We were lucky to catch up with Meridith Braun recently and have shared our conversation below.
Meridith, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about social media – do you manage your own or do you have someone or a company that handles it for you? Why did you make the choice you did?
Social media is a very intimate and personalized marketing channel for your brand compared to other marketing outlets such as advertising and PR. Social media is earned attention that is such a powerful authentic way to speak to your audience but can also easily become stale, misinterpreted or damaging because of its constant hunger for new, fresh content to keep catching eyeballs and the attention of a quick-scroll society.
We are The Grand Order of Divine Sweets (The GOoDS) specializing in delicious and fabulous handcrafted cakes, cupcakes, cookies and fine chocolate creations of all shapes and sizes with a delightfully geeky twist. Our mission is to make the world a little sweeter one sweet treat at a time and help fans of all kinds celebrate their passions through the most lovingly made Fandom-inspired desserts. We manage our own social media channels and I can’t be more of a proponent of keeping it mostly in-house.
The key to using social media successfully is to make sure it is authentically your voice always. That is nearly impossible to outsource successfully because no one knows your brand and its voice nearly as well as you do.
That said, I do recommend learning through a consultant if necessary about the constantly changing landscape of tools within social media so you’re maximizing the platform. It is hard to keep up on the always changing algorithms and roll-outs of new changes and products they offer. Having someone help you stay on top of the logistics of social media is very helpful and easily outsourced to help keep your in-house person or team continually maximizing its uses.
Funny enough I think alot of lessons we all were taught in our childhood holds true for Do’s and Don’ts with social media and well, all aspects of marketing really:
– Do keep it genuine, authentic and relatable, don’t try to be something you’re not just to fit in.
– Do try new things. Don’t let fear hold you back. Social media is fast moving so trying new things to test the waters is a good approach especially during down seasons or times big news isn’t occurring.
– Do keep it light but also know when to keep it just about business. Levity, humor, self-deprecation are all great ice breakers not only in person but online. Just know that there’s always a time and a place for it.
– Don’t be afraid to fall on your sword when you’ve made a mistake. Accountability is forgiveable and makes you human.
– Don’t always hop onto every latest trend – they may not translate well with your brand and feel like you’re lazily hopping on the bandwagon of whatever is the latest hot topic just to get a hit.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media, it is a daily window into your brand and voice. Make it interesting, fun, engaging, memorable and impactful.
Meridith, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I grew up on a farm in Idaho and moved to New York City at 21 on my first plane ride to be a nanny for a family I had never met because I didn’t have two nickels to rub together after college and it was the most economical way I could think of to get to the media capital of the world to ev
I grew up on a farm in Idaho and moved to New York City at 21 on my first plane ride to be a nanny for a family I had never met before because I didn’t have two nickels to rub together after college and it was the most economical way I could think of to get to the media capital of the world to eventually kick off my career in marketing. I started in PR at a midsize agency and focused on high tech, that eventually lead me to my dream job working in the video game industry.
The Grand Order of Divine Sweets (The GOoDS) is a dream creation I thought up while being a lifelong geek and after a 20+ year career as a marketing executive in the video game industry I was ready to do something new. I have long been an at home baker and amateur cake designer hobbyist and one day discovered my soon to be business partner online who was equally geeky and also a brilliant professional cake designer and chocolatier. I took a chance and reached out to her on Facebook, introduced myself and asked if she would like to go into business together on a new venture that focused on Fandoms. Our first meeting was kismet, we shared many of the same views and ideas for making something magical together and helping the world become a sweeter place one well made delicious treat at a time.
Our primary goal was to build community by bringing people together through their Fan-based passions but in sweet form. There’s something about feeling the sense of belonging and part of something bigger than you. Fandoms provide that feeling no matter who you are or where you come from. It’s something everyone can enjoy, celebrate, agree on (well actually…there are alot of arguments within fandoms but solely out of the passion of that universe which is awesome.)
Fandoms and geek culture have become more and more mainstream and we realized especially as fans ourselves that we want to celebrate our interests in every way possible and no one had yet done it in food form in a way that it deserved; with the best most intricate designs done with the highest quality ingredients located in an elaborately designed environment that felt like entering a magical world of the sweetest possibilities. Can you tell Willy Wonka is one of our inspirations?
And so began…
The Grand Order of Divine Sweets (The GOoDS)
And our mission…
At The GOoDS you’ll find we are proud geeks who love celebrating our passions through the most lovingly made desserts using only the best ingredients all with a delightfully geeky twist. We first make everything taste delicious… then we make it all look amazing forever feeding the internal struggle of “It looks too good to eat”, while rewarding those that take the first bite. Does that make us evil? Maybe… but the dark side has cookies… go on…
Feed Your Fandom!
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
As a small business startup there isn’t alot of, if any extra capital to spend on marketing so getting extra creative with little to no budget is vital. The hurdle we had to work through in our minds was taking a risk on the right kind of big marketing ideas that fit with our brand and our values without knowing if they’d pay off.
One such idea came up as we brainstormed how we could increase sales during Covid. As a custom cake and fine chocolate shop, the disappearance of events, celebrations, large gatherings of any kind was a devastating business crisis we needed to overcome to keep the doors open. How could we possibly build community, one of our core values when everyone was isolated? Everyone including our staff only feel safest in your own home or outdoors.
The Easter holiday was coming up and as a chocolate shop, not only did we want to capitalize on this prime seasonal revenue period but we wanted people to feel connected again somehow. We needed something exciting, fun, engaging, socially distanced and significant enough to move the needle. We came up with ‘The Grand Hunt’…a take off our name The Grand Order of Divine Sweets.
An outdoor treasure hunt with clues divulged through our social media for anyone to go out and start hunting for 10 different treasures. Driving people through our social media increased our following dramatically within days. What was so exciting about it? The Grand Prize treasure — $1000 cash inside a golden chocolate Easter egg!
Coming up with such a large prize made us very nervous. We didn’t know who if anyone would come out for this treasure hunt and we could possibly be flushing $1000 of cold hard cash down the drain. Also, were people ready to go outside, gather and do things again yet in this tricky Covid time?
Luckily our announcement got picked up by a popular local blog and the news spread quickly after that. In our first year running the event, we had over 600 people hunting around Toronto for treasure. It was an incredible community builder…friends, families, children all participated and were thrilled to have something to do outside their homes again. The coverage and sales we received, more than covered the cost of the $1000 in the egg and cemented our shop as a newly beloved community establishment. Word of mouth has continued to spread throughout the year just from this one event and now we hold it annually.
Here’s the press release for additional info:
https://www.prweb.com/
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I hate to bring up Covid again, but…we unknowingly picked the absolute worst possible timing to open our business not knowing what was about to unfold throughout the world.
We spent 6 months preparing our shop for opening from design to completion that took 3 months longer than expected due to waiting on building permits to close so we could legally become operational. By December 2019, we finally had everything ready to roll and opened on December 7, 2019. A new business no one had heard of yet, coming out at the tail end of the most lucrative holiday season for cakes and chocolates. Our plan was to get established as a well-known high end custom cake and fine chocolate shop who focused on a somewhat niche realm…the nerd world. We had just trained our kitchen and front of house staff and things were running smoothly through a wonderfully fun, exciting and well attended opening. We knew and expected January to be a slow month as everyone is back at the gym and on diets right after the holidays so sales would drop and we’d use that time to prepare new product ideas, recipes and marketing plans for the year. February rolled around and Valentine chocolate sales picked up but people barely knew who we were yet so still slower than we’d hoped. Then March 2020 rolled in and everything came to a screeching halt. The news said Covid would be over in a few weeks, we didn’t want to lay off our just trained staff to then rehire and have to train again if we couldn’t get the same people back. We also had hearts and didn’t want anyone to suffer more during this time so we paid their full-time salaries through the entire lockdown that lasted much longer than anyone could predict. It was financially devastating for the business and in hindsight we should have done what we dreaded even thinking about…shutdown and restart 2 years later.
But we didn’t and so we had to figure out a way to continue making amazing sweet things and getting them out to the world. Our business model pivoted immediately to getting online so we could take online orders not only locally but shipping throughout Canada and the US. We transformed our once beautifully appointed cafe space into a fulfillment and shipping center. Offering only curbside pickup to keep our staff as safe as possible.
We also leaned into our Fandom venture by reaching out to the IP holders of the brands we wanted to represent most and do it legitimately so we could repeat the designs we made and sell them over and over without infringing on trademarks. This was the most expensive risk we took and accelerated our original business plan from our 3 year outlook to immediately, due to Covid. We got lucky with some very good contacts through my video game industry days to connect with licensing managers at Nickelodeon, CBS Viacom and Warner Brothers. Trying to make a great first impression over zoom about your brand new custom cake and chocolate shop who could manage their mulitmillion dollar brands with care was a daunting task but our geeky passion shined and won them over.
This also added a whole new complexity to our business that was better managed due to Covid than it would have been had we had a fully operational cafe to serve at the time. It allowed us the time to begin creating products and go through the arduous approval process with our licensors to achieve our first officially licensed products to sell online and curbside. We proudly became the first fresh food bakery in Canada to receive the Harry Potter license among many other equally exciting brands.
Do I wish Covid never happened? Absolutely! I wish we actually knew what it was like to start a business without it but we’re certainly stronger for it and took many more leaps faster than we would have if the threat of survival wasn’t so immediately upon us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thegoodsweets.com/
- Instagram: thegoodsweetsto
- Facebook: thegoodsweetsto
- Twitter: thegoodsweetsto