Sales numbers and sales goals

Unfortunately, we lost all of our business earnings data from the first few months, but started fresh in January of 2004. I had this feeling Sugar wasn’t really meeting her sales goals, from the small size of the deposit slips. John was still doing the sales calls, and we lost a few clients due to poor sales of our products.

Oh, funny story about this one espresso company we had sold to. John brought by samples and they were excited about the tarts, although they said that high end things usually don’t sell. They finally agreed to try the tarts, which John took to mean they would start a standing order, which was how most of our clients were ordering. So we started delivering to them. Then one day, John was delivering and the barista refused the order, saying that she was not supposed to accept anything from us. When I called later to find out what was going on, the owner yelled at me, accusing us of delivering products she hadn’t ordered. I tried to explain to her it was a misunderstanding, and that we had thought she wanted a standing order, and then she told me we could come pick up the tarts from the previous week, that she hadn’t opened the box. Well of course those were already too old, and I was shocked that she thought I would take them back and try to re-use them. I happily voided all her orders and told her she did not owe us anything, and apologized for the miscommunication.

Anyway, our sales for January were only about $234 so we needed to do something to boost things. I was still working at that catering company about 2 days a week, which generated enough money to pay the rent for the kitchen, but John was thinking why not increase our sales to pay for the kitchen?

I had just done a cookie calendar and was thinking about adding some fancy cookies to our lineup. I made up little baggies of cookies and started showing them to our clients. This was NOT the big chocolate chip cookie, and this was something that could retail for $1.00 or so. I made up little lintzer hearts and little heart shaped cookies for Valentine’s day. They sold really well, or so we thought. Then I tried some cookies for St. Patrick’s day which were really cute and they had little fortune scrolls in the packs. They didn’t sell as strongly, but people really liked the shortbread. This is probably where I learned that ideas are hard to sell, but cookies are good to eat.

Meanwhile, John was playing music at an event for one of our clients who had been coincidentally ordering a large sized tart once/week. So he decided to bring some of my cookies to the show and hand them out. The client expressed interest in having some new cookies at his shop, so I set to work on some samples. At the time, there was a lot of interest in Lavender as a culinary herb so I worked on some lavender shortbread and some chocolate dipped mint shortbread. I remember putting a big purple white chocolate “L” on the lavender. I don’t know why; it looked a bit stupid, like the “L” on Laverne’s sweater from Laverne and Shirley. Of course any of the clients I showed it to were like “yes, I like the shortbread, but I don’t like the “L”.” Of course, our client from the big shop we really wanted more of our stuff in, wanted us to cut the shortbread differently. We decided that would be ok, but we wanted him to buy the whole pan in that case. Another client in a Tea House up north wanted the smaller shortbread as well. I started to have a lot of pride and even cockiness when it came to our products, and when I went on sales calls, I was like “of course you want our shortbread, it’s the best in the city”. It was weird that we actually had to convert the Tea House dude to our shortbread, since his shortbread was so crappy and wasn’t even made with butter, but he eventually caved and agreed to buy our shortbread, which we developed two additional flavors for him: lemon ginger, and orange cranberry. Things seemed to be looking up, and at least some of our deliveries wouldn’t be just $6.00 each drop, so that we were at least heading in the right direction to become profitable, or so we thought.