Jordan Rondel founded The Caker after honing her skills during holidays spent baking in her grandparents' kitchen in Paris. She’ll take cake mix creation over invoice creation any day. But she admits she’s fallen for Upstock – so much so that she’s taken on doing order management herself.
“It was never really my job to do this side of the business. But now that it’s so streamlined I actually really enjoy doing it. It's just so easy.”
Jordan created a cult brand that mixes luxury, fun and cheeky domestic glamour via her social media channels and as a judge on the Great Kiwi Bake Off. But it’s the little things that can threaten to hurt your customer experience and ultimately your brand.
When you’re promising stockists a product that’s about fun and decadence the last thing you want to do is hit them with a call saying those three little words ‘Out of Stock’.
“Before when we were out of stock of something, customers had the ability to order it anyway. And so we had to reply individually and say, ‘sorry, sorry’.”
“Now with Upstock, they can see that we're out of stock of something and know to order it next time. So that just cuts out a whole lot of work and disappointment, which we love.”
Jordan says The Caker wants to continue growing its stockist count in New Zealand and as it expands in Australia.
“Upstock helps with that because of the discoverability that it gives to brands. We just want to keep growing and becoming that household name. We want to make the luxury cake mix space more known and understood. So the more people who experience our products, the better.”
More from our chat with Jordan Rondel:
Who are your wholesale customers?
There's a huge range of them. It goes from typical supermarkets, and then it goes all the way to little tiny boutique homeware stores and kind of everything in between. So florists, boutique grocery stores, and ice cream shops. Pretty much anything you can think of that sells more high-end goods is a stockist of ours.
What was life like before you started using Upstock? What were your operations, your processes? How did you manage your ordering?
Well, it was a bit of a mess. You don't really realise how bad something is until it's changed. When you're in it, and it's kind of working you just get by. So I look back, and I'm like, 'Gosh, every single order that came through came through in a different format'. So some stockists would send us an email and some would simply call us. Some stockists would send us their own PO. Some would fill out this weird Google spreadsheet form thing we had on our website. We were getting all these different types of orders come through in all these different formats. The details of all our stockists were a mishmash. They were all saved in a different way. We did obviously create a spreadsheet, but it was hard to update. It was hard to remember to do that. And then just in terms of knowing when and what customers ordered, stockists ordered, that was a real mess too. And now with Upstock, and its Xero and Foodstuffs integrations, it's all in one place, so it's awesome.
How did you discover Upstock?
We received an email in our inbox. And I've got to say, since moving to the US, the number of cold emails that we receive from people who are trying to promise ‘to change our whole world, our operations, our systems are all going to be suddenly streamlined, and it's going to cost us next to nothing’! Well, we get dozens of these sorts of emails. But this one in particular did spark our interest. And I remember taking it to our Operations Manager at the time. And she was like, ‘Oh, it just seems like another one of these sort of scammy things, we can't afford it’. She sort of pushed against it so me and my co-founder pushed against that and decided to sign up and we're so, so grateful that we did!
What does your team think of Upstock?
We just brought on a new team member and as a testament to how easy this is to use, it really did take us less than an hour to train her up to use it – and she's away. She didn’t even have one question. So it's perfect.
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