Blondery – a Cloud Kitchen That Went from Home Baking to a DTC Empire in a Week

The biggest challenge has been kitchen space for us. And finding something that was affordable, yet flexible. That we could actually grow in, unfortunately, late last year, we noticed that we needed to move out within eight days. 

Because of the Hurricane Ida flooded a facility. For the past year or so we’ve been in like a whirlwind of kitchen stuff. Like, we’ve moved way too many times — that has been like one of the biggest struggles, but also, I think, on the other side of all of that is managing our customers’ expectations around what like how this process works, it is a perishable good. And I think like because people are used to Amazon or just like E-commerce in general. 

They’re either expecting it to take like be a very short window of time before they receive their product or they may be expecting a longer period, but they’re concerned about if the product will be stale, stale by the time they get it. They start thinking like, if I order on Monday, and it doesn’t ship until Friday, that means that the product has been sitting in our facility since Monday and that’s not true. Like when we get your order on Monday, we’re probably baking it On Wednesday, and then we’re shipping it on Friday. So yeah, it’s just like managing our client’s expectations. 

And that’s actually why we got involved with LateShipment.com because since ours is a perishable product, people are very anxious about it and they think something horrible will happen to it if they know stays in transit for a little longer than it has to, but constantly reassuring them like, at the end of the day, we’re just making brownies, right. So there are very few things that can go wrong with a brownie. It’s not ice cream, it’s not a cake like It’s not pie, it’s a brownie. Even though we package it differently, and call it something else. 

I think people are still very anxious about getting food in the mail and they’re scared, they’re nervous, they’re excited. So just managing the fulfillment and shipping process so that the customer knows what’s going on has been the biggest thing. It’s like one of our biggest customer service inquiries. It is like when will my order ship? How long does it take? Well, how long will it be fresh by the time it gets there? What if it gets delayed in traffic? Like it’s just so many things that people are concerned about? When it comes to like perishable products