New vs Old

New vs Old

I am generally frugal in life with a low personal burn.

However I wasn't always frugal with my business - I thought I was, but I wasn't - which is the worst trap we can find ourselves in - unaware of our own habits and mindsets. It was only by the force of Covid and lockdowns and when I was faced with the question of "quit and find a job", that I tore my retail business down to bare bones, introspected every expense and started to build frugally - for real this time.

For my new readers, I started Cheeky Food in April 2015 as a retail brand of premium Indian condiments selling through independent stockists across UK, in March 2021 I started pivoting towards the hospitality industry primarily selling our range of sprinkles and as of March 2022 I paused/shut the retail arm of Cheeky Food to become a b2b enterprise selling stock and bespoke sprinkles to national restaurant chains and manufacturing units in the UK. 

Below I share three examples of my old "frugal" ways vs the new real frugal ways.

Product Launch

The Old - 

1) Pick a recipe from my family treasure of condiments. Something I, my family and my friends enjoyed 🚩🚩🚩2) Find suppliers for the ingredients (ignoring potential scalability and supply interruption issues) 🚩🚩🚩3) Create samples and send to 5 loyal Cheeky customers (customer selection was always biased to the all star fans who loved everything I touched) 🚩🚩🚩4) Live in my echo chamber of the good feedback and ignore negative (but valid) concerns 🚩🚩🚩5) Hire designers for the prettiest label designs 🚩🚩🚩6) Hire printers for X thousand labels (in an attempt to keep unit costs down) 🚩🚩🚩7) Hire photographers for glossy lifestyle images 🚩🚩🚩8) Publish on website -> Publish on social media9) Burn money on digital marketing to push sales 🚩🚩🚩10) And once again, ignore poor ROAS and data and refuse to delist simply to use the X thousand labels, designer, photographer and other sunken costs 🚩🚩🚩

Can you see how many red flags I ignored during this process?

The New - 1) Hire my trusted NPD chef to create 3 versions of my idea of a new sprinkle or one requested by an already paying customer (maybe more work could go into prior research and market trends as we grow)2) Acquire ingredients at cheap or no cost from existing suppliers (relationships are key here)3) Pack the samples frugally with home printed labels and send to 5 trusted paying customers who are experts in the said sprinkle cuisine4) Get feedback, but ONLY invest in nutritional analysis, micro testing, and factory trials if there is continued interest from the customer (must admit that my years of experience in sprinkles give me much confidence in the production and micro viability of the finished product even at NPD stage)5) Take to production and invest in cost of goods ONLY when the first PO is at hand. 

I understand that the above processes are also quite different as my business has moved from retail to b2b. But I think the principle of a lean product launch can be applied to retail as well. 

Businesses need a direct line of communication with a varied range of customers (could be through newsletter signups, physical food markets, complimentary with other product sales or even social media shoutouts like "first 100 comments get our new product for free"). And then have a good way of studying the feedback before taking recipes to production. Even so the first version of launch should be just that - "first version" with a good period of testing, validating and improving before the product is final. Higher fixed expenses in product launches like packaging, designer and photographer hires need to be pushed as far out as possible in a frugal product launch.

A good example of frugal product launch is what I witnessed with ManiLife's cocoa dusted peanuts. At at least 3 exhibitions I saw their team handing out tiny samples of the cocoa dusted peanuts in tiny little bags to customers. I don't know what their feedback collection method was, but I saw them test the product for a solid few months before launch.

Photography

The OldI love pretty lifestyle food photos - who doesn't!I'll admit that I have burned money through food and videography in the retail times of Cheeky Food. I assumed that a product launch COULD NOT BE DONE till I had product shots against white backgrounds and in lifestyle settings. I also assumed that for my website to look attractive to customers, everything had to "match". This meant that if I was to launch new products, I should either photograph them in the same manner as the existing range or use the opportunity to reshoot everything.

At a day rate of £500 and assuming 20% margins at sale, I would have to sell £2500 of product to just recover these costs! Were they warranted ? Nope - never at the product launch stage anyway.Total spend in 5 years ~ £5000

The NewYes customers might be inclined by flashy photos to make the first purchase, but NO ONE is coming back to buy a product they didn't immediately loved just because the lifestyle shot included a plethora of delicious looking food. In my new frugal setup, I take product shots on my phone, jazz them up with some filters and then off they go to customers/website/newsletters. Only when the product has made 3 sales and enough money to warrant a professional shoot, will I now invest in hiring a photographer.Total spend in 2 years ~ £180

One might argue that this method is not possible for retail brands - I thought so too, till along came Lexi's Treats, where Alexi admitted that all early versions of his products were shot by him on his phone. And his ooey-gooey treats continued to be a sellout month after month! His method of building his business was a wrench in my wheels of overspending on professional hires before establishing repeat paying customers for my products. 

Website

The Old

In the course of 5 years of Cheeky retail I went through 3 websites - every time I tried to be frugal but truth be told there is nothing like a frugal website dyring the early stages of a business. Websites simply by their nature are expensive - 1) Developer costs2) Maintenance costs3) Your own time costs4) Continuous change costsIn the early years of business, the entire proposition is (or ideally should be) so fluid that what we do and what we sell can change every few months. Now to reflect this on a website would be expensive and time consuming. My first website was built during our launch at Selfridges - I mean I HAD TO have a website when people saw my products right ? In retrospect I even think that launching a brand through Selfridges was a vanity idea and set my small business for big expenses (read about this in my next blog)

My second website was a massive improvement on the first, SEO compliant, more designer and yet more expensive but not e-commerce centric.And that meant that when Covid hit, and I pivoted online, I needed a third e-comm focused website like Shopify.

The New - When I closed my retail business in March 2022, I shut down my website - cold turkey, no web presence. For 8 months I simply focused on business development, product development and customer acquisition. It was only when I had a good run of repeated paying customers did I even get a sense of what I was selling! And who I was selling to! And that is when I launched my new b2b focused site - www.cheekyfoodcompany.comAll design elements were borrowed from a previous branding exercise to keep costs low. 

Funnily the 8 months of having no web presence were also months of highest growth in my business. This was a big learning for me - A business CAN exist without a website! Especially in today's day and age where instagram/tiktok are cheap and cheerful ways for businesses to have direct comms with their customers. You can edit your business page for free, continue to launch and test products for free and continue to sell for (almost) free! If I was to run a b2c again, I would simply direct customers to my social media pages and establish a good run of sales before investing into the expensive exercise of website building.

My frugal journey was forced due to a very real chance of having to shut my business down during the lockdowns. At the time I thought it was the worst thing happening to me, but in retrospect, it was the best! It challenged everything I thought I knew on it's head and led me down a way more suited to bootstrapped business building.If you enjoyed my post, please subscribe for my weekly newsletters. Next week I share why launching my brand with Selfridges was a vanity exercise that set me on the path of heavy expenses.Also read more about my frugal setup and costs involved here -