Network Solutions – Small business conversations and working together for small business success

Too Sweet To Pass Up: Free For All Cupcakes

When you have three kids with food allergies, what do you do for their birthday parties? If you’re Jeanny Lee, you develop your own recipes and sell specialty cupcakes to other parents!

Sisters Jeanny Lee and Janice Kim started Free For All Cupcakes about 6 months ago. Having little kids with food allergies, Jeanny had to develop her own recipes since her kids can’t eat store-bought food. As she met more parents of kids with food allergies, she started developing recipes for other parents. In September 2008, she and her sister Janice launched the Free For All Cupcakes website and started taking orders from customers.

As they found a niche market to serve, they also found a joy in being business owners. The best part about being small business owners according to Jeanny is that they are “able to provide a product that people need and enjoy, especially children.” Janice also revealed that running a small business allows them to have personal relationships with their customers. “When you work for a big company, that personal customer service is kind of lost. It’s nice to have one-on-one relationships with customers. We want to maintain that if and when we get bigger.”

As many other small business owners do, they wonder about how big their business should grow. “We can stay small, where we work out of our kitchen, which is licensed and certified, and it keeps us busy. Or do we want to take the next step with a major marketing effort? The hardest thing for me is to figure out what I want.”

One of the things that they want for sure is a nice website. They feel that it’s very important to have visual representations of their products because they don’t have a brick and mortar store. They also want to provide product details as customers ask for a lot of information, such as ingredients and how they prevent cross contamination when preparing food.

They found that it was nerve-racking in the beginning to launch a website. Not knowing anything about creating a website, they hired a Web Designer. They sent photos and concepts of what they wanted to have on the website to the Designer and FreeForAllCupcakes.com was born. They like that the website is easy to navigate and that it has enough information without looking too busy. But they are also looking for ways to enhance the website, such as adding a blog to keep in touch with their customers.

With pretty much no marketing, Free For All Cupcakes currently generates their business from referrals from current customers and local food allergy support groups. To help them get started (and they promised me free cupcakes!), I’ll be working with the cupcake duo to build an online marketing program. I’ll record our journey along with online marketing tips relevant to other small businesses in this blog.

So I’m off now to work on their online marketing plan. If you have any ideas for Free For All Cupcakes marketing or website enhancements, please leave your comments. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll share some cupcakes with you!

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