Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Richard Crawford. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Richard thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Sunday Bakeday was born because I needed a creative outlet from my corporate job and wanted to make something with my hands. The fact that it turned out to be a semi-viable business model was an unexpected bonus. I was trying to master croissants as a home baker and I regularly had a lot of leftovers so I decided to offload them onto my friends and call it a business. I created an Instagram account, built a website with a menu and ordering information and it kind of spread by word of mouth. Now it’s a real thing and I have to manage a lot of spreadsheets and worry about taxes. It’s fun though. I’ve never really promoted bakeday so it’s cool to know that when someone signs up for the mailing list or follows me on Instagram it’s because one of their friends has probably mentioned it. I mean, if I wasn’t the guy baking the stuff, I’d be all over it. I would love someone to bring me a box of fresh pastries on Sunday morning.

As well as the actual baking, I’ve enjoyed having an excuse to build a website and design a logo and all the branding stuff that goes with it. I’m a nerd so I wrote a lot of code to automate my processes. I made a web app that updates the website when I have a new menu, puts incoming orders into a pretty fancy spreadsheet, and updates the website again when I reach my order limit. I can’t believe I’ve already mentioned spreadsheets twice.

Richard, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I come from a mystical land across the ocean (Scotland) but I’ve lived in the US for 17 years. I’ve been a graphic designer for most of my “career” but got burned out on that around 2012 and spent a couple of years baking professionally. I got burned out on THAT (because working midnight – 8 is HARD) and went back to being a designer/general-web-nerd. Sunday Bakeday is a creative outlet that combines all of the things I like. People order pastries through the website (you get to mix-and-match 4 pastries from the menu for $20) and I bake them at home and deliver the boxes around Grand Rapids on Sunday mornings. I’m just one guy in a very small kitchen so it’s hyper-local but I think that’s part of the appeal. People seem to really like it. I have a lot of regulars. Orders are limited because I can only physically crank out so many pastries in a night but I think people enjoy the underground, “secret club” vibe. At least that’s what I enjoy about it. When I started I was delivering 3 or 4 boxes to my friends and now I’ve just about hit capacity at around 60 boxes and I’m delivering to people who heard about it from a friend who heard about it from a friend. Growing it has been a fun challenge. I built a little prep kitchen in my basement and installed two more ovens to keep up with demand. I’m currently looking into commercial kitchen space to grow it even more.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I enjoy engaging with my Instagram people. I’m quite silly with it but I think people appreciate a bit of silliness. I made an Instagram reel where I baked a batch of cookies and inter-cut it with a load of pictures of Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I also post a lot of quite self-aggrandizing stuff about how great I am. It all probably confuses a lot of people but it entertains me and that’s what keeps it fun. I have huge respect for people who do social media properly though. There’s a very cool community of home bakers and micro bakers in Grand Rapids and some of the social content they produce is inspiring.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I think I have a lot of repeat customers because I offer an unbelievably convenient service and I’m very particular about my product. I’m not a trained pastry chef and my baking isn’t super fancy but I know a good flavor combination when I meet it and I have high standards. I don’t let a pastry go out the door unless I’d be delighted to eat it myself. I think people appreciate that. I enjoy seeing people posting their bakeday boxes on Instagram on Sunday morning. I also get a lot of nice messages from people which I save in a Google Doc called “nice things people have said about bakeday”. I keep in touch with my customers via Instagram and through the emails and texts I send out when there’s a bakeday coming up. Writing those is fun. The text thing is a new development. I wrote code that integrates Mailchimp with an SMS service called Twilio that lets me send texts to anyone who signed up with a phone number. Is that interesting? Probably only to me but I’m quite smug about it because I learned Python to do that. Sorry I know this is supposed to be about my amazing baking business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sundaybakeday.com
• Instagram: @sunday.bakeday