Seattle-based Lauren Ko is a self-taught baker who rose to fame thanks to the mathematical precision of her pie designs, most of which are inspired by complex geometric patterns.
A former executive assistant in higher education, Lauren Ko got into baking completely by accident. She saw a picture of a really beautiful pie while surfing the internet and asked herself if she could do something like that. Little did she know that the seemingly unimportant self-challenge would change her life forever. After baking her first pie in 2016, Lauren never looked back, and soon after starting her Instagram in 2017, her mesmerizing pies were already a big hit on the popular social network. It wasn’t long before juggling her job and pie making got too difficult and she decided to focus her efforts exclusively on her passion.
Photo: Lauren Ko/Instagram
“Pies are a very warm, traditional, nostalgic kind of food, but to see it done in a modern and unique way is what makes them so appealing,” Lauren Ko told INSIDER magazine in an attempt to explain the massive success of her geometric pies.
Ko’s pies drew people’s attention right after she started her Instagram account in August of 2017. She only had 200 followers of her own, but her very first post got over 600 likes. A couple of weeks later, she already had around 4,000 followers, and things kind of snowballed from there.
The self-taught baker now boast an impressive following of nearly 330,000 on Instagram, has caught the attention of celebrities the likes of Oprah and Martha Stewart, and has been involved in various promotional campaigns. It’s been quite the journey, and one that Lauren never saw coming.
“It’s still been really wild, the best part has been meeting creators, artists, and designers and developing relationships with people that I don’t think I’d otherwise have had the opportunity to meet,” the pie master said.
Ko admits that while the fact that her creations are edible is crucial to her success, to her the creative process is less about the ingredients and baking, and more about coming up with new and interesting designs. That has been getting difficult of late, as she has already gone through hundreds of designs.
Lauren Ko is just one of the super-talented pie artist we’ve featured on Oddity Central. Only a few months ago we brought you the beautiful pies of German artist Karin Pfeiff-Boschek , and who could forget the detailed pie portraits of Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin?
