LUNE , VIC
Kate & Cam Reid
It’s lucky the glass cube at the heart of Melbourne’s cult Lune Croissanterie in Fitzroy is not only climate-controlled but soundproof. Lune Lab, as it’s known, was the setting for a legendary screaming match between
Kate and Cam Reid when they processed creative differences in the way only siblings can.
“We must have looked pretty comical to anyone standing outside,” says Kate. “Staff had to tell us to take it out the back.”
In fairness, you don’t get to be the owners of two hyped bakeries with 70-odd employees and queues stretching around the block without a few dust-ups along the way. And, despite a few hiccups, the Reids have weathered their seven-year road to success without any fracturing of their bond.
Cam, 35, joined his sister, Kate, 37, when she was at a crossroads of wanting to evolve her wholesale-only business. An entrepreneurial spirit, he’d just sold his Melbourne café and was at a loose end. In 2013, they opened the Friday-to-Sunday shop in Elwood that would make the
Lune name. The rest is pastry history.
It’s safe to say they didn’t know what they were in for.
The alarm went off each day at 3am; they put in 70 to 80 hours each week. “We were open one-and-a-half hours a day, three days a week, and worked all those hours,” says
Cam. “It was insane.” With just the two of them, the pressures were immense.
“We were living together at the time,” says Kate. “The place had paper-thin walls… there were dark times for me.
But seriously, we could have a fight at work, then get in the car together, go home and then go out to dinner.”
Circumstances have certainly changed for the pair. With their café-impresario partner, Nathan Toleman, they moved into their impressive Fitzroy mothership in 2015, then expanded into the city in 2018 with predictable just-add-Instagram success. A Sydney location is now in the works, too. Lune sells around 21,000 croissants a week compared with 1100 back in Elwood. And their role is now to guide Lune and its employees into the future rather than work the pastry bench.
“To be successful, you have to be prepared to write off a couple of years,” says Cam. “We worked and worked and worked. Our health suffered. But I was really fortunate to have Kate there. I could have said, ‘This is too hard,’ but because it’s family you can stand those pressures.
The fact that we’re siblings is the only thing that got us through those first 18 months.”
If you ask nicely, they’ll happily share more stories of explosive sibling bust-ups. There was the time they stared each other down, knives in hand, across the pastry bench.
The time – much more recently – when Kate screamed expletives at Cam down Flinders Lane.
But they’ve weathered it all and come up smiling.
Want proof? Kate was Cam’s best man at his wedding last year. “When I was a kid, I really wanted a sister and used to dress him up,” she says. “The joke was that Cam had the last laugh because he got me in a tuxedo.”
Lune Croissanterie, various locations, lunecroissanterie.com