind-the-scenes of everything I do in the business,” she said. “And I take them along on my day-to-day life.”
She’s gained such a following that many people will visit Café Lola in hopes of meeting her, and Steve Jerome said there were some locations — like that inside the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace — where they can hardly work because of the stir Lourdes makes when she walks in.
“It’s a phenomenon to see the amount of people that walk in solely because they saw a video,” he said. “And then when she’s in the room … everything stops. It’s gridlock. Because they’re here because she’s now become this persona.
More businesses should take advantage of social media as a platform not only because it allows them to engage with customers more closely, Lourdes said, but also with celebrities and other influencers that can promote their product.
Her biggest advice for entrepreneurs entering the social media sphere: Don’t sell to your audience — just authentically tell them your story and what you do and make your life accessible.
“I don’t try to sell to my audience,” she said. “I don’t want to sell to them because I want them to feel like they’re watching entertaining content, and maybe something inspiring. I don’t want to sell to them.”
Like anyone with a substantial presence on social media, not all the interactions Lourdes encounters have been pleasant, she said. But even when she gets hate from people for Café Lola being a women-owned or women-focused business, Lourdes said her goal was\s always to continue posting content that may inspire girls to follow their dreams or start a new venture.
The incorporation of her family and her role as a working mom in her videos, Lourdes said, as well as anecdotes about being a small -business owner and the struggle that may come along with it, hits close to home for much of her audience.
“It’s awesome to connect to not only other business owners, to moms — to everyone,” said Lourdes, who noted that she loved her audience, which is 95% female. “To show them what’s real, just be authentic. That’s my main suggestion or recommendation is you must just be authentically you and people will love you. You’ll find your right audience.”
Lourdes, her husband, Lin and Steve Jerome each wear so many hats, which is part of what Steve Jerome said he thought made Lourdes’ social media so compelling. Her day-in-the-life videos show authentically what it’s like to be a mother, a business owner, a content creator and so on.
“It’s all of that on the day to day, and I think people are like ‘Wow, that’s what it takes,’” said Steve Jerome, who appears in many of Lourdes’ videos, including several popular ones in which she makes new recipes — like pizza lasagna — much to his chagrin. “And I think that’s really why it does so well and it resonates — it’s true and genuine and honest.”
Lourdes, who has 1.5 million followers on TikTok — most of whom she gained within two years of launching — was recently named to the app’s first-ever 2023 TikTok Latin Visionary Voices list, which aims to uplift Latin creators.
She was honored to be recognized, Lourdes said.
“It’s really cool,” she said. “It validates what I’m doing, and I think it’s incredible. I love that they’re recognizing minority or Latino creators, because there’s so many … and the fact that people who haven’t seen my account maybe will come to see what I’m doing — that’s amazing.”
