Brooki: 2023 Year in Review
Hey friends! Wow, what a year it has been.
I’m quite fond of taking time at the end of the year to sit back with a cup of tea (okay fine its coffee) to scroll through the year as it was through iPhone photos.
This year has been an absolute whirlwind for me as a business owner and Brooki Bakehouse as it blossomed into a global brand. The year has been full of so many highs (as well as a few lows for good measure), but all in all it has been the ride of a lifetime, one that feels as if it is just getting started. Here’s the timeline of the most exciting, fast-paced year of my life and the start of my business journey.
January
At the start of the year I boarded a flight to Los Angeles to visit my lifetime friend Sophie to capture the promo photos for Bakwithbrooki.com. I had long sought to bring my baking experience and tutorials to an online format, so to realise that dream so early in the year really felt like the perfect kickstart to 2023.
Whilst there, we worked on transferring the website from Squarespace to Shopify, which was a scarey and tedious transition for me to do solo, whereas for Sophie - as a web developer - it was a breeze (she did so with a glass of wine in hand in the evenings after we explored LA by day). The transition allowed us to build out an e-commerce platform that could handle the increasing volume of cookie orders, an element of the business that was beginning to pick up pace, but I never could have predicted what would happen next!
February
When I came back from my trip we had successfully transitioned over to Shopify, allowing for a more detailed operation behind the scenes. I had a vision to create an e-commerce bakery where customers could ship freshly baked cookies to loved ones around Australia, and now that the website was functioning properly, it was time to lay the groundwork to increase our orders.
Before my trip to Los Angeles, I was shipping 8-10 boxes of cookies per day on Mondays (the days the retail shop was closed). After that trip and successfully migrating the website, we were fulfilling up to 100 orders on Mondays.
But it was a painfully tedious process. Each shipping day myself and 1-2 team members would transform the bakery into a makeshift e-commerce factory - baking, heat sealing and packing each order. We would then drive the orders over to the post office before cut off time (3:30pm) because the latest pick up time was between 1pm-2pm and we weren’t always ready in time.
March: Pop the champagne!
In March, as you can probably tell already, I got engaged! It was one of the most surreal moments of my life - sat on the beach in Noosa while my boyfriend collected rocks (not unusual for him) and came back with a pile of his treasure. He piled the rocks into my hands and hidden inside was a diamond ring :’)
April: Our first photoshoot
On both a personal and professional level, I was buzzing. The online orders were more popular than ever and the bakery foot traffic was picking up pace. For the first time ever I had enough money to invest in marketing - so I booked a photoshoot with a local photographer to capture the bakery in all her glory. The idea was to use the photos across the space of a month to trickle into our social media calendar, but I got so excited that I ended up posting them all the same day I received them.
May: Moving in to a new production kitchen
The only thing more nerve-wracking than signing a five year lease to pursue a dream you have to open your own bakery is to sign another one!
Five months into the year one thing became very clear: we could no longer keep posting cookies in the mail from our retail location. Until this point, I was baking all of the postal orders on Mondays and Tuesdays, followed by opening the retail store Wednesday-Saturday. That left Sundays for admin catch up, which was a pretty defeating schedule to say the least. But as any of my fellow small business owners will know, there is a period of any small business where you just fight to get everything done in time and quite often working 8 days a week, 25 hours a day, becomes your new normal.
Thankfully, it wasn’t for long. As the online orders grew and we could no longer physically make that many cookies in our little 5-tray oven in store, we finally found a production kitchen in the suburbs of Brisbane where we could shift production to.
Upgrading the operation (and the packaging!)
The shift to our new production kitchen was well overdue. Almost immediately we started shipping our product from the new location, as well as bulk batching all of our cookies, cakes and macarons.
The new production kitchen now operated five days a week - baking, packing and shipping hundreds of boxes of cookies every day.
The next area of improvement was our packaging, to ensure we were minimizing each step along the way and forfeiting old ways of doing things (like stickering each bag!) All of our cookie bags, boxes and mailer bags got an upgrade and before too long we would require a shipping container to keep stock of all the new packaging, and later by the end of the year a whole new warehouse (more on that soon).
Cake City
Back in the bakery our cake orders were in overdrive. I never anticipated the cake orders to pick up pace so rapidly, but almost overnight we went from a few cake pick ups a day to 50 a day at its peak. It was exciting to have a challenge to keep up with the orders, but I could sense carpal tunnel was going to catch up with me if I kept going at this rate.
I was in search of a cake decorator to join me and thankfully, just when I was about to give up, Ally joined our team to take over cake decorating.
The search for a cookie factory begins
Meanwhile on the production side of things, our orders just kept growing (and it didn’t seem as if they would ever slow down!) We were shipping thousands of cookies a day and suddenly our new production kitchen felt familiarly small and inadequate for the operation.
It was somewhere around the middle of the year we started the search for a cookie production facility. The aim was to find a bigger space where we could increase our cookie production, have a dedicated office and customer service team, and continue to build the brand’s reach in new markets worldwide.
When the search began, I thought it would be a matter of weeks before we found the right spot. But I was about to learn the hard way about square footage, grease traps, power amps, contract negotiations and all of the nitty gritty that goes into finding the right space for our cookie operation. Over six months later, we still haven’t found a space. It has been quite a ride of emotions finding two spaces that were perfect and missing out on each of these in favour of bigger hospitality groups who were more established and experienced than us. So the search continues!
My car turns pink!
In the second half of the year I finally wrapped my car pink (after talking about it since the day I opened the bakery). I always said I would wrap the car pink if we ever grew enough to warrant a marketing budget and finally, she got a pink upgrade! Now I get to wave to so many of our Brooki stans around Brisbane when you see the pink bus in and around the city. ☺
New packaging, more photoshoots
As the business continued transition into a brand, I had to keep outsourcing as much work as I could, while also keeping a hand on everything so as to not lose the vision. The first area I outsourced was our photoshoots and product photos, as my iPhone photos pale in comparison to our photographer Grace’s eye!
We continued growing our packaging range too, which is great from a branding standpoint but scary for my bank account. We went from ordering hundreds of packaging boxes to 20,000 of each box, which was both scary financially and logistically to store so much packaging.
Hong Kong for my birthday!
At the start of September I snuck in my first holiday for the year and visited Hong Kong for a few days with my fiancé. Unfortunately we arrived to a typhoon, which meant we only had a few hours to explore the city before being stuck inside the hotel to wait out the typhoon. But what we did get to see and explore, we loved! And of course I took this as an opportunity to stalk some bakeries, even talking my way into a kitchen tour at one of the local cake stores.
Filming with Tiktok
Nearing the end of the year, I had an exciting email pop up in my inbox. The team at Tiktok Australia were flying to Brisbane to visit Brooki and bringing an entire film crew with them! This felt like such a full circle moment seeing as though I had started using Tiktok only a year prior, to now having them visit the bakery in person with a film crew to interview me about the way Tiktok has change my business. This was so surreal.
Meeting so many worldwide visitors
Another equally surreal moment was when I had visitors coming into the shop from all corners of the world. I think I could cover an entire map with every continent at this point! It is always such a treat to meet so many of you who follow my journey from different parts of the world. It has certainly got me thinking about a worldwide tour next year!
My first magazine cover!
On the last week of the year I opened my emails just like any other working day and found myself plastered on the front of my favourite baking magazine. To say I was jaw to the floor is a severe understatement!
This year has been so incredibly rewarding in my journey to building a brand. There have been so many highs, only a few lows, and ultimately, there has been so much joy and fulfilment in growing the team behind Brooki.
I’m so excited to keep sharing my day in the life as a bakery owner videos to continue capturing the journey on Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube and via my bakeclub newsletter.