The client

The LadyBird Bakery is an Essex based custom cake maker and decorator who started up in 2010. It was a new business started by the owner, Sarah, who had recently quit the City for a simpler life. She had completed a course to become a Master Cake Decorator and her cake designs and photos were exceptional. She knew what she wanted to call her business and was ready to unleash her cakes on the general public.

The challenge

When she came to us, Sarah had been getting orders through word of mouth, but she wanted to spread the word and get the bakery noticed in her local area. Sarah had decided that, for the most part, she would serve a ten mile radius from her kitchen. She wanted a brand identity and logo for The LadyBird Bakery, along with a website that could serve as an online gallery of all the designs that she does. She also needed her stationery designing, along with promotional leaflets to go with her cake deliveries.

What we did

Initially we started working with Sarah on her logo. She knew she wanted it to be simple, with just two colours, so cheap to print, and with a handwritten font, for a homely style. We went through several iterations together and once we had a design we liked, we built a pallet of colours to support the brand from that.

This was then used to develop Sarah's website. It was created as a gallery of all of her images, with information about the types of cakes she bakes, the ingredients she uses and the types of events she caters for. By using solid search marketing techniques, we were able to identify what keywords Google searchers were using to find businesses such as Sarah's and we were able to build this in to the website to help capture those people.

Sarah's website also features Flickr linked galleries, allowing her to update the images on her site herself. A Google Calendar is also embedded so she can manage her orders and bookings and visitors can quickly and easily see when she is booked or has availability.

Sarah was keen to keep in touch with her clients regularly so we set up and linked to a Facebook page, where she talks about her latest creations, and a Flickr page where she can showcase even more pictures of her work.

Finally, we created some simple A6 flyers to go in with Sarah's orders and deliveries. These used her excellent photography (you eat with your eyes you know!) in order to really show what she could do. They used the same style as the website and we used one of our local printing partners in Woodford to provide a large quantity at a great price.

The results

The biggest measure of the result has been in the website. In a very short period of time, due to the search engine optimisation work we've completed, Sarah has crept up the Google listings with her cake designs appearing in Google Image searches. With this, and the Google Map on her website which shows her free delivery locations, she has been getting regular emails and phone calls requesting quotes for cakes from people in the surrounding areas of Epping, where she is based.