Indianapolis Monthly magazine just ran an interesting feature article on Gwendolyn Rogers, proprietor of a local store called the Cake Bake Shop. I have never been to it and am not the target market. But I thought there were a few interesting elements to it that are relevant not just to marketing businesses but cities.
Rogers is not an Indianapolis native. She spent time living in Los Angeles and Idaho before arriving there. She had worked for a modeling agency in LA and her husband worked in the film industry. Perhaps because they both worked in the entertainment sector, Rogers understands the power of celebrity for marketing, and how to go about getting celebrities to help promote your product. This appears to have been a big part of how she built her business up.
In 2014, she opened her bakery from scratch. She created the recipes, seeking the finest ingredients, no matter the cost. She designed the restaurant, the decor, the packaging. Four years later, customers line up to purchase cakes that top out at $210. Her gift cards hang at Costco. Williams-Sonoma sells her cakes online. She has won awards and has a celebrity following, from Steve Martin to Paula Deen. This spring, the baker debuts her biggest challenge to date—a 3,600-square-foot Cake Bake restaurant in the heart of Carmel.
Rogers smiles. Her mouth quivers. Even she can’t believe how big everything has gotten, how big she is dreaming. In the beginning, she just wanted to take financial pressure off her husband and put her three boys through college. She did not expect to sell 1,200 slices of cake a day, as she did one recent Friday. She did not expect to land on Oprah’s “O” list.
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There’s another essential ingredient to Rogers’s success, one that plays out in real time as the owner greets a woman at one of Cake Bake’s little round tables. She returns to the bar brimming with excitement. “Her husband just happens to be Darius Rucker’s agent,” Rogers says. “I am going to see Darius Rucker tonight and I love him, and she’s like, ‘I’m going to get you in there.’ So I was like, ‘I want to bring him a cake,’ and she was like, ‘Let me call my husband right now.’”This is Rogers’s signature move. She slips a pretty foot in the back door. Brings celebrities a free cake. Someone snaps a picture. Rogers posts it on social media. Orders flood in. If you can’t be Matt Damon, you can at least eat the same cake.
Of course, it doesn’t always work. John Mellencamp never responded, though six months later one of his people bought a bunch of cakes to take back to Bloomington. The Darius Rucker gambit may not pan out.
“We’ll see what happens,” Rogers says. “We’ll have to follow up with this story. I’ll let you know if I made it.”
I find this interesting because very few independent retail shop owners in cities like Indianapolis would ever even think about trying to leverage celebrity endorsements for brand building. Rogers, with her LA experience, thinks about it all the time.
I was reminded of the micro-distiller Cardinal Spirits that I profiled for CityLab. Their co-founder had lived in Brooklyn for many years, and so understood the value of going after the NYC market and the high end press there, resulting in getting featured by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times – and CityLab. He was also not intimidated by the prospect of doing so.
It seems to me that interior cities could do a much better job of leveraging these types of marketing approaches to sell themselves as places. But few seem to do so, possibly because it’s just not on their mental map, and also because they don’t know how it works and/or feel intimidated. That might help explain Nashville’s superior marketing skill. The music industry there always had to manufacture buzz to sell its product, so that same mindset and skill set translated to selling the city. What’s more, the same companies that do business in Nashville are also in New York and LA and London, so there are connections to leverage.
Brooks appears to be a natural marketer. She also created a sort of fairy land aesthetic for her shop, with tremendous attention to detail, and plastered her logo all over everything. Here’s a pic from their Instagram.
It’s a bit rococo for my taste, but apparently the customers love it. From the article:
The tiny restaurant is heavily decorated, a cross between a French bistro and the inside of a coconut snowball. Lavish garlands festoon the windows. Towering cakes resemble the hats Southern women wear to church. Cookies and brownies sparkle. Literally. They’re topped with Pixie Glitter, edible dust Rogers trademarked and sells online. Men in pink vests and silver neckties and women in matching aprons greet customers. Mozart plays.
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She had her eye on a Broad Ripple cottage she thought would make a good bakery, but she had to secure a bank loan and renovate it. She built fake cherry trees and hunted down twinkling lights from the Netherlands. She shopped all over for uniforms, then had the idea to embroider her logo over the back pockets of the khakis so staffers couldn’t carry their cell phones.
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“It’s not enough for it to taste good,” she says. “It has to look good, too.”
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Other keys to her success: A masterful marketer, she puts her logos and patterns on everything, from rubber spatulas to pens to take-out napkin rings. It also helps to have a husband with Hollywood connections. And her timing was good. She rode the heels of the cupcake explosion ignited by Magnolia Bakery in New York City and Candace Nelson, who opened her first Sprinkles shop in Beverly Hills in 2005. But don’t call Cake Bake a cupcake shop.
I don’t tend to frequent cake shops, but I’m not aware of any stereotypes about gentrified cake shops to match that for coffee shops, barbecue joints, etc. So far as I know her aesthetic isn’t just from the urban extruder, though someone may correct me on this. This helps it stand out.
Who knows whether she will succeed or fail in the future, but to have survived as long as she has selling a product at a price point far above what the extremely price conscious Hoosier market is used to paying says something.
If you read the piece you’ll also notice that she’s honed her origin story to create a mythos around her path. Like a number of these origin stories, it includes taking a crazy leap of faith, in her case buying plane tickets to London for a contest that she hadn’t even been selected to participate in yet but ended up winning. De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace! You an get a sense of these origin stories and how they are constructed simply by reading magazine profiles of people.
By saying that she honed her origin story, that’s not to suggest that she made it up but rather that she took the facts of her life and created a compelling narrative out of the right parts of it with elements of the mythic, the heroic, vulnerability, etc. Frankly, it’s a to-do item for me. It’s also a to-do item for cities. How can they create that authentic backstory and mythos that points forward to something aspirational people want to be a part of?
This is something that’s definitely not on the mental map of people in interior cities. If anything, interior cities would seek out middling local celebrities to give their product local authenticity. The fact that this woman reaches out to anyone, with or without a local connection, makes her quite different for this region.
Are cake shops considered markers of coastal city consumption in the US? Usually when I think of coastal consumption I think of well-known vernacular products in California and New York, like Korean tacos or art depicting the Village’s water towers. The latter example isn’t random – I saw it in droves at a museumified medieval town in the Riviera called Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Ad the former, if someone opened a kimchi taco restaurant in just about anywhere that’s not California or New York I’d presume the intended clientele is tech workers who’d had that food in the Bay Area or else people trying to affect Bay Area mannerisms.
I’m not referring to the fact that it’s a cake shop, but rather that she marketed it by seeking endorsements from celebrities.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway tries to do this. They promote The Race in part by having celebrities drive the pace car or wave the green flag.
So it’s not a foreign concept at the “almost city” level here.
The trick for the City/metro would be to get these same people to be part of a YouTube “48 Hours in Indy” series.
Think about all the people you associate with the Speedway – Jim Nabors, Florence Henderson, etc. It’s hardly a bastion of contemporary star power. They badly underperform in leveraging celebrities as a brand builder.
Yeah, I thought of Gomer and Flo, but I was thinking more of Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson (back in the day), David Letterman, and drivers whose appeal crossed over into pop culture like Mario Andretti, Helio Castroneves and Danica Patrick.
The very idea of self-promotion is seen as questionable by midwesterners. We’re taught from childhood to keep our heads down, play by the rules, and to not take advantage of others. “Tooting your own horn” is a criticism in the Midwest. The real lesson in this story is that midwesterners need non-midwesterners to do their PR. Social and cultural diversity is the real issue. The midwest lacks it and needs it .
That’s nice for her, but how can blue-collar Midwesterners or immigrants really hope to replicate her coming in with this level of outside buzz, connections and resources? Flying to London on a whim for media exposure is presented as a triumph of grit and moxie here, which seems unlikely for the corner kolaczki shop with an owner behind the counter.
but to have survived as long as she has selling a product at a price point far above what the extremely price conscious Hoosier market is used to paying says something
Every place has its elites. I was in a rural crossroads hub of 1,500 recently where two families had slapped their names on most businesses (grocery store, gas station, motel, etc) and at least one guy was farming 3000 acres outside of town. I bet Indy can support at least a couple of these shops and has a critical mass to flaunt it to each other, a world away from its “price conscious” demographic segment.
I think that Mr. Renn focuses too much on the elites at times. One of the conclusions that I have come to reading this blog is that outside a small handful of cities in the US, what most cities really lack are a critical mass of entrepreneurs trying out new ways of doing things and employing people in the process. The McKinsey analysts and Wall Street bankers are actually pretty useless to the rest of the people in NYC, except for the people who provide them services, and would be even more useless in Indianapolis. An Elon Musk, on the other hand, would be employing skilled manufacturing workers, engineers, and managers, and maybe in doing so some of those folks would themselves see new opportunities to start a company.
And where does Elon Musk live? Los Angeles.
I forgot to write that I was not intending to insult Mr. Renn personally with the McKinsey comment. I don’t really think management consultants, and consultants in general, are useless. It is just that they play a particular role, and that role isn’t I think what distinguishes thriving cities from other cities.
I also anticipated that kind of comment about Elon Musk. My point is that focusing on entrepreneurship is somewhat different than focusing on elite workers. My suspicion is that entrepreneurs are focused on opportunities, not amenities. Now, maybe having more elite workers in a metro provides entrepreneurs with more opportunities in the form of important and scarce human resources (I could definitely see this for a certain type of management that has experience working with and for new companies). I just not sure that type of person is looking at cities in the same way as Amazon or Google or Apple when they are thinking about sourcing engineering talent (and managerial talent for that matter, as I believe that being a manager in a large bureaucratic firm is actually quite different, and requires a different skill set, than managing in a young, growing firm).
I think that it is instructive that when Mr. Musk started up an online, electronic payments company, he was located in San Jose. Now that his major businesses are in aerospace, engineering and manufacturing, he is in LA, because LA is a place with far more opportunities to successfully launch that type of company. That is to say, it wasn’t Hollywood or any other sort of branding that brought Musk to LA, so far as I can tell. It was the opportunity to realize his visions for colonizing Mars (I mean that only partly in jest).
Amazon is going to hire a lot of people in DC and NYC, and Google will do the same in NYC. That will provide a nice little boost to the economies of both DC and NYC, and I do suspect that it helps tech entrepreneurs in both cities that are looking to sell their companies to one of the tech behemoths simply because it will be easier for them to garner the attention of those companies, and maybe to poach some of their employees. But ultimately, I don’t think that those Amazon and Google employees will add all that many entrepreneurs into the mix for NYC and DC.
Interestingly enough, Musk’s brother Kimbal has focused on a limited number of second tier cities to open his restaurants. He has three or four locations in Indy.
But he isn’t employing high-earners, he’s feeding them.
Brilliant marketing. We need more of this kind of thinking – and it doesn’t just have to be celebrity endorsements. It can be creative, unique approaches in general.
Many businesses are good at doing what they do (baking, building, brewing, etc.) Most businesses are terrible at self-promotion.
I found this helpful and have shared it locally. Thanks for putting it out there.
This concept is reminiscent of the old “Dewars Profiles” and the now-revived American Express commercials, but locally focused on brand-building-by-association.
I’ve always felt that Columbus missed a marketing opportunity by not using it’s most recognizable brand, Victoria Secret. I think that opportunity has passed with the decline of the supermodel motif, but it could have been something.
I have loved everything about Cake Bake since it opened…very well done…and the offerings are quite good…loved it all to pieces except for the prices, just a tad too high. Makes it a special occasion destination.