We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rebecca and Lisa Martin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rebecca and Lisa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’ve always been passionate about baking, rushing home after preschool to watch “Baking With Julia” on PBS while I ate lunch. After high school graduation, I was delighted to be able to attend my dream school, The Culinary Institute of America, and graduate with a baking and pastry degree. I worked in Long Island bakeries for several years but always held the dream of running my own baking business. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing became right for me to take the plunge and start my own venture. My mother was a casual home baker but was up for the challenge of becoming my partner. Our first official appearance as the Three French Hens Bakery (our name is a tribute to my paternal grandmother and her two sisters, who were of French heritage) was at my boyfriend’s band show in the fall of 2021. For the past 2 1/2 years, we’ve been weekly vendors at two local farmers markets and have taken special orders for delivery between markets.
Our focus is on offering our customers elevated classics in flavors that are both familiar and fresh. Our menu ranges from the humble chocolate chip cookie and basic biscuits to laminated pastries and custom-decorated cakes. With all of our baked goods, we pride ourselves on giving customers the very best quality we can, using organic flour, sugar and eggs, European-style butter and organic dairy and produce whenever possible. We make everything we can from scratch, including jams, chocolate-hazelnut filling and speculoos cookies for cookie butter.
Our growth has been slow but steady. We’re focused on longevity, so our goal is always to keep moving forward at a pace that works for us and serves our mission the best. We also are constantly reevaluating what we’re doing, taking note of what sells well and what does not, tweaking recipes and changing our menus to respond to customer needs.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Instagram is really the hub of how we communicate with our customer base about ordering, new menus, seasonal offerings, etc. By sharing those posts across Facebook as well, we’re able to reach the Instagram-averse who may still want to keep tabs on their local favorites.
At farmers markets, we knew that brand recognition wouldn’t be there from the get-go. We just needed to get people to try our food. A small business doesn’t usually have a marketing budget to work with, and sometimes a consistent presence, a friendly face, and maybe a few samples of cookies get shoppers interested. From there we began to have customers come back with friends and family, sharing with them what we had to offer. We’ve learned through trial and error what menu items work best. To keep ourselves and the customers interested, the menu items are constantly cycling, with repeats of items we have positive feedback on.
The biggest push we’ve noticed in the last few months is for custom cookies, cakes, and macarons. Custom orders are far more important in the bakery realm than people realize. Those orders fill in the gaps between markets while getting our product in the mouths of anywhere from 10 to 100-plus people in one given day.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Our reliability, transparency, commitment to quality and willingness to work with our customers to give them the best product possible have helped fuel our slow-but-steady growth. We’ve stayed up all night baking to meet a deadline for a custom order or to have all of our products ready in time for a farmers market appearance. In every interaction, we try to conduct ourselves with integrity and honesty. We don’t operate a gluten-free kitchen, so we would never tell a potential customer otherwise just to court their business. We are honest about the ingredients we use and proud that we use an organic heritage wheat flour, organic eggs and European-style butter in our baked goods. In spite of the cost of those ingredients, we believe that’s kept our customers coming back for more.
And above all, our customers are the key to everything. If they’re not happy, our business has no reason to exist. We’ll take all of the time needed to work with a customer to give them the custom cake or cookies that will make their special event complete. We’ve put certain items on our weekly menu when we know they’re favorites of our regulars. We treasure the relationships we’ve built with our loyal customers, some of whom have become true friends.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.threefrenchhensbakery.com
- Instagram: @threefrenchhensbakery
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/threefrenchhensbakery
- Other: email: [email protected]