Gosh.  Just yesterday I was driving home from one of my kids’ soccer games at a school that is really far away and I remembered that there was a wonderful homemade pie stand nearby where occasionally I’d have to run product out myself when we were in a pinch. It was a long drive and not worth it at one level. We spent more on gas and of course, my time, than we sold in cookies.  But we were building a relationship and it was a good one for us. 

Thinking back about it I realize how crazy those heroic, small company efforts were.  They were totally unscalable. And yet, those were the elements that we build a national brand on.  We did it one customer, one cake, one delivery in a pinch, at a time.

If you’ve got great ideas and wonderful product and packaging you should be able to rustle up press and certainly benefit from word of mouth.  Food writers love to discover something new and wonderful.  Your customers should be advocates for your brand.  And small is particularly appealing these days.  Use it while you have it.

But I don’t know how we could have built the business in the early days without both me and my partner working brutal hours and pouring our energy in to the effort.  So you might re-evaluate your business plan.  You can starve a perfectly good business by not having enough resources to put into its growth. 

Who doesn’t love cupcakes?  And yes, I think they are a fun novelty fad that will fade, but not go away.  What’s great about them is the retro feel good and charm of having your own little cake. Of course they are best when you both ice, decorate and eat them with friends. Cupcakes are more of a social experience than a culinary one. But cupcakes dry out very quickly, and it’s enormously inefficient to pack them properly, so the retail price really gets up there per pound relative to what we can deliver a 20 oz cake for.  So we admire them from afar.

This is a question for Scott Miller, VP of our Direct to Consumer Sales.

Scott: Excellent customer service, delivering on your brand promise, ease of ordering and personality.

The primary limit is product shelf life versus geography. Since many gourmet foods do not contain preservatives, sites selling these products need to ensure that the shipping method selected can deliver the product with ample freshness remaining.  A product with a 7-day shelf life should not be allowed to ship via ground shipping (5 days) to the west coast from the east coast.

I’ll get Scott Miller, Vice President of our Direct to Consumer Sales to answer that.

Scott: Be very clear on how your customers are using your site.  Customer end use is critically important in the design of a site.  Over 90% of our online customers are purchasing gifts.  However, in retail stores such as Whole Foods, Dancing Deer products are purchased for personal consumption.  As a result our site design is targeted towards features and functions supporting gift giving (to serve 90+% of our online customers) such as Shop by Price and Shop by Occasion.