For just under a year, we’ve sold Celebration Cakes, not to be confused with the fancy fondant-covered wedding and special occasion cakes coming in November.
Celebration Cakes are home-made style cakes in the same cake and icing flavours we have for cupcakes, and in fact they didn’t start their PGB life as cakes at all. When we started making them last fall, we offered them as a new size of “cupcake”, along with the new Cutie size. So the idea was that we would offer four cupcake sizes: Cutie, Mini, Classic (new name, who wants to order a “Regular”?!) and Celebration.
But customers actually “don’t care” what a business thinks it is launching, instead they will respond to a new product as they see fit. In this case, our customers in effect said, call them what you want, but these are cakes and – oh, by the way – why are they so small?!
So…sometime in the summer we started planning the new sizes: a 9 inch round and an 8 x 12 inch rectangle. And yes, we still sell the 6 inch size but nobody pretends anymore it is a cupcake.
The new sizes are selling well, and I think they’re a good example of launching something that is in direct response to customer requests. The other good aspect of this launch is that the initial investment to “try it out” is minimal – no new recipes to test, no new equipment needed (other than some new cake pans) and we can even use two of our existing cupcake boxes to pack them in. And they can go through our edible printer too, as you can see in the attached photo of a 9 inch Celebration Cake with a Thanksgiving themed image.
This week we had our largest online order yet – 10 (yes, 10!) cakes with a corporate logo on each one. I was really happy about it for a few reasons: it showed us that even for large orders, our customers are comfortable using our online technology (reducing our team’s time in taking orders); it validated our edible printer’s success (“Trixie”); and it showed us that our customers, like Goldilocks, are at last saying “..and this cake is JUST RIGHT!”
