How Gooey Center 15x’d sales on Hotplate
Gooey Center is known as LA’s best cinnamon roll for a reason: the buns are soft, pillowy, generously frosted, and always baked fresh. They’re so irresistible that even professional athletes (we’re looking at you, Anthony Davis and LA Dodgers) can’t stay away.
But Christopher’s popup wasn’t always drawing hour+ long lines and celebrity DMs.
6 months ago Christopher was selling most of his cinnamon rolls wholesale to coffee shops around LA. You could find Gooey Center in a bunch of bakery cases around town, but Christopher’s margins were taking a big cut. Wholesale generated significantly less profit (~40%) than selling directly through drops on Hotplate. He offered weekend pickups from his commercial kitchen in Lincoln Heights and occasionally at a café in Eagle Rock, but he just wasn’t seeing much demand for pre-orders.
Over here at Hotplate, we saw that Christopher had massive potential, despite low pre-order volume. @GooeyCenter had over >10k followers on Instagram and was selling a delicious, hot cinnamon roll every weekend that only 10-15 people seemed to know about.
We hopped on a call with Christopher and heard his goal loud and clear: increase direct sales (pre-orders) to make better margins.
We also asked him what he thought was keeping customers from pre-ordering through his Hotplate drops. A few different concerns kept coming up:
Customers were really spread out across LA and his pickup spots weren’t convenient enough
Customers didn’t know how to pre-order, or why they should pre-order
Customers were getting lost in 3 different sales channels: wholesale, nationwide shipping, and pop-ups
Since there was a range of possible weak points, we set out to tackle each one with purpose. We took Christopher’s concerns, broke them down into 5 key challenges, and developed solutions for each.
Challenge #1: Were customers too far away?
Los Angeles is a super spread out metro area where residents tend to stay within a 5 mile radius to avoid traffic. Christopher was worried that his East Side pop-up locations (Lincoln Heights and Eagle Rock) were simply too far for customers to get to. He thought the only solution might be to look for another popup location on the West Side.
To test this theory, we did 2 things:
We sent a survey out to his subscribers. While folks were spread out, the biggest cohort of respondents actually were on the East Side.
We also designed and put posters up in different neighborhoods with trackable QR codes. The posters near his East Side location got the most scans.
Using these data points, we knew location wasn’t the problem and it actually made sense to double down on his East Side popup and capitalize on already engaged customers.
Challenge #2: Gooey Center’s brand wasn’t consistent or as memorable as it could be.
When we asked Christopher to describe the personality of his brand, a few different vibes came up. There was a cutesy, warm, and fuzzy tone that went along with his logo of a smiling cartoon cinnamon roll, but also a cheeky and suggestive voice that made an occasional appearance. Followers on social media jumped at the opportunity to poke fun and play along with the innuendos.
So, there was a bit of dissonance between our initial perception of the brand and the personality underneath that his audience was actually relating to. The suggestive humor was the voice that best caught his audience’s attention, entertained, and engaged them. We posed the idea of fully embracing the humor, and letting go of the warm and fuzzy innocence that he once thought a bakery had to project.
Fully leaning into the cheeky sense of humor allowed Christopher to align his brand’s persona with the side of him that customers already loved. This made engaging with his audience fun and was the key to appearing consistently and authentically online.
Re-heating instructions
This insert instructed customers how to best enjoy their cinnamon rolls and turn it into a shareable experience.
Embracing his brand’s character also made it a great time to get new photos of his product to use in marketing collateral. We connected Christopher with Joseph Duarte who captured his new, edgier, brand aura in this photoshoot:
Challenge #3: Customers didn’t understand how to pre-order.
When we first started working with Christopher, there were lots of different ways to buy Gooey Center cinnamon rolls. They were in ~20 coffee shops, available for nationwide shipping, and at weekend popups. On Instagram, the weekly wholesale schedule was more prominent than the link to his Hotplate storefront. Christopher put lots of effort into clearly communicating his 3 different sales channels, but the result was that in-person popups simply weren’t the priority. To scale direct orders, this had to change.
The first step was committing to a consistent ordering schedule. This is crucial because it allows customers to make a habit out of ordering and build it into their weekly routines. Christopher typically opened orders on Wednesday, but the exact time would vary. He landed on 6pm.
With his schedule locked in, we turned to social media to make it abundantly clear to followers how to pre-order. We worked with Christopher on 2 key updates to Instagram:
@gooeycenterbakery
He re-organized his Instagram bio to communicate 4 things
what he makes
his ordering schedule & location
a clear CTA to pre-order
and the link to his Hotplate storefront.
He posted a ‘How To Order’ carousel and pinned it to his grid:
Subscribe to Hotplate notifications at www.hotplate.com/gooeycenter
Orders open Wednesday @ 6pm. You’ll get a text when we drop, just click the link and check out.
Pickup and devour
Leave a review on Hotplate and tag @gooeycenterbakery
These changes transformed pre-orders from an afterthought to the main event. Now anyone who came across his profile would know exactly how to subscribe and pre-order.
Challenge #4: Drops weren’t optimized for conversion or driving urgency.
Now that customers had clear instructions on how to pre-order, it was time to fine-tune the mechanics of the drop itself. To do this, we made changes in 3 key areas: menu, inventory, and automated texts. Specifically, we
Re-organized the menu into 2 sections: classics and specials. We also introduced a sampler pack (”The Threesome”) but kept the total menu to 5 or fewer items.
Set limited inventory with the goal of selling out. This was a key part of changing the perception from abundantly available to limited batch, and gave Christopher another marketing opportunity: he could post stories near and at sell-out.
Injected Gooey Center’s personality into the drop text and pickup reminder copy. This was another opportunity to make the brand experience consistent and lean into the voice that engaged audiences most.
Challenge #5: There was a lack of excitement around pre-ordering for popups.
Gooey Center had its loyal die-hard fans, but to grow demand for pre-orders, we needed more people shouting from the rooftops to bring new customers into the fold.
To get the conversation started, we reached out to LA-based, food-focused microinfluencers and invited them to try a cinnamon roll in exchange for content. These creators had already been hearing the buzz, so were ecstatic about the opportunity to come try for themselves:
Microinfluencer coverage led to more and more organic coverage, including reviews from
As the crowd at his popup grew, Christopher celebrated the excitement and the value of pre-ordering by documenting the scene and expressing gratitude for the turnout. He posted stories of the long line, thanked his customers for their support, and reminded followers they could pre-order to skip the line next time.
Results
In less than 6 months, Gooey Center went from
selling 50 rolls a week to 500+
~15k Instagram followers to almost 40k
630 Hotplate subscribers to 5,400+ (8x’d subscribers)
never selling out to selling out in a minutes or less
and also
moved to a bigger kitchen to increase production capacity
improved margins (more pre-order volume, less reliance on wholesale)
expanded his team
added more popup locations all over LA, including Orange County and Santa Monica
