SusieCakes

SusieCakes’ founder, Susan Sarich, grew up in Chicago, where she was called Susie by her two beloved grandmothers, Mildred and Madeline. Every day, Susie would come home from school to enjoy her grandmothers’ company over a glass of milk and a fresh baked treat. These family memories and family recipes inspired the launch of SusieCakes Bakery back in 2006 and the business has been spreading across the West Coast ever since. With over 27 in-store locations across California and Texas, Susie’s bakeries built up a vast customer fanbase that was growing fast, but SusieCakes had ambitions to share their delicious treats with the rest of the nation and launch nationwide fulfillment.

For a modern brand, the old SusieCakes buying experience was quite limited. First, the look and feel of the website did not match the playful, joyful, fun, & delicious brand that Susie was able to convey in-store. Additionally, if west-coast based customers wanted to place an online order, they were redirected to the POS system Toast to complete checkout there.

Toast POS was the system SusieCakes used to connect all 27 bakeries and allow customers to make orders online, but customers were forced to leave the SusieCakes domain and checkout natively on Toast. This rigid system inhibited rich product merchandising and disabled the ability to talk about the quality of the ingredients or better guide customers through path of purchase. Not only did Toast present challenges on the branding side, but the POS system also limited scalability in terms of being able to ship and fulfill orders nationwide.

SusieCakes was in dire need of a strategic partner that could help transform the regional bakery into a recognized national bakery juggernaut and so they came to Trellis.