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Small Enterprise sat down with Katie Cross, director of vegan bakery Cake or Dying, one of many three winners of the Small Enterprise x Sage pop-up store competitors.
Cake or Dying was certainly one of three profitable companies chosen by our skilled panel to occupy a pop-up store house in London’s busy Oxford Road earlier this month.
The Devon-based bakery creates luxurious brownies delivered by your letterbox in iconic pink leopard-print containers. The Unbiased named the mail-order bakery Finest Letterbox Deal with in 2020.
Lifelong baking fanatic Katie Cross began her vegan cake enterprise in 2019 promoting on to bakeries, cafés and eating places. She pivoted the enterprise to promoting direct throughout the pandemic.
Earlier than her reinvention as a star baker, Katie Cross loved a profitable profession as a fundraiser and marketer within the charity sector, working for the NSPCC and Greenpeace UK, amongst others.
The place did the concept of Cake or Dying come from?
It advanced over a variety of years. It began after I utilized for The Nice British Bake Off. I obtained fairly far by the audition course of though I didn’t really get onto the programme, which was an amazing disappointment. However I feel it confirmed me that I had a ardour for baking, and that I needed to pursue it as a profession. So, over the subsequent yr I experimented with baking and some occasions and that obtained me to the purpose the place I used to be able to stop my day job.
How lengthy has Cake or Dying been in enterprise?
We’ve been working for four-and-a-half-years now. We began as a wholesale cake enterprise, however we needed to pivot sadly firstly of the pandemic as a result of most of our wholesale prospects needed to shut their doorways. We determined to ship our brownies, which had been our hottest product, by the submit in letterbox-sized containers and now hundreds of individuals ship them as presents, principally to household and buddies.
What made you determine to enter the Small Enterprise x Sage pop-up store competitors?
Two years in the past, Cake or Dying moved from its kitchen in London to sunny Devon, which was a private transfer for myself and my household. We’ve arrange a bakery in Exeter. The concept of getting a presence in London for 4 days was actually thrilling. A whole lot of my prospects are primarily based in Londoners, and I knew I may get them to return and see us within the pop-up store. It was actually thrilling to be in such a busy a part of the town.
What’s your expertise been of being within the pop-up store?
I do assume that footfall is basically excessive on the street, however it’s been tougher than I believed to get individuals to return in. Individuals are not too certain about what the concept is. We’ve discovered probably the most profitable factor to do is to present tasters on the street and level individuals in direction of the store. Individuals are fairly reticent about strolling into a store once they don’t know what’s happening.
What would your recommendation be to anyone getting into subsequent yr’s Sage pop-up store competitors?
It’s best to go for it, however you want a simple retail-able product, and you want to really feel that the patrons on Oxford Road are your sort of buyer. You should have put some thought into advertising and marketing and PR. We laid some groundwork by performing some PR work and a radio interview forward of time, and we reached out to Instagram influencers to return and see us on the primary day. We’ve additionally been priming our prospects for every week to return and see us. Doing that groundwork is basically essential.
Extra on the Sage pop-up store competitors
Sage pop-up store winner #1 – Deborah Maclaren, LoveReading – Deborah Maclaren, managing director of LoveReading, sits down with SmallBusiness to speak about what profitable one of many three coveted spots within the Sage pop-up store competitors means to her
Sage pop-up store winner #3 – Katie Hanton-Parr, Baboodle – Katie Hanton-Parr, founding father of Baboodle, tells Small Enterprise what profitable the Sage pop-up store competitors has meant for her on-line child tools subscription enterprise
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