Elizabeth Vernon is interrupted in mid-sentence one late winter afternoon by a boy at the door of Birdie’s Bakery (formerly Biddie’s Bakery), the Akron-based mail-order cookie operation she and husband Mike operate alone.
The child’s request is predictable, one the proprietors have grown accustomed to hearing during their three years in business on Baird Street.
“I can give you a cookie today, but just a plain one. That’s all I have,” she tells her young visitor as she dispenses the free treat, then returns to her conversation with an explanation. “Just my friendly neighborhood children coming by on their way home from school, wanting to know if we have any rejects. There’s always broken ones and mistakes.”
The kids, some would say, are getting a real deal. Customers across the country pay $17.50 for a ribbon-tied tin containing one dozen individually-wrapped, just-made-from-scratch cookies. The varieties range from the requisite chocolate chip to cherry macadamia cookies in white chocolate and chocolate truffle brownies.
Elizabeth’s fancy shortbread creations, themed cutouts hand-decorated with icing using different pastry points, start at $2 apiece. The bakery also produces custom-decorated cookies made with cutters Elizabeth fashions herself. Her trademark item is the gingerbread teddy bear, a 10-inch “greeting card” cookie included in the company’s eight-fold brochure.
Mike, 39, admits that the fledgling bakery is still primarily a seasonal endeavor, and a specialized one at that. About 60 percent of business is done during the holiday season — a time when the couple employs approximately 20 temporary workers and manages on a couple hours’ sleep each night. Elizabeth operates an antique store bearing her name at the Medina Antique Mall to help supplement the bakery’s income.
“I don’t think it’s something you would want to start and leave your day job for,” she says of the bakery.
But even as a side-job, Mike reports that gross sales receipts have doubled each year. Approximately 20 percent of all orders come from the area; the rest are from out of state. And he says that about 20 percent of all prospective customers who have sampled the product — in other words, new mailing-list additions who have received gifts of cookies from current Birdie’s customers — order again at some time.
Robin Segbers, director of client services at Bill Brokaw Advertising in Cleveland, says the figure is double that posted by one client, an established regional mail-order purveyor of a traditional holiday food item, for repeat business among current customers.
The bakery is a far cry from the Vernons’ first entrepreneurial exploit, a tea room they opened in the Trumbull County town of Holand a decade ago.
“We were a little ahead of our time on tea rooms,” Elizabeth admits. “People weren’t really supporting them. Now, of course, there’s lots of them.”
The couple moved back to Akron after the tea room’s demise, and Mike went to work for West Point Market, the upscale Fairlawn supermarket his father owns and operates. It was there, he says, that he received a thorough education in “just about everything — working with people, how to manage, store operations, merchandising, food.”
He served as food service director, human resources manager and store manager; rewrote employee hiring and training manuals; and transformed the basic deli into a gourmet delight. But Mike, who loves to bake, still wanted his own business — a mail-order cookie business, to be exact.
“He did a lot of research on what most Americans eat the most of in a year and what’s the most popular food item,” Elizabeth says. “Cookies is what kept coming up.”
Elizabeth already had some experience in the area. While Mike was working at West Point Market, she made the decorated cookies sold there — an item Birdie’s has supplied ever since the bakery opened in November 1997. And a mail-order business, they believed, would allow more flexible hours, generate less overhead and provide a much larger potential customer base than a walk-in shop.
The Vernons’ first marketing move was to compile a mailing list of about 200 friends, relatives and acquaintances, each of whom received an announcement of the bakery’s opening, and place ads in the West Side Leader and local trade publications. New customers were added to the mailing list, as was anyone who received a gift ordered by those customers.
“The customer is paying for the sample, actually,” as Mike puts it.
Cookie gifts were donated to charity fund-raisers, and the couple worked with the Akron Regional Development Board to promote the business.
The Vernons also took their cookies on the road to trade shows, art and craft fairs, and business-to-business events, where those who sampled their wares could request a mailing. Outings closer to home included promotional appearances and demonstrations at West Point Market.
“From there, it was all word of mouth,” Mike says.
The two-color brochure was — and still is — designed with the help of students at Akron University, where Mike studied graphic design.
“We can do all the art direction, and they just put it together for us,” he says.
He adds that the results are good and the cost is about one-tenth of what he’d pay somewhere else. The brochures, sent once a year in October, are supplemented by occasional postcard mailings and a Web site.
The result of the Vernons’ efforts is a mailing list that includes names of about 2,000 individuals and businesses across the country. A visit to an outdoor crafts show at a New Jersey art school last summer yielded an order for custom cookies in the shapes of lighthouses, sailboats and seashells to be served at an April wedding on Cape Cod.
Elizabeth says corporate customers have ordered their cookies as gifts for the likes of Disney executives and Neiman-Marcus co-founder Stanley Marcus, who in turn ordered a couple dozen cookies to be shipped to his Dallas office late last year. The couple is considering expanding into the wholesale market, but Elizabeth believes their prices may be too high for some.
“Really, our prices are pretty reasonable, considering how much work we put into them,” she says. “You might go to a coffee shop and pay $3 for a piece of coffee cake, and it’s not even made with real butter.”