We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Duke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.
Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
The name of our company is a combination of the logo and a word from my childhood, goodie. The logo is from a silhouette done by master scissor artist Karl Johnson at the NC State Fair. Karl (or his brother Erik) have had a booth at the fair for as long as we’ve been going. It is in the Village of Yesteryear building that houses a variety of artists and crafts people. It is framed and hangs on the wall of our office.
The word ‘goodie’ comes from my Mom’s sister, my Aunt Lois. I have so many happy memories with her, from dinners in the house on Village Drive in Louisville, to living with her for a time in Frankfort, KY. When I was growing up, Mom would drop me off at her house for the occasional weekend stay. On one of those occasions when I was maybe five years old, I went into her kitchen where she was busy working and announced with a big smile that ‘I’ve got a surprise for you!’. ‘Well, what is it, Christopher Robin?’, as she called me. ‘We’re going to make cookies!’. I can’t say for sure, but that may well have been the mustard seed that led me to where I am today.
Later in life, I lived with Aunt Lois for a time. They were some of the best memories I have. We spent time in the kitchen and when I would make something she particularly liked, she would say, ‘Boy, that’s a goodie!’.
When Debbie and I started the company, we kicked around several ideas and names. The combination of Anna’s name and image with a favorite word from my family history seemed to be the right combination. And it has worked out well over the years. When my Aunt Lois died and went to join my Mom, who had already passed, I baked up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and carried them back to Georgetown for her memorial service. We held a gathering for family just prior to the journey to her final resting place and honored Aunt Lois with a ‘cookie toast’. She was, most certainly, a goodie.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
My mother loved quilts. She made a few over her lifetime, and had other people turn her collection of random fabric scraps into magical creations that comfort the body and warm the soul. Some of that came from her mother, who put together scraps of fabric not as a form of art, but out of necessity. My grandmother made quilts, sewed clothes, baked pies, butchered farm animals, tended crops, maintained a farmhouse, and raised nine children, basically on her own. She did not have a resume, but if she did, it would most certainly be a patchwork of experiences. She passed that drive to do what needs to be done to my mother, and in turn, it was given to me.
My list of experiences from the early years thru getting my MBA from Duke would fill a resume that would be far too long to read and at first glance, seemingly unrelated. Bicycle repairman. Farm hand. Roofer. Assembly line worker. Convenience store clerk. Legal assistant. Salesperson. Programmer. Consultant. Network Technician. It is a long and diverse list.
After graduating with my MBA from the Fuqua School of Business in 1987, I spent twelve years cobbling together a patchwork of career experiences, generally focused on technology. This included a couple of startups I helped found – one fizzled and one went up in flames. After dusting myself off and licking my wounds, I started my career quilt again by selling and installing CAD software and PCs. I added various professional service and consulting roles, working on everything from local area networks to file servers to mainframes. I finally landed at my first fully ‘dotcom’ company two weeks before a massive $170+ million IPO. Nothing, and yet everything in my entire work history, from pre-teen to that moment, prepared me for the next four years. It was thrill ride with plenty of ups, downs, peaks, valleys and ultimately, an off ramp to Anna’s Gourmet Goodies.
It was just prior to that slide to the bottom when I realized that the ride might be coming to an end. I wanted to start something on the side, but I was not sure exactly what that should be. During the fun times at SciQuest, I won the title of Grand Champion in a Cheesecake Competition. Several people encouraged me to sell them. I resisted, with no foodservice experience or formal training. But after looking into it, decided to setup a small company.
We purchased some basic equipment, secured inspections, permits, and set out to see if there might be a viable market. I made a few samples for a restaurant owner in Cary I had come to know thru frequent lunch visits. Chef John served up the cheesecake and customers loved it. He ordered more.
From that one customer, we grew organically, one customer at a time, selling pies and cheesecakes to restaurants. We funded the business through savings and sales, growing quickly, but comfortably free from debt. In 2003, we felt we had enough savings and customers to give it a try full time. Layoffs had trimmed the workforce from a high of more than 400 to around 90 people. In November, I walked into my manager’s office and let him know that I was grateful for the opportunity, but it was time for me to get off the bus.
In addition to running Anna’s Gourmet Goodies full time, I’ve helped bootstrap two other companies, one where I am still active. I’ve had people describe me as a ‘serial entrepreneur’, but I like to think of it more as a ‘sustainable entrepreneur’. I’m not a fan of big debt and losing money, then trying to make it up on volume. I believe that in money, and in life, net is more important than gross. When it comes to money, having huge sales, but little to no profit means you won’t last very long. In life, gross is your reputation, or what others think of you. Net, is your character. I am far more interested in ‘net’.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We started Anna’s Gourmet Goodies as a business that sold pies and cheesecakes to restaurants, wholesale. Restaurants bought our products, marked them up three or four-fold, and served them to customers. Our products were very good and those who tasted them loved them. We had very little churn among customers. Despite keeping tight reins on our costs, we learned that making real money in the wholesale business is about one thing – scale. You must get to the point where you sell enough products at a small margin to make the business worthwhile.
We purchased solid equipment, some new and some second-hand, and were able to produce a consistent, quality product. But alas, we grew to the point where we needed to either make a giant leap that would have required significant investment in larger facilities and equipment, or figure out another way to generate revenue.
We had experimented with the idea of shipping cheesecakes as gifts. We invested in the required packaging materials and found a source for dry ice. But the cost to the purchaser for doing this was prohibitively expensive. And it was difficult to manage the process of sending a frozen product via overnight services.
We decided to experiment with baking and packaging cookies instead. While they are perishable, they did not require complex packaging like frozen goods and we could ship them via a 2-day service, so they arrived in plenty of time.
We basically started over, finding a customer base that might be likely to send gifts – businesses, realtors, financial planners and the sort. One by one, we built a following of customers who sent our cookies as gifts. We added brownies but decided to limit our offering to two cookie flavors and one brownie. No nut products to avoid any allergy issues.
By keeping our product line simple and varying the quantities and packaging available, we were able to create products that were consistently high in quality and easy to produce at scale. By selling direct to the recipient, we had a significantly higher margin than the wholesale business.
We kept the pie and cheesecake business, letting it naturally decline as restaurants closed or changed ownership, while extending the base of customers for our cookie and brownie gifts. We built a website and began expanding online sales.
Eventually, when the wholesale business was too small to continue, we shut that down to focus full time on gourmet cookie and brownie gifts.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
One of my favorite authors and bloggers is Seth Godin. I’ve read several of his books, subscribe to his daily newsletter and his podcast, Akimbo. His thoughts on building a brand and a reputation have had a big influence on my thinking.
A brand is not your logo, a color pallet, or a tagline. A true brand is a promise. It is a promise to deliver goods and/or services of a certain quality, every, single, time. It is a promise to treat everyone that interacts with your company, customers and suppliers, a certain way. At Anna’s, we believe in respect and gratitude. We respect that our customers and suppliers are not required to do business with us, and we are grateful for their help and support.
Another person who has had a profound impact on how we have built our reputation and brand is Simon Sinek. I wrote a blog post describing how we apply the concept from his groundbreaking book, Start with the Why, to our business. Perhaps my favorite quote from his Ted Talk is this, “The goal is not to sell to people who will buy what you have, but to sell to people who believe what you believe”.
It is almost counter intuitive for many entrepreneurs and business owners, but not everyone is a customer. We’ve built our reputation and brand by helping customers when it is something we can do extremely well and saying ‘no’ when it is not. Reputation is ultimately about trust, and we work very hard to earn and maintain that with all our customers and suppliers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://annasgourmetgoodies.com
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/annasgourmet
- Other: Blog: https://outsidetheoven.com