Open for Business - Virtually!
After over a year of dreaming about how to build the reach of selling our granola, our website is live and open for orders!! And it is bold, colorful, strong, and lively - I am so proud of the results.
Getting the website up and running is one hurdle to overcome, but establishing the infrastructure to fulfill orders is another. Since I wasn’t confident, the back-end logistics were sorted out, and I hadn’t announced the site to many people, and they were mostly in the US. So, imagine my surprise when I saw a notification from Shopify alerting us of an order of 12 packets of granola to be shipped across the country! The site works and is open for business!
The order came in around 2 pm. We had been baking and packing granola for an upcoming event, so we were flush with product. We had boxes on order to ship single packets, but we “just happened” to have a box in the store room that held 12 packets comfortably. We were sorted and ready to ship! If it were up to me, I would have booked a courier as an individual (not a business) for the assurance it would be picked up and shipped out the following day. Impatience and checking things off the list would have taken priority. I would have figured out the business account later. However, and thankfully, our general manager was more thoughtful and even-paced than I was.
He had been researching shipping aggregators and prices, so we had data but hadn’t made any decisions yet. Necessity brought us to make a decision! He took the time to call the aggregators, share the necessary documents, and add bank information. By 6 pm, after several back-and-forth phone calls, not only was there a driver scheduled for pick-up the following day, but we had a business account and business rates. We had back-end shipping infrastructure!
From that one event, we took away several lessons and plans for processes. We discussed with the kitchen team the optimal amount of granola stock to keep on hand for orders, decided on two more sizes of boxes we can use for different-sized orders, and our general manager met the courier driver and took his number, and established a rapport with him. So many lessons and opportunities. Yay for progress!
Also, let’s take time to celebrate our first internet order!!!! So often I am guilty of running to the next thing, or thinking how to improve going forward, however in effort to slow down, I want to pause to celebrate and give thanks for all the hard work that has gone into getting us here over the past year - design, creatives, market research, copy writing, photo shoots, taste testing, brain storming. The work has just begun, but we pause to mark this first website sale and claim it as the start of something big to come!
Photos -
Screen grab - website
Behind the scenes at a photoshoot to get us Amazon Ready
Full Suitcase to take to an event in Thailand
Our first shelf display in a shop in Thailand
