Idea

[misty]

Hi

I'm hoping that I can tap in to your wonderful honesty/feedback for an idea I have had for some time.

I have 2 small children and have wanted to run my own business from home so that I can be around for them as and when, so I came up with the idea of setting up an online store to sell luxury homemade traybakes - brownies, flapjacks, caramel shortbread etc.

Customers will have the choice of just ordering the traybakes, which will be beautifully wrapped so can be sent as a gift directly to someone, or if it is a special occasion eg. birthday, new home, new baby etc they can opt to purchase a 'pack' which they can make up themselves eg. select a tray of brownies, and 2 pretty mugs for someone who has moved home, or some cute booties & a teddy, and some shortbread & flapjacks for the new mother/baby.

You could even order a lovely handmade wooden box to put your goodies into, for yourself or to send to someone else. You can select a handmade gift card to be included with your order if it is a present for someone, so they know who it came from!

All the products are homemade and contain no artificial adds.

So, my question is would you buy something like this over the net? What sort of price would you pay for say the tray of brownies (1lb) or a pack for a new baby?

Hope you can give me some feedback so that I don't make a complete pillock of myself and set this all up!

Thanks

It sounds lovely. Are there any laws you would have to be concerned with, regarding the sale of food? You might need to have your kitchen inspected by the council. Perhaps there are mumsnetters out there who might know the ins and outs of this.

I wouldn't buy one over the Net (sorry, just wouldn't trust the quality, would imagine I could get better or same locally at lower prices, or I could just think of a better gift, full stop).

But hey, I think I'm the only Mumsnetter too cheap to consider having a cleaner!

Janstar - thanks, I do know that you have to register with environmental health (which i've done) and they've already been to inspect the kitchen which has passed
Zebra - no offence taken, I know some people will love the idea and others not, just wanted some sort of gauge before I take the big plunge.
Have already had a dummy run with about 20 local friends where we took orders, but this is a bit different to selling to unknowns out there.
Incidentally i got the idea when i'd just had ds1 and a good friend sent me some lovely biscuits via another internet site and i was sooooo impressed that someone sent something for me and not just the baby! It was lovely to have yummies to offer guests as obviously i hadn't had time to make any

I think it is a great idea, and I hope you do well with it. Please keep posting about your progress.

Misty, I think it's a great idea - especially the new baby packs.

The trouble is, like Zebra says, I would be very wary of buying such things on the internet and I don't think you will be able to rely on web-site marketing alone. You would however be able to sell lots once people start seeing reviews etc. so I think you'd need to allow tme/money to do things like send freebies to M&T groups, run competitions in conjunction with local papers and maybe even standing around in shopping centres giving out free samples.

If it weren't for the extortionate cost of sending them to Sp[ain I think I'd buy some (if they're good! ). Would pay maybe £5 (tops) for a tray of brownies and up to £30 for a baby pack - but then I'm quite frugal and wouldn't particularly pay extra for the wooden box.

The thing is, if you could find a local outlet (street market, bakery, NCT-sales, that kind of thing), I would indeed buy at such venues if they looked good enough!

would pay up to £10 for well wrapped tray of flapjack as a gift for someone, including the postage. Another tenner for nice additions to make it a pack for a baby or something. Would only pay a fiver for myself though, so the gift idea would work better as i imagine postage would be quite hefty.

What a great idea
You will have to cost out your brownie ingredients very carefully as I'm sure you know that they are expensive to make with all that chocolate and all those eggs, in order for you to maintain your profit margin and mark up. Bear in mind you will also have to list all ingredients and be sure you can trace your suppliers.

Good luck

Suew & zebra ? brilliant idea re using the NCT thanks. Shame though I don?t live in notts area, you sound very organised! Do all of the NCT groups run along the same lines i.e. cost of advertising and handing out leaflets etc?

Great idea re sponsoring coffee mornings, will def look into that locally. Is the Sainburys mag available online do you know? Haven?t got one near me to get a hold of a copy of the article, which sounds interesting.

We have thought about having a stall at a couple of farmers markets, just to spread the word (we live nr Cambridge so would attend that one also).

Thanks everyone else ? it?s really motivating to hear all your replies and ideas, I knew mumsnet would come up trumps! We have costed out everything as accurately as possible, at the moment we are trying to find good local organic suppliers for flour, eggs etc ? if anyone is local to Cambs do they know of any good ones?

Just as an update I tried out a couple of new recipes today (I am gonna be so HUGE!!) for a scrummy apple cake, and some caramel shortbread and they are lovely (even if I do say so myself ;-) ) so our range is expanding already!

misty I read an article this week about a Mum who had done this, I will try and find it and come back to you later.

I remembered where it was quicker than I thought!!

It is in April edition of Eve magazine, don't know if it's in the shops yet, I've just got it through on subscription. Page 16. She is called Hannah and has 3 children.

Her tips: invest in decent equipment, best mixer you can and fan oven is best for batch baking

She needed a health and safety certificate for her kitchen and she's also done a basic food hygiene certificate at college.

Try getting regular orders from local cafes, and WI Markets (www.wimarkets.co.uk) they only cost 5p to take part!!

She now works around 25 hrs a week, roughly 2 elaborate birthday cakes per week, plus traditional round cakes and her restauarant orders.

She charges between £15.50 and £35 per cake.

With regard to costing apparently she used to underestimate how long it took to make the cakes and charged approx £15 for something elaborate that took about 2 days to make!

Word of mouth and personal contacts are much more effective than advertising big bucks.

It's a really good article with lots of tips.

Hope it all goes well Misty, I think it's a lovely idea.

I like the Meg Rivers website; for cakes, shortbreads etc, you can order them with or without box. Very useful prezzies.

bluesky, that's very useful info, thanks so much. I've actually just started the health & safety course at a local college, and do the exam next week even tho' it's not a legal requirement for my type of business which is considered low risk food - just thought it would make people realise how serious i am.

Re the Meg Rivers site - sort of my competitor if you like, i know they do a few traybakes. However we will be offering 'extras' which they don't e.g. soft toys (teddies, tiger & elephants at the mo), booties and dou-dous (like comfort blankets with teddies heads on!) for the baby packs, pretty mugs & wooden trays for new home packs (or birthdays if that's what people want!) and a few other bits and pieces.

Hopefully there is room in the market for more than one company like this!

As another update (this is changing daily as well, perhaps I could start a blog ((web diary)) for any other budding entrepreneurs!!!) have now ordered the lovely wooden boxes, and the soft toys and had a quote come back for our cardboard packaging boxes (which will be white with pale pink stripes) but these are quite expensive so we are just scraping the pennies together!!!

Just another update...... we've just installed the ecommerce software onto our site!! It's so exciting
We've been frantically baking over the last 2 days as the photographer needed all our goodies for some photo's he is taking for the website/brochure we are having printed. So guess what I'll be doing this weekend? Uploading all the piccies and 'personalising' the website.
The order is in for the cardboard boxes and they take about 2 weeks to arrive, so once we have those we are pretty much ready to go.
We've asked the lovely ladies at Mumsnet about advertising on this site, but not the best solution for a new and small company so if anyone wants more info about us, please feel free to contact me direct

Good luck with it Misty, have just caught up with how you are doing.

Just wanted to say Good Luck and please stand round in the grafton centre giving out free samples ...

Will you deliver abroad or not?? Sounds like a great idea and I wish you all the best!! Would love to know the address when you are up and running.

hi misty

don't know how well your project is going but good i hope. think it is a fantastic idea, wish it had been mine!!! love cooking.

just a quickie to see if your still after advertising ideas, cause i help out on a free mag that goes out to mums in Sheffield think we have a ciruculation of about 1000. Avertising in Chatterbox is still a bargain at £50 for a full page, £25 for a half page and £12.50 for a quarter page, contact me for more details if you are interested.

Hadn't seen this until now, I just wanted to say well done. It's great to see someone with the initiative to do something like this. Best of luck with it all, and let us know how you are getting on.

Thanks everyone for all your lovely replies - it's so nice reading them!

katzguk - thanks for that info, at the moment we aren't actively advertising as the site isn't ready but I will def come back to you when that changes for some more information.

Update for this week - we've had the gift cards delivered and they are lovely! We'll have a selection of 6 ranging from birthdays, to new baby, new home, thankyou etc so should be one for every occasion! Just trying to tweak the software so that customers can select a gift card if they are ordering as a present.

The photographer is still 'editing' the photos he took last week - needless to say none of the goodies we sent him have come back, so that's 6 trays of cake, and various packs of biscuits he's had all to himself.... not bad!

Spent all day today making some wedding favours for a friend who is getting married tomorrow - have made hazelnut shortbread mini hearts, in stacks of 5 with the top 1 iced with the bride & groom's initials, all wrapped up in cellophane and tissue paper matching the bridesmaids dresses (ruby red) and little name tags attached with cream ribbon - they look great, and it's our first 'official' order!

Happy days....

Cazzybabs - your suggestion may not be that bad an idea - not far from Cambridge. Do you think something like that would be good promotion? Would people taste something from a company they don't know??

Incidentally we've donated one of our Gift Hampers (wooden box, 2 pretty mugs, teddy, 3 traybakes & some shortbread) to the 'Real Nappy Week' promo bus which is going around Cambridgeshire this week - I know they are in the Lion Yard tomorrow (Sat) so if you want to be in with a chance of winning it, or some 'real' nappies, pop along!

Me again, with another update

Our boxes were delivered last week, all 1000 of them.... all unloaded by me from the lorry with the really unhelpful driver ....all now taking up the entire dining room....all of which have to go back
Basically they are pink stripey boxes, but the stripes haven't printed properly, although the company still thought it acceptable to send them out - what happened to QA???
So, we are now waiting for the rubbish boxes to be recollected, and for the new ones to be re-printed - good job we aren't lined up with orders waiting to go out!
The website is all but finished, just fine tuning it now. We can't go live until the boxes are here though, and we are waiting for a delivery this week of the china mugs for the gift packs (mixture of Cath Kidston and Churchill Great Shakes mugs)and the gift ribbon to wrap around the traybakes and biscuit packs.
Someone has suggested we read the Anita Roddick story of starting a new business, I think it would be heartening to read about all the hassles someone else had starting a new business
Ho hum.

misty,

Despite the boxes not being printed properly, things really sound like they're going well! Thanks for the update --- I was just thinking of this thread the other day, and couldn't remember its title. Best of luck!

maomao, thanks!

misty - good for you, just caught up with this thread.
Once you're up and running if you want someone to do you some PR then give me a shout - women's interest mags, mother and baby titles etc.

happy to do a bit for nothing if it helps.