A WELL-KNOWN bakery and shop that sold upmarket wedding cakes and launched Scotland's first dedicated cupcake store has closed down after 25 years.

Top Tier Cakes, the Glasgow-based firm that had shops in Hyndland and the Merchant City, has ceased trading with immediate effect.

Visitors to its shops at the weekend were met with signs announcing the closure. The notice in the window of Cupcakes By Top Tier on Bell Street thanked customers and said the owners were hopeful a buyer could be found to save the business in its 25th year.

It added: "We had worked very hard over the past year to modernise the business but despite our best efforts we have been unable to make the necessary changes quickly enough to enable us to cope with the current retailing conditions."

The Bell Street shop opened in February 2009 in premises already leased by Top Tier Cakes to capitalise on the growing fashion – and appetite – for cupcakes. These had been popularised by programmes such as Sex And The City, whose characters bought them from New York's famous Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

Meanwhile, the Hyndland shop, which caters more for wedding and birthday cakes, has become a well-loved West End institution and recently underwent a significant refurbishment. Top Tier Cakes also has bakery premises in Govan.

With wedding season in full swing it means added worries for those brides-to-be who have ordered cakes. However, Top Tier has said all customers who have placed orders will be contacted either by phone or by letter and offered refunds.

Control of business affairs has been handed to Campbell Dallas Accountants, who issued a statement on behalf of owner Mark Bradford, director of Centrepiece Confectionary, which trades as Top Tier Cakes.

It said that despite the injection of significant funds over the past 18 months the company had continued to incur losses and a decision had been made to wind up the business.

It added that enquiries have been made from third parties potentially interested in acquiring some or all of the business and that any future owner would be encouraged to take over the current order book as part of a sale agreement.

Until June last year, Top Tier Cakes was owned by founder Evelyn Hogarth, who had started the business in 1988. A primary school teacher-turned-baker, she had spent the previous seven years selling cakes from her home.

Spotting a gap in the market for a specialist cake shop in Glasgow, she applied for a bank loan and from a start-up fund of just £15,000 turned Top Tier Cakes into a business with an annual turnover of £300,000, an employee roll of 14 and a customer base that stretched as far as New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Dubai.