We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michelle Kenyon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michelle below.

Alright, Michelle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?

We will go to any length to make a happy customer but sometimes it’s hard getting a new customer to believe. We have a ton of stories to share but we will talk about our most recent event in Atchinson Kansas. We are growing fast and a lot of people already know the difference between a store bought cake pop and one of ours. A nice lady is walking by our booth and is sounding a bit disgruntled by our Cake Pops. We entice her to come over but she is there not for the usual joy of cake but to let us know how horrible Cake Pops are. Of course we tell her it’s a story we hear time and time again but we are going to change your mind. Absolutely not she says I just can’t do it anymore!!! You can’t even imagine how many weddings I have been to lately and they keep making me eat these disgusting things she says. She has a few more remarks about what she thinks about them that we can’t say here but we end up convincing her to forget everything she thought about them before and give us one shot. We decided to let her try one of our Ketchup cake pops since we figured go big or go home right. She was so certain that she hated them we were not sure what to expect. As we interestingly wait for the verdict she comes out with I can’t believe it this is great!!! Not only did she love it but she loved our most controversial flavor. She couldn’t believe it and hung around and made sure to tell everyone that passed by how amazing they were. People all assumed that we were paying her for the praise but to be honest we still dont even know her name!!!

Michelle, 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 have loved baking my whole life and seeing peoples reactions to my designs and different flavors are so scary and amazing at the same time. What I think the customer is thinking and what they are imagining is the hardest bridge to gap. I try and stress how the more information I have the better but customers are vague and sometimes it is challenging getting any input at all. My team loves the challenge as every custom order and every event poses problems that need solving. Even things that sound as simple as a customer wanting say the color blue have a ton of variables in the color spectrum let alone the fact that a color on your phone may look a little different on our system. So far things have gone well and we rarely if ever miss the mark. We are here to make every event Pop Off and are proud that our customers are willing to put their faith in our work and make us the star of their show! With thousands of followers and nothing less than a five star rating we strive to stay ahead of the competition and continue baking you happy!

Have you ever had to pivot?

It has been a rough road and not just for us but the baking and restaurant industry as a whole. We have been pivoting so often you would think we were playing basketball. In the beginning we were struggling to get this brand off the ground and contemplated throwing in the apron. We were wondering if there was any hope left when we had an idea. We were listening to the KC Barbecue scene give Patrick Mahomes the Business for pouring ketchup on a perfectly delicious steak. With so much disgust and debate over the everyday condiment we decided to run with the Ketchup Cake Pop to support our QB. We came up with Ketchup in Cake it’s Not Just for Steak slogan and started the taste testing. This was far off the track but it gave us so much exposure with our Mahomes head ketchup cake pops that the news stations were calling left and right. We were back in action and as Mahomes brought us home a Super Bowl Championship we were riding the wave. We were getting in restaurants and events that people said we would never get in. Restaurants were selling our cakes, pies, and pops as fast as we could make them. Than that beautiful wave crashed and the pandemic closed down all those events and restaurants with it. This took the wind out of our sails and our sales. Time to pivot and try again so we basically overnight had to turn into a direct to consumer delivery company. Instead of moving crates of product around we were serving and delivering to one customer at a time. With events completely out of the question and all the restaurants closed we wondered once again if we could make it through. Luckily we were able to scrape by and people slowly started gathering again. We did it we thought we made it through the worst of it. Things looked to be getting back to normal when surprise not only is our costs of business all going to triple but the delivery business model is now losing money due to the insane gas costs. We even had to pivot and buy different vehicles to try and combat the ever rising gas costs. We started to pay more attention to our brick and mortar location that we decided we were going to have to open to the public. So here we are now years in wondering what else can the universe throw at us. With all the restaurants and bakeries that now cease to exist we are blessed to still be poppin after all these pivots and will be opening our brick and mortar to the public. and excited to offer not only cakepops and be able to watch us decorate in action, but grab a slice of cake, cheesecake, pie or maybe even a sandwich or slice of pizza. We are sure you’ll be back for more!!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

It doesn’t matter if you are the greatest baker on the planet if only a handful of people know about you. If it wasn’t for Facebook, Google, and our website CakePopBakery.com we would not be where we are today. The social media aspect could be the most important part of your business and no application that can gain you a following should be overlooked. I would suggest that you take whatever you are comfortable using right now and invest further in that app. In the end these platforms are all in the business of making money off of users. They want you to spend your money on advertising to their app and will send people your way in return. The social media apps want you to succeed so they can get more of your advertising dollars. This seems like a straight forward transaction but you have to pay attention to your numbers as you will have organic views and paid views! The dashboard to check statistics can be confusing at first but like all things it will get easier with time and just when you got it figured out they will update and change everything anyway so it’s like everyone is new. Look at Google making everyone go through their maps to get to your business profile. You want to keep tabs on what ads are doing the most for you and invest accordingly. The internet has a ton of information on your business and you want to take the time to make sure the info at the very least is correct and make sure you add pictures for your business. Do your best to be unique and take video and pictures of your work. You never know when it will come in handy and the longer you do it the more content that you will have in your social media arsenal.

Contact Info:

• Website: CakePopBakery.com
• Instagram: CakePopBakery_
• Facebook: [email protected]
• Other: TikTok CakePopBakery

Image Credits
Images by [email protected]