Baking Time Club

Market

Target market

Based on a survey we conducted and customer feedback, our typical customer is: Female, aged between 19 - 54, lives in the UK, USA or Australia. She loves baking as a hobby, she is the kind of person whose friends and family ask to to bake cupcakes for a hen do or cake for a christening. She’ll get involved in charity bake sales and sometimes she makes cakes for part-time work. She usually bakes once a week, so uses a lot of baking ingredients, enjoys trying new baking tools. Friends often give her ‘cake themed gifts’. On social media she follows Foodies and Baking Influencers / Personalities for baking inspiration and the latest trends. She enjoys watching the Great British Bake Off.

Our target customer purchases most of her ingredients in the supermarket, but enjoys shopping online for those specific items like cake toppers and novelty cookie cutters, when planning a specific themed cake. She may have friends who are celiac and/or vegan, so has made “free-from” cakes.

Some of our customers love receiving ‘happy mail’, post which is not bills or junk. The subscription model is popular with this audience, who enjoy crafting and making something they have seen on Pinterest. We believe that the Sprinkle Subscription meets the desires of this audience, providing them with a flexible subscription (delivery every 1-4 months), starting at £7.49 for a box of surprise sprinkles, which will transform their next baking challenge. The Sprinkle Subscription makes a suitable gift for parents to buy for teenagers just getting into baking.

For those who don’t like surprise subscriptions, we offer direct checkout on all products via the website.

Not all our customers are women, there are plenty of male bakers out there. Two of the Great British Bake Off winners were male, breaking the taboo that baking was traditionally just for housewives!
Our customers shop online because we believe that they like the convenience of home or work deliveries. We frequently dispatch orders to work addresses.

Characteristics of target market

In our survey of 300+ bakers 70% of them bake 1 or more times a week with 54% spending between £11 - £30 each time they buy baking supplies.

We believe the trend for more baking at home has increased due to the Great British Bake Off TV show. 14.8M people watched the finale episode in Oct’16. Many of those viewers are now hobby bakers and participate in cake clubs like the Clandestine Cake Club which has 19k members. Supermarkets saw an increase in ingredients sales after each program aired with viewers trying the recipes featured in the show. The home-baking market is now worth £900 million a year and is growing at a rate of 17 per cent per annum.

Along with an increase in home baking, 75% of bakers we surveyed have baked free-from. According to Mintel: "March '15 - Sept '15, 33% of Brits have bought or eaten free-from foods, with 22% gluten-free products, 19% dairy substitutes, 16% wheat-free and 16% lactose-free."
We provide brand consistency to bakers looking for free-from cake decorating supplies and will continue to create inclusive products. Mintel forecast the free-from market to reach £673 million by 2020 which shows a growing demand. The Artisan cake sales market in the UK was predicted in 2014 to grow to £786M - £826M for 2014-19 according to Baked Goods Euromonitor International, Oct’14.

Consumers use smartphones to shop so our website is optimised for mobile, desktop and tablet use. 65% of website views are from mobile, 31% desktop and 4% from tablets.

Marketing strategy

We have a growing social media presence with over 15,000 followers on Instagram and 7,000 on Facebook to whom we will actively market. Social media generates the majority of traffic to our website. Our focus includes generating engaging blogs posts and content to improve the website SEO and increase organic find through Google and other search engines.

We work with social media influencers and are looking to build the number of Sprinkle Ambassadors, who use our products and promote us to their own followers. This generates inspiring cake creations and recipes, which we share with our audience. This has contributed to a 36% increase in website visitors from April 2017 to May 2017, as a result of being mentioned and linked on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. We are planning on growing the number of food and lifestyle influencers we collaborate with, which will increase reach and brand awareness in the lead up to Christmas, taking advantage of seasonal shopping patterns.
Our plans include providing an online referral program to incentivise influencers and baking bloggers to link back to Baking Time Club website.

The raise will enable us to implement our PR strategy, as well as increasing the number of product samples we can distribute to raise brand awareness. We provided 250 packs of ‘Blogger’s Delight’ sprinkles for Blogtacular’s goody bags this June, which is an annual blogging conference in London.
We have previously targeted potential customers through social media adverts and will allocate budget to re-market to this audience. We will also expand the reach of our messaging through increased digital channel advertising, especially via Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Lastly, we will attend home and gift, cake baking and “free-from” trade and consumer shows, to meet customers in person and also launch our wholesale side of the business.

Competition strategy

While supermarkets do sell cake sprinkles, our experience suggests that they are predominantly they are of the single colour and can contain a variety of allergens such as wheat, dairy, beeswax, fish oil and egg. Our cake sprinkles are all gluten-free and dairy-free, providing customers with allergen consistency.

Supermarkets also sell a range of baking supplies, the items available vary per store and can be subject to change at short notice.

Our research suggests that online there are a couple of large sprinkle companies which sell sprinkle mixes based in the USA, however they only offer a limited selection in dairy and gluten free sprinkles, and the postage rates to the UK can be high.

There are a variety of online cake decorating websites, which tend to resell the same brands: Wilton, PME and Rainbow Dust. We aim to differentiate by selling our own diverse range of quality baking supplies, sprinkles and giftware, less ‘traditional’ to those already available, perfect for the trendsetting baker.

To our knowledge we are the only sprinkle subscription based in the UK, however we are aware of a competitor based in Canada. We have plans to develop a variety of baking gift boxes and subscriptions in the future to appeal to different levels of bakers.