Bittersweet: The Cheesecake Girl’s season of sorrow that ended with a unique new location
After eight years of building and growing her business, The Cheesecake Girl, Samantha “Sam” Strange, 32, knew a lot about creating unique desserts, doing pop-up sales and building-out store locations. But when she got an email asking her to bid on a retail bakery space at The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, she was at a loss.
“I finally emailed them and was like, what do you mean ‘bid?’” she remembers. “I had no idea what they were talking about. I baked cheesecake.”
The space the hospital was looking to fill was formerly a Cheryl’s Cookies, which had a 30-year run in the location before closing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Sam wasn’t looking for another location, but with some encouragement from her parents, Mike and Lorie, and prayer to determine the best next step, she filled out the bid forms and waited, a little ambivalent.
“I went into it feeling like, I don’t even know if I want this. It’s just something I’m interested in.”
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But her outlook changed when she got word her bid had made it through the first round, and she’d been invited to pitch The Cheesecake Girl to the hospital board.
“I started thinking, I wonder if this could be great? We could be there for 30 years, who knows?”
Well, Lorie Strange knew. She had no doubt.
“From the beginning my mom was saying, this is going to happen. I feel it. This is meant to be.”
Sam made her pitch in September 2022, telling the board about her company and suggesting some hospital-specific tie-ins, positioning cheesecake as a treat equally appropriate for celebration or consolation.
The pitch went well, the second-round of waiting had begun, and Sam got back to business-as-usual.
Two months later, Mike Strange was diagnosed with T-cell Lymphoma.
Suddenly, the family’s connection to The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center was far more than just business. Mike went to the James Comprehensive Cancer Center for a month, where Lorie slept every night until he was discharged, to continue with outpatient treatment. Their in-person experience gave them all a new appreciation for the hospital.
“They were spending time there and they were like, ‘This is a great place, and amazing people are working here.’ When I visited, I’d take cheesecake for the nurses and they’d say, ‘If they choose you, please, please open here – we would love it.”
Sam was still waiting to hear the outcome of her pitch when her dad went into remission in March, 2023. With the family in a more hopeful place, they agreed they should make a go of it if The Cheesecake Girl was chosen for the hospital spot.
“We hadn’t heard anything in a long time,” she said, “then kind of all at once, in August of 2023, they reached out and said they chose me and wanted us to sign a lease.”
That same month, Mike’s cancer returned. The lymphoma had metastasized, but he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for the project.
“My dad was so gung-ho about it, even when he was in the hospital,” Sam recalled. But it didn’t feel right to keep growing The Cheesecake Girl while her father was undergoing cancer treatment. In the process of finalizing the lease, she told her parents she could still back out.
“They said absolutely not,” they insisted. “Don’t stop for anything. We’re fully behind you.”
Sam was already going to the hospital every day, dropping off food and whatever else would make her parents more comfortable.
“I realized I might as well just check on the construction and be opening there,” she said. “At that point we were thinking he was going to make a full recovery, and this would be an amazing story about how it all happened…”
Mike started outpatient treatment, but this time the cancer got bad fast, Sam said. He spent another month in the hospital, Lorie by his side, and died in November, a month before the location’s scheduled opening.
His family was grieving, and the space wasn’t finished.
“My dad was the point of contact for all contractor things for all our other buildouts,” Sam explained. “He was the person working through the orders, the schedule, everything, but he could barely talk for the last month he was here, during the most important part of construction.”
Sam turned to her contractors, Julie and Allen Godfrey, who were aware of Mike’s illness.
“I remember calling Julie and saying I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve got three other locations to run, my dad is in the hospital and I don’t know what to do,” Sam said. “Julie told me, don’t worry one more second about this. I’ll handle everything, and I’ll do it in your best interest.”
She was true to her word.
“I’m telling you, it was turnkey,” Sam declared. “I think I checked on that build twice, compared to all the other buildouts where I was there every day making sure things were getting done.”
The Cheesecake Girl at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center opened December 28, 2023, dedicated to Mike Strange. A picture of the family is displayed there, along with Mike’s favorite Bible verse and a brief tribute.
Now in her second year at the hospital, Sam still seems awed by the journey, and is so grateful to the doctors and nurses who cared for her dad.
“A lot of people who get the diagnosis he got would have to travel to be at a hospital as good as the Wexner and the James,” she said, “so we are very, very thankful that it was essentially in our backyard.”
And even though it wasn’t the happy ending they’d hoped for, it is, still, an amazing story.
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