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Founded out of Erica Tucker\u2019s home kitchen in 2009, what started as a passion for baking for friends quickly blossomed into <\/span>Sweet E\u2019s Bake Shop<\/span>, which today serves clients throughout Los Angeles and the United States.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m from Texas and grew up baking with my mom and grandmother. I\u2019ve loved baking decadent desserts for my family and friends for as long as I can remember,\u201d Erica says.<\/span><\/p>\nToday, Sweet E\u2019s delights customers with classic sweets, extravagant custom cakes for celebrations, logo cookies for corporate events, and more. Sweet E\u2019s has an established bakery near Beverly Hills, and a booming ecommerce business to support online orders, store pick-ups, and local deliveries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nUntil recently, Erica and her team didn\u2019t have an ecommerce site and used pen and paper to take walk-in and phone orders. This not only made it difficult to keep track of orders and have a holistic view of sales, but the business was making no sales through online orders. To support her aspirations to grow Sweet E\u2019s into a national brand, Erica knew something had to change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nShe enlisted the help of Shopify Experts Pacific IQ to set up Sweet E\u2019s online store and migrate her bakery from pen and paper to <\/span>Shopify POS<\/span>. Since moving the entire business to Shopify, Sweet E\u2019s has:<\/span><\/p>\n\nDramatically simplified back-of-house operations\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\nGained a holistic view of online store, pop-up, and bakery sales\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\nSeen a 41% improvement in its repeat customer rate\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\nLifted conversion rates by over 5x since launching next-day store pickup for online orders<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nChallenge: Taking orders using pen and paper\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\nPrior to getting set up on Shopify, Sweet E\u2019s Bake Shop didn\u2019t have an online presence and tracked orders with pen and paper. That meant taking orders over the phone, writing down customers\u2019 names, contact and delivery information, and manually keeping track of what had to be made when.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThat made planning what food inventory to purchase really hard because all we had to work with was scattered on a bunch of pieces of paper,\u201d Erica says. \u201cThe more orders we got, the more complicated it was to keep everything organized. Looking back on how inefficient that process was, it hurt us and made fulfilling orders harder than it had to be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nNot only was this manual system inefficient, but it also didn\u2019t give Erica and her team the data they needed to grow the business. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have centralized reporting to help us understand our business better. We didn\u2019t know what products we sold most, when our peak selling season was, or who our repeat customers were. We had no clear view of our business,\u201d she says.<\/span><\/p>\nWhile the pen-and-paper method was slowing Sweet E\u2019s down, Erica and her team could still get by. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic drastically shifted consumer buying behavior, she saw it as a chance to pivot, start accepting online orders, and modernize how she ran her business.<\/span><\/p>\n\nThe pandemic really forced us to rethink how we did business. I saw it as an opportunity to reset Sweet E\u2019s from a tech standpoint, improve our processes and workflows, and ensure we could sell our products in a way consumers want to shop.<\/p>\nErica Tucker, Founder, Sweet E\u2019s Bake Shop<\/cite><\/footer>\n<\/blockquote>\nSolution: Unifying its sales channels with Shopify\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\nCOVID-19 forced Erica to rethink Sweet E\u2019s entire business model. She partnered with Shopify Experts <\/span>Pacific IQ<\/span> to build Sweet E\u2019s ecommerce website and get the bakery set up on Shopify POS. Now, the entire business runs on Shopify.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWhen Erica came to us, she wanted guidance on how to make her business more resilient in the new environment she found herself in,\u201d explains Sean Clarke, Founder of Pacific IQ. \u201cDuring COVID, fulfillment methods like store pickup and delivery became essential, as did customer retention. By switching Sweet E\u2019s from pen and paper to Shopify, Erica has an infrastructure that enables her to build out the online component of her business, grow and retain her customer base, and ensure her bakery can support an influx of online orders efficiently.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFor Erica, seeing all orders in one place has dramatically improved back-of-house operations for kitchen staff. \u201cWith Shopify, staff can see all of our orders, whether they come from a phone call, an email, an online order, or a walk-in customer. Every order we get is in one place. We see what we need to make, when the order needs to be fulfilled by, delivery addresses or pickup times, and any notes the customer left. Moving to Shopify really helped streamline our production.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nEquipped with Shopify\u2019s unified customer reports and marketing tools like <\/span>Klayvio<\/span>, Erica can also engage with clients post-purchase, foster loyalty, and grow customer lifetime value. \u201cShopify allows me to see who is a repeat customer versus who is a first-timer. I know what products customers like, their lifetime spend, and even when their birthdays are. All the information I need to keep customers coming back is under one umbrella,\u201d Erica explains.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cNow, with this information, I can build newsletters and share promotions with my customers in a way that just wasn\u2019t possible before. Since upgrading to Shopify and using Klaviyo, our repeat customer rate has improved by 41%\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThanks to Sweet E\u2019s modernized front-of-house and back-of-house operations, Erica even started offering next-day fulfillment for orders in the greater Los Angeles area\u2014a convenience her clients appreciate and that sets her apart from other local bakeries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cRight now, our order cutoff is at 11:59 p.m. for the next day. I\u2019m only able to do that with the help of Shopify,\u201d Erica says. \u201cWhen our staff arrives at five in the morning, they see all the orders they need to make that day in Shopify POS and can prioritize production based on lead times and when the order is scheduled for pickup or delivery. Shopify helps us offer a convenient buying experience for customers and have a seamless production process on the back end.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\nShopify helped us to pivot our entire business model to something more efficient that\u2019s in line with how our customers want to buy. All that was possible thanks to the support of Shopify. We were able to customize our ecommerce site and POS system to create a modern bakery operation.<\/p>\nErica Tucker, Founder, Sweet E\u2019s Bake Shop<\/cite><\/footer>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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