[Music] [Jennifer Zimnowski] All right, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. Before we get started, first of all, there's cake at the end, so if you stay, you get some cake.
I want you to think back to the last time you celebrated a birthday, or a wedding, or maybe an anniversary, or maybe even a personal victory. And I'm sure cake was part of that. And it's because cake is more than a dessert. It's a symbol for joy and celebration, for connectedness and shared experiences. And at the center of that experience is Nothing Bundt Cakes.
It's a brand that keeps delivering this joy and the connectedness and the shared experiences. And did you know that 1.5 billion Americans eat cake annually. That's a lot of celebrations. And staying at the center of all of these celebrations, as I mentioned, is Nothing Bundt Cakes, and it's a really hard job because as we know, consumers are super demanding these days. We need convenience. We need speed. We need reliability. We need to stay connected across all of the channels that we interact with. And compound that with growth over a period of a couple of years to 678 bakeries across the US and Canada. And that's what we're going to talk about today is how Nothing Bundt Cakes has really embraced technology to fuel this tremendous growth, as becoming this joyful celebration that Americas can really grab onto. So my name is Jen Zimnowski. I am a Client Partner with Huge. We used to be known as Hero Digital. We are a full service digital agency, and I am so thrilled to be here with one of my favorite clients, Scott Lovejoy, bringing the joy, the CTO of Nothing Bundt Cakes. Thank you so much, Scott, for being here with.
Before we get started, maybe you can introduce yourself, talk a little bit about your role, about the organization. [Scott Lovejoy] Sure. I'll talk about myself a little bit and Nothing Bundt Cakes a lot. How about that? So I've been in technology for more years than I care to admit here. But about 10 years ago, I got into the hospitality industry. I went to work at Topgolf, and there I was responsible for the entire guest journey. All of the technology points from the game, I'll say reservations to lobby, to the games themselves and point of sale, and I really got the hospitality bug. I love working in an operation where you bring the joy, you make guests happy, they can bring their friends and family and such. About a year ago, I guess a year and a half now I can say, I moved over to Nothing Bundt Cakes. Our mission literally is bring the joy, so my name could not be better-- You really embody. That's probably how I got the job. Yeah.
But more importantly, so Nothing Bundt Cakes was founded in 1997 here in Las Vegas. So two women, Debbie and Dena got together and opened a humble little cake shop here at-- I believe it was on Sahara Avenue. That was in '97. I think it took them several years before they opened store number two. And then really probably five, six years ago, the company started a growth trajectory, started getting into franchising and started rapid growth. So for the last few years, for example, we've been opening 100 per year. Our goal this year is about 150 bakeries to open. So I was introduced to Nothing Bundt Cakes as a customer, as a guest. So when I moved my family from Seattle to Dallas in 2014, my aunt Donna brought a decorated 10-inch welcome cake. And I thought, being in the South is different, right? Here we go. It's like a big decorated cake. - Bless your heart. - Right. Exactly. Yeah. But it was amazing. And I thought, what is this? This is and-- So that became my party trick to take a Nothing Bundt Cake to housewarmings, or birthdays, or whatever. And it's common to see, like Jen mentioned, for Thanksgiving to see a red velvet cake and things like that. So it's a wonderful brand. It did not start off digital, although we've been getting there in a hurry, especially in the past five years ago as we've been trying to increase our digital mix and meet our guests where they want to be. You don't always want to drive into a strip mall kind of thing. You want it delivered to you or want to be able to order ahead of time and skip the line and things like that. So we're meeting our guests where they are. That's wonderful. And you can now boast the number one chain restaurants in America, which is amazing. - That is a big deal. - Congratulations. - That really is awesome. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Yeah. Definitely worth a round of applause. But it's had its challenges since you joined. And so maybe you can just start off talking about some of the challenges that you've encountered specific to technology over the past couple of years. Okay. Well, I would prefer to skip over that part, but I'll relive it a little bit. - I know. I know. - Okay, so picture this. I started in November of 2023, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. Okay, cool. I'm liking this. I've got a lot to learn about franchising. Topgolf wasn't as big on franchise as Nothing Bundt Cakes. But six days in on the job, I got to meet many of our franchisees, we call them bakery owners because the website crashed. I'm in a meeting, and all of the sudden, my phone starts blowing up. Somehow, they got my mobile phone saying, "The website's down. What are you doing to fix it?" Even as extreme as when are we going to get off of the Magento platform. It's only brought badness to us. Yeah. So that was my intro to Nothing Bundt Cakes. Yeah. - Not stressful at all. - No. I went from day two. Especially around the holiday, you want to be with your family. That's it. Day two, I'm decorating cakes and going through the training. And day six, the website crashed, and so people are coming after me. But that was a really good benchmark to building trust. We can only go up from here with our digital presence. And thankfully, I had wonderful partners with Hero, now Huge, and I integrated very quickly and we've partnered well. Awesome. Please ignore the music next door. - Right. - I don't know what's happening. - That's not for us. Yeah. - That's not for us.
But let's talk maybe about some of the largest pain points that you encountered. Like, what were the issues with the platform? Okay. So one of the biggest problems, and some of this is, I had to put on my archaeologist hat when I got there to figure out the why behind some of this. But our platform, we had migrated from some other non-Magento site to Magento. And I guess due to time constraints or whatever, it was a lift and shift. So we weren't really taking advantage of the Adobe Commerce platform. So that was number one. Lots of custom code, very inefficient queries to the database and things like that. So we couldn't even think about how do we improve conversions? How do we attack abandoned carts and things like that? We really just had to build trust that the website would stay up and running because of our growth, right? So we have a starting point of, we migrated code as is not leveraging the platform. - Then you add 100 bakeries a year-- - Yeah. Growing awareness as a brand. We're compounding the issue back in '22, '23. Right. So when holidays came up, more people were coming to the site. The site would slow down to a crawl and we'd be watching on New Relic. Man. No, I don't want that line to go up and that line to go down. But we very quickly had to dig in and figure out what was causing that and how could we improve those scaling issues. Yeah. Yeah. And can you walk us through what happened during some of those high traffic periods of time. We've got this slide up that shows. Yes.
My team didn't necessarily love this, but my office window had a day's up sign because every day I would add to it to say we've been up for 28 days, 20, I've got to start over again. Erase it on the window and put back zero. And we had to attack that very honestly and say, "Look, we all inherited a platform that can be improved. And I'll go into that more a little bit later on why we didn't listen to the folks who said throw out Adobe, this isn't the right answer. I learned very quickly, it is a great platform. Adobe can handle far more traffic than our lowly little cake store, right? But we hadn't implemented it correctly. So the team, with a lot of humility, we started working on the roadmap to attack what's the lowest-hanging fruit to improve the infrastructure, scaling, security, all of that stuff because we just could not handle the volume that our brand brought with it. Right. When you think back to the time where you were evaluating, you had these bakery owners that were calling you very frustrated. Your customers were probably very frustrated every time the site was down. They weren't able to order their cakes and celebrate joy. What were some of the business impacts there too? Can you talk through that a little bit? Yeah, it's a strange thing because we didn't start off as a digital brand. We started off as people knew to drive down the street, go to your local Nothing Bundt Cakes and order and take to your family event or whatever.
Probably the best news is that when our site crashed, they would call the bakery and complain about the site crashing, and then the bakery owner would submit a ticket and call us. And I say that's the best news because any other brand, they would abandon. They would go to a competitor. - I can get a cake anywhere. - Right. But they didn't. They would chew out the bakery owners who would then chew me out. - Love that. Love that. - Right. So I would much rather have that situation. But to be honest, we know that there was lost revenue, right? If your website's down during a Thanksgiving period, we're calculating by the hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue. Yeah. So the scaling, we really had to get that fixed. Yeah. And at what point did you decide to stay with Magento? I'm sure it was a really thoughtful decision that you went through, especially with the bakery owners telling you to leave. And did you just have a gut feel this was the right platform? There is a bit of a gut feel because again, if Coca-Cola is on Adobe Commerce, I think Nothing Bundt Cakes should be able to adapt, right? - Right. - There's many other brand examples there.
There was a bit of a gut feel, but there was also a-- As we put our archaeology hats on and realized we were barely scraping the surface of what Adobe is capable of, the native features, and we had so much legacy code that was in there. Yeah. Here's a very specific example. So partnering with the DevOps team at Huge, we saw that as a guest traversed the website, one-click would on average be 19 queries to the database. So you've already put in your local baker. You've already put in what flavors you want and things like that. And it was querying the database for that each time. And so digging into those root causes, you don't need 19 queries to do something like that, right? So we started down that roadmap of picking off the custom code because we knew that Magento was the right answer if we optimized it. Sure. Sure. You talked about working with the Hero/Huge dev team. How was that experience? Were they wonderful? - Yes. - I'm not leaving you.
I would say as with all partnerships, there was a push and pull as we learned each other's styles and learned to trust each other because it was a tough situation where calls are going back and forth, and I never had to worry about finger pointing or any of that. So I've loved that about the relationship. But I would say it did take a little bit of a breaking in period to where we knew we're marching in the same direction. We're picking off those 19 queries every time a customer traverses the site. And then we worked both simultaneously on project work, like upgrading to the latest version of Adobe Commerce, as well as the DevOps side to build in security, make sure monitoring and alerting are in place so that I felt more comfortable that I could see things before I got a phone call from the bakery if they happened. Otherwise, we were able to benchmark and see improvement over time. - Right. Right. - Yeah. I have to say, trust is the right word really. And we have appreciated your partnership very, very much. And over time, it just continues to grow. Your team, some of the people are here today are fabulous. And we do really appreciate all of the work that we've been able to do with you. - Likewise. Likewise. - All right. So let's talk about, now you've been able to stabilize the platform. Things are smooth sailing and rocking and rolling. So what's next? What does the road to transformation look like? All right. So there's several things. First of all, you never end optimization. We're always building that in. So as we build new features, we're making sure we're not using custom code when we can avoid it and things like that. But at the same time, we're looking down the road at how can we better answer our guest questions with perhaps AI web chatbots so that we have a different generation buying cakes now than were 10 years ago. Yeah, they don't want to talk to people. - That's right. - Easiest thing. They don't want a phone number. They don't want an email. I want to answer right there. What that could mean for us is not only the opportunity to answer guest questions, but also to build a cake for them, right? Do you have any gluten-free options? Yes, we do. In fact, we have 8-inch, 10-inch gluten-free chocolate chip. Would you like it decorated or not? And we can build the Bundt cake there and lead to another conversion. Right. So that's one of the things we're looking for. We'll talk a little bit about what we've rolled out in last year and what we're continuing to optimize for those. - Yeah. - Sky's the limit. There's a lot more we can do now that we have comfort in the platform. Great. And before we get to those new features, maybe you could talk about some of the DevOps, how you're alerting and just being aware of what's happening on the platform a little bit more regularly now. Yeah. That was a key part early on was instrumenting or getting the monitoring and alerting set up so that we knew we could follow the performance of the site as it went.
The fact that we have a dedicated DevOps team means that from an employee base, we have a low employee count, but trust in a partner. And that's been huge. - That's great. - Yeah. And all out-of-the-box Adobe components also, right? - That's where we'd like to go. - Yeah. Yeah. - We're not quite there yet-- - Right. But we're working towards it. Right. Congratulations. It's a huge win. So as we mentioned, these are some of the key wins that you guys are seeing over the time now. That's right. So is there anything you want to call out here that really stands out to you? Really, anybody who's technical in the audience can look at these numbers and go, "Yeah, this is great." What I care the most about is that our customer doesn't feel, doesn't see a little wheel spinning like some of you may have saw on the video broadcast earlier today. We were joking. Jamie Dimon got to the most important part, and then the wheels turned. We don't want to see that on our website. You don't want to see that on a live cast, right? It feels so much better as a guest to be able to load up your cake with the right bow colors and flavors and everything else and just click, click, click and get through it. So this is the proof that it's happened-- Yep. To the qualitative and the quantitative blend there of a better guest experience. Great. All right, let's talk about growth. - Where are you going? - Right. Well, let's talk about a few of the things we did in the past year that we couldn't have done before we stabilized the platform. One good example. Is anybody in the restaurant industry in here? No, just me. Okay. Has anybody ordered from any of these providers? - How about that? - Yeah. Okay. Got it. Okay. So I'm going to do a little translation. Back in the old days, when you ordered a pizza, you would order it directly from a Pizza Hut, a Domino's or whatever. Some still do. What we call that first-party delivery. That is our customer data, our delivery. We have a little minivan that gets painted up and we call the-- Which has been in a lot of parades lately. Good. Good. The IRA of St. Patrick's Day parade, the cake truck was going through. So we have a Bundt Mobile with a picture of a big Bundt cake on the side. Yes. It is that cheesy, but it works. She remembered, right? So first-party delivery means you go on our website, you order. There's some limits because often the person driving that Bundt Mobile is the franchise owner. So they may put in fairly restrictive times. I can deliver as long as it's more than two weeks out. It can only be during these times. And there needs to be a minimum order size of say $150. Can you imagine back in the day calling Pizza Hut and they said, "Well, only if it's more than $150." So on one hand, we've had the Bundt Mobile first-party delivery concept. A couple years ago, we rolled out a third-party, what we call third-party delivery concept, which is you go on the DoorDash app, you're hungry on a Friday night or whatever, you load up a couple of Bundtlets and DoorDash would deliver it to you. Okay, the downside with that plan, there's an upside, but the downside is that we have no idea who you are. We have no idea what you're ordering, why you're ordering it. Yeah. You're not connected to that guest. That's it. So it's their guest, their delivery is very simple for us. They just show up, grab a bag, and leave. Unfortunately, if there's a bad experience, our brand may be impacted, but we have no idea what that situation is. Now the upside is turning on that third-party delivery was a revenue upside immediately because we found an incremental guest that we didn't have before. Because people had been looking for us on DoorDash and Grubhub and Uber Eats, but they couldn't find us because we weren't there. So we saw a nice little revenue bump, however, we didn't have the customer data. And new brand recognition for people that may not have known about your organization, which is great. That's it. Exactly. Exactly. So this past year, we met in the middle. We came up with what we call second-party delivery. That is our guest on our website on the Adobe Commerce platform, but delivering with a third-party. So we would process the order, set all of those requirements I talked about earlier. Minimum order? No. You want one Bundlet? Great. I've done that many times. I mean, there are times. That Chocolate Chocolate Chip Bundlet sounds very good. The REESE'S Pieces is to die for. There you go. Yeah. And so we now have the customer data. We deliver much more efficiently with an Uber Eats who has cars standing by who are delivering, but we don't have to have the franchise owner stop what they're doing and go deliver cakes in the minivan and the Bundt Mobile. So that, again, we saw a revenue bump almost immediately. We knew we would. We were able to run missed delivery or missed order reports with our first-party solution prior to this. We charted them geographically and showed how many orders would get all of the way to the end, and then when they clicked availability, there was none. I want something tomorrow. - Sorry, we can't deliver for seven days. - Yeah. And so we could chart that and we could see hundreds of these around every bakery. So literally the day we turned on our second-party delivery, we saw those orders go through the roof. Yeah, that's great. And it's a complex solution too, right? Because you've got several integrations to account for. That's right. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So this is a great example earlier when I said we had simultaneous project work and the DevOps work. - Yeah. - Different set of resources. The project work was to integrate going from the guest order, pulling potential times, any minimum fees if there were any, flowing through to the Uber Direct platform, and then connecting with the driver, sending messages back. You can see all of the integrations through this path. And then once we have success that we have an order, we have a driver submitting the order through to our point of sale and bakery. Yeah. So that they fulfill the order, bag it, and put it out for the driver. It was quite complicated, but it paid off. - Certainly paid off. - Right. Not on the front-end, though. It's pretty seamless. You would never be able to tell and it's super fast. - So it was a really great solution. - That's right. In fact, I'll take that a step further. It was so seamless to the guests. They expected us to be delivering and then they'd be surprised when an Uber driver shows up and drops it on the front porch. Yeah. Were there any other logistical challenges that you came upon while rolling this out? Those bakery owners I mentioned earlier. Yeah. So imagine putting your life savings into a franchise and you're so proud of the brand and everybody tells you my favorite color anytime you wear a shirt or a pant or whatever. And then getting a call from an angry guest that says, "My cake's turned out upside down. What happened?" Or we had one case. This was probably the worst I've ever heard with a delivery service, where they had ordered a decorated cake. A tiered decorated cake. So a 10-inch with an 8-inch cake on top of it. It arrived by Vespa. - No. - Right? So we had to learn. I'm just picturing bungie cords and-- - Right. - They were, the guest was not happy. - Absolutely. - We made it right, of course. But some of those things we had to figure out in the early days of delivery. And this is why we test and learn. We pilot in small numbers of bakeries and then grow over time. But we did have to iron out some of those kinks. The customer experience, we believe has been happening that way all along with a third-party delivery, but they weren't our guests. - That's right. - We didn't see their tickets. - We just saw money coming in. - Right. With second-party delivery, we got firsthand knowledge of every time a pack of Bundtinis would arrive upside down. Yeah. So now that you have more visibility into who the customer is, what are you doing with the data? It's so fantastic. So now that we have that data and we can see guest frequency, we can see what types of things they're ordering at different times. Our goal is to meet the guest where they are and find opportunities to change their behavior or help them along with these celebrations. The simplest example is many people know us only as a celebration brand. You order a cake, you bring it to a party, and we can see those cases, and those tend to all clump around times like Mother's Day, Super Bowl, Halloween, Thanksgiving. - Father's Day. Yeah. - That's it. Well, fathers don't get nearly as much love as mothers. We have data to show that. But what we found is those special occasion guests, we can now target them with email, or SMS, or app messaging to say why not treat yourself? The REESE'S Pieces cake is out. - Yeah. - And vice versa. We have people who only know us as buy $6 Bundtlet. Did you know you can make mom's day or dad's day or whatever with a decorated happy birthday cake? Yeah. So that's data we didn't have before this. I have taken advantage of those targeted marketing efforts. - Thank you very much. - That's great.
It's 2pt was one of these projects that we also were very proud of working on with you all. And especially after the first month of rolling it out and hearing the success of the program, which was a surprise, right? All the financial numbers. Can you talk about that a little bit? I can't share the actual numbers, but I will say it was a significant bump in revenue system wide. Right. We had planned on taking much longer to roll out the system, but based on the financial results and our ability to quickly turn around fixes to things like a tiered cake going on a Vespa or Bundtinis arriving upside down-- Right. We escalated that and rolled out much quicker. We got the entire system rolled out in about six months last year. That's amazing. All right, so now that that is, what other innovations are you able to come up with? Well, one of the things we're working on right now to hoping to roll out this year is fundraising. Yeah, it's a great one. So for many years, our bakery owners have been involved in the community.
PTA events, hospital, charitable giving events, soccer club, things like that. It's an enormous amount of work for them. Again, these are people who have put their life savings into opening a bakery and then two and then five, and they're out in their community loading up the Bundt Mobile, going to an elementary school or a PTA event, or a hospital, or whatever. And when we interviewed them just to understand what opportunities there were to automate and to improve the process, we learned that there were-- I think we have 678 bakeries. We probably have about 380 or 400 franchise owners. There were probably 380 or 400 different systems ranging from Monday.com to track orders to Excel to things like that. And we realized there was a great opportunity to create a fundraising portal that reduces the amount of work both for the fundraiser and the bakery. So in an electronic fashion now, you can negotiate the discount you'll give for a PTA versus an Air Force Base or whatever it is. They can go back and forth and say, for example, we'll give you Bundtlets for $4 each. We suggest you sell them for $7 each. Your organization gets three per. And you can see the math on the screen very quickly as you build up. If I sell 2,000 of these things, and who doesn't love cake? - Yeah. - Right? So it's many benefits, but the automation helps the bakeries. This also helps us to scale community involvement much more than a person or two driving the Bundt Mobile out full of cakes, as well as it helps us to track in one central system flowing through to the point of sale and helping with inventory management. Yeah. You were talking earlier about the Frisco location and somebody was-- It's available at that location. Somebody came like 35 minutes just for the order. - That's it. - Maybe you could share that story? Yeah, so we can even put marketing. We typically don't for a pilot, right? When we roll out a pilot, we just want to work out the kinks. Yeah. Make sure you can't design behind a desk and you can never truly understand what's going to happen in the real world until it happens, right? So we didn't put any marketing behind this. But Frisco is a far northern suburb of Dallas, and it was the only bakery with this fundraising portal set up. And we got our first $2,800 fundraising order from West Fort Worth, which is probably 35, 40 miles away. And we were thinking, how did they even-- This is just a guest that we didn't market to, going to the site searching for fundraising and found the easier process that's automated with Frisco. And so they went through. The transaction happened. She coordinated with the bakery owner, and she drove her 38 miles or whatever it was to load up her car to sell at an event. - That told us there's demand. - Yep. It's a unique offering. Not a lot of cakes for sale for fundraising. That's right. We have 13 bakeries in the Dallas Fort Worth area, and this is probably the furthest one, but it happened to be the one that we turned this on. So we've since rolled out to 17 bakeries and rolling. We're learning with each implementation. We're getting feedback from bakery owners, as well as the fundraisers themselves. So we hope to get this rolled out by the end of the year. Yeah. I also love that you enabled the location services to allow for that distance too because sometimes it just doesn't show any results. No, you're right. And anybody who's worked with a franchising organization, that gets a little dicey with territories. - Sure. - And so that told us something too. We need to roll out by market so that we cover the entire market, so territories are respected and things like that. - Right. - Lots of great learning. Right. All right, so you're on a serious growth trajectory. 1,000 bakeries by 2027? Can you talk about how this is going to happen? And how the technology too is enabling this? So I would say for the past two to three years, long before I got to the company, we've been focusing on how do we scale, how do we grow. Others have done this in the industry. It helps for growing awareness, as well as just getting everything standardized. And it helps in a lot of ways beyond technology, right? Training processes, marketing efficiency, awareness, and all of that. From a technology perspective, we've been focusing on-- I'll say, I've specifically been focusing on not 700 bakeries, not 1,000, but 2,000, and beyond. How do we pick a point of sale company that can scale to that level? How do we double down on the website to make sure that we can grow our digital mix percentage, the mobile app, even the silly things you wouldn't normally think about like the audio in a store? Do we have the right provider there? Because it's very difficult to go from 100 to 500 to 600 to 2,000. But by designing things for the 2,000 range, that's enabling us to go from, I think we went from 1 to 2 to 10 a year to 46 to 100. Like I said earlier, we're hoping to get to 150 this year and there's no reason we can't open 200 to 250 bakeries a year. Yeah. I love that you're planning for 2,000 and not just the 1,000-- Right. Which is still incredible by itself, but yeah, that you're planning for. So can you share what's on your roadmap a little bit for the kind folks in the audience? Yeah, for sure. So I mentioned earlier that we're working on an AI web chatbot solution. That one is a relatively straightforward way to add guest service features onto the website. We're doing a lot of work optimizing things we rolled out in the last year. I'll set the stage for this a little bit. We have a technology advisory council that is made up of bakery owners with a technical background and they represent for the rest of the bakery owners. And one of our meetings, I think this was in November, one of my allies and sometimes opponents, he'll be in my ear, but he'll also thank us for the good work and all. He said, "Lovejoy, for 8 years we've been asking for 2pt, for fundraising, for mobile app solution, for a website that stays up during holidays." He said, "We love it. Don't get me wrong, but why do you have to do eight years worth of requests in six months?" - Right. - And he was right.
They went through so much change for improvement. And our commitment to them was we will slow down on new rollouts and focus heavily on optimizing the things we've rolled out. - Sure. - How do we optimize Uber Eats? How do we get fundraising right before we roll it out? How can we make simple things like how do you out of stock Red Velvet because it was popular this week across the platforms to make it easier for your 18-year-old perhaps who's working as joy creator there, so-- Yeah. And loyalty is going to play an important role here? - That's it. - Thank you for reminding me. Yeah. So we never had a loyalty program until this past year, but specifically in October, we rolled that out. Yeah. With loyalty, we've enabled the ability to add events. So me as, I'll just say as a dad and a husband is a good example of, I sign up for the app and it asks me, would you like to enter your dates, birth dates and anniversaries? - Yes. - Heck, yeah. Because the app will remind me, you have an anniversary coming up. Sweet. Okay. I'm going to buy cake, a birthday, things like that in every year on those anniversaries. You need one for Father's Day. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I need to put that on somebody else's phone, I think. But loyalty is a big deal because we now have better guest information correlated to do they do pickup or delivery? Are they a special event guest or are they a treat guest? And how do we get them to go the other way? So much more we can do to meet the guests where they are now-- - Yeah. - That we have that loyalty information. Even that interplay with the fundraising program and loyalty is going to be really important also-- That's right. In using that example with fundraising, everybody in this room has different personas depending on whether you're at home, or at work, or in the PTA. And each one of those hats you put on has a different case where you might need cake or any other product out in the market. So really considering that all of the ways that our guest journey can change depending on those personas leads to great opportunity for us and for them to be the winner when they show up with cake. Right. You and I have talked a little bit about catering. Is there anything that you can share there? Catering, I forgot about that. Catering is a good example. In fact, I think we used ezCater platform today to-- Good. Get Bundtinis for the winners here, for the question answers.
We made a small change on our website just a few weeks ago, and we really enjoyed this. We rolled out ezCater. It's a third-party catering provider. They're big on white glove service, large orders, that sort of thing. So think company event. You have a company meeting and you want to have Bundtinis sitting out there. ezCater is a great third-party to do that. We didn't get much traction though, and we couldn't figure out why. There's a marketing element to it, but it seems like an obvious thing. On our website, we've been doing a lot of A/B testing. Now that the platform is stable, we do A/B testing, we do heat mapping and look at where guests are clicking through on the mobile version, on the desktop version. And we noticed that one of the tabs at the top that says, "About Us," hardly ever got clicked. Nobody cares about the history of the company. I'm going to the website to buy a birthday cake, or a wedding cake, or whatever. So we had somebody on the team had a theory. What if we removed About Us or move it down to the bottom of the screen and put catering there? That week with zero marketing, we had nearly $40,000 in sales through ezCater just by a simple product placement. But, of course, since then we've been doing all sorts of things to help spread the word. Yeah. But catering is a big opportunity for us for events like this and company parties. Yeah, for sure. And I love that test and learn mentality also, just the experiment with everything. Right. Is there anything more that you can share there? I would say you don't know if you don't test, right? That's true. Certain people in the audience pointed out, as we're looking at our heat maps, so the conventional wisdom in e-commerce from my perspective is don't force anybody to scroll and get to the cart as fast as you can. We found we break some of that, right? We're looking at it. We added a happy birthday package at the bottom just to see what happens. So on your mobile, about 80% of our traffic is mobile. And at the very bottom of the page is happy birthday. That had more clicks than most of the stuff up at the top. And so we thought our guests are a little different than at least the conventional wisdom. And so we've been experimenting with-- We moved happy birthday way to the top when we saw how popular it was. But we've been experimenting with different placement. And I'm just imagining somebody who's hungry on a Friday night, scrolling, scrolling. - That's the one, right? - Yep. Yep. - But if you don't test, you don't know. - Right. And I imagine too that the optimization of the platform has made it really easy to be able to make these changes as you see things happening. That's right. We didn't have the headspace to focus on that when we couldn't handle large volumes for traffic. Just keeping it live, yeah. - That's right. - Yeah, that's great. It's a lot more fun to focus on the customer than the tech, I will say. I'm sure, and I love that. Now that it's stabilized, it's all about the customer. That's right. What are you excited about? What is so exciting going forward? I love our growth. I love the increasing awareness. I think there's so much opportunity to increase our digital mix now that we're meeting customers where they are.
There is a lot of opportunity for us to expand, really expand fundraising. We've got the potential to go into gifting, like corporate gifting type stuff. Sky's the limit in terms of what we're able to do on the digital platforms. Yeah. You and your team have had some really great success. I'm excited to be there with you. All right, so looking back on your journey over the past two and half-ish years. - One and a half, yeah. - One and a half. What are some of the lessons learned? I think I would do it the same exact way. Again, very few times in my career have I said that, but I would focus on the platform, the foundation, and the infrastructure first. Do the archaeology dig if you start somewhere, figure out what the problems are, and focus on the foundation. You can't grow as a company if you're scattershot all over the place looking for how do we improve conversion yet? It takes 10 seconds to open a page or something like that. Security is really important. It's obvious if anybody in technology in the room knows that it's a constant threat.
Infrastructure, just the ilities, scalability, stability, maintainability, really focusing on those things first. Yeah. Then open the door for us where all of the opportunity of product placement and leveraging features with Adobe Commerce. Yeah, and it really helps when you do have a platform that is reliable and trusting that you can grow on. That's it. Yeah. That's great. I think that's all we have for today, unless there's any other stories that you want to share? I can't think of anything. I will say one-- Actually, I will tell a side story here. One of my big things, and we do this as a company too, is I like to work in the bakery, right? And I am the least bakery like I frosted a cake and it was a disaster, right? So they don't let me do that job. But for holidays, I'll go work behind the cake case there and work the point of sale and understand all of the things that our 18 to 80-year-olds are dealing with there. And they're so wonderful as brand representatives and joyful and what are you celebrating today? And then they can help with the upsell because if it's a birthday, we can put a birthday hat on it or whatever. But it's really humbling. I worked on Easter last year, the day before Easter. It's really humbling to have people come in and complain about the website, right? And they have no idea who I am. And I'm like, "Yep, that's fair." And people are answering the phone, "I'm sorry that happened to you." And I bet the bakery owner looks at you like, "I told you." Yeah. They love it though. They love the fact that you're willing to hear the feedback and everything. I've since worked in bakeries and that is not people show up to get their cake and it's just a smooth transaction. Yep. Or there's somebody who didn't go to the website and they need to. - Yeah. - But, yeah, it's been a big difference. I have ordered tens of twenties of times and I've never had an issue either through the second-party delivery or the pickup. Good. And oftentimes I want to say, "I help with your website." But I don't, keep that to me. You know-- Yeah, I know. All right. We will be at the Booth 571. There is a very large pink cube over our booth, so if you do have any other questions, please stop by. There are cakes for everybody and there will be cakes also at the booth. So we'd love to see you. And thank you very much for joining today. Thank you. I appreciate you. Likewise.
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