At opening time last Saturday, our customer service person unlocked the door and was just about to say to the waiting customer, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like….[fill in name of Canadian well known figure]?”, when he said, “I’m here to pick up my order, it’s under [fill in name of Canadian well known figure]”.
As it turns out, we had done cupcakes for this person’s child’s birthday, with cute little fondant toppers in her favourite cartoon character – not the toppers shown to the left with a fictitious company that I made up for the photo shoot. (After months of guiltily using the blue bank’s logo on toppers featured on our website, I figured it was time to start making corporate logos up). Anyway, the point of my story is to mention that we are seeing an amazing take-up by customers of our toppers and custom cakes. Here’s 3 things I have found interesting in our foray into edible ink:
1. The greater the specificity, the better. The above mentioned celebrity doubled his order once we showed him that we could put the exact cartoon character onto the cupcakes, not just a random, say, frog.
2. The point of the toppers and images on cakes isn’t always about aesthetics – some images are in weird colours and the messages obscure: “Way to go, TK7, on instal 1!”. Huh?! Obviously, it means a lot to someone.
3. Online customers are savvy and can figure things out. Ailish thought it would take time and patience to have people actually use the option to download a JPG right into their shopping cart when buying toppers. But no, this week we received a large online order with a major company’s logo just popped right in – no fuss, no muss, let’s just get it done.
I know I have mentioned this before but, really, trying new ideas in a business is a constant source of surprises: you win some, you lose some!
