059: Packed with Love: Turning a Bakery into a Subscription Box with Jonica's Bakery Box

Have you ever wanted something so bad you just kept trying no matter how many times it took to be successful? You're gonna love Jonica's story. She walks us through how she put her bakery into a box to share with the world. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today I've got a special guest Jonica's here from Jonica's Bakery Box, and we're gonna talk about her subscription box journey. But what's unique and different about Jonica's subscription box is that it's full of perishable items. And so we're gonna break down Jonica's bakery, the road of her subscription box, and we're gonna talk about packing and shipping perishable items. So Jonica, why don't you just introduce yourself and let's start with how you started with the bakery.

Good morning, I'm Jonica Thompson. I am founder and CEO of Jonica's Bakery Incorporated, and we are in Guntersville, Alabama. I started my bakery journey really as a teenager, baking for other people, baking for friends and family, a few character cakes here and there, and went into corporate America. Graduated high school, I wanted to go into criminal justice and psychology. That's what most of my college career was and didn't use a lick of it. I've never used it at all. So the baking just never went away. Everybody wanted me to, to make a cake for this party or make it for that party. And it just quickly became something that I was good at. And people enjoyed, and I liked that. And so I would do that on the side and did that for about 10 years. And one afternoon, looking at a slot open in a shopping center, I made the decision to open a bakery.

I love that you did this kind of as your side hustle for a long time before opening the bakery. Is that what you're— so you did this for like 10 years, then in 2009 You just said, okay, here's a prime spot for me. I think I'm going to go all in. Were you nervous? Were you scared? Or had you had so many years of experience that you felt very comfortable going into that?

I really wanted it out of my house. That was the thing is I had everything everywhere. I wanted it out of my house. My husband wanted it out of my house. And I tend to just see something and kind of jump and figure it out later. So I saw the building, I looked at it, it was this tiny space. And I signed the lease and then I figured the rest of it out later.

I love it. Okay. So now we've got the bakery open. It's probably busy. I know you're having some major life changes at this point. So let's talk about what's happening. You did have this idea you wanted to do like a goody of the month type box since you opened the bakery, but life kind of got in the way a little bit. Let's talk through that and then let's bring them to March 2021.

After I opened in 2009, we were so busy that I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what to do to keep up with the business that I had. I wasn't prepared in that way. It was the first time that I had done it. I just opened the doors and said, here I am, let me give you this yummy food that I have. And I had no clue. So I learned a lot in that first bakery about what not to do. About a year in, I had a lady who was just like me and wanted to do the same thing. And I jumped at the chance to sell her everything that I had and run out the door and let her take it. So that's what I did. And I went back home and I went back to corporate America for just a little bit, still baking on the side, and decided that I was going to try it again a few years later in Pell City. And I did kind of the same thing happened just on a bigger scale. And so I had some major life changes and decided that that just wasn't the right time. Fast forward all of these years of still doing it on the side and people just begging me to make things for parties. I moved to Guntersville, Alabama. Married my husband in 2014 and was bored out of my mind. I'm not a person who just stays home. I only had one child at home at the time. Um, I was at the school so much for PTO that he got out of the car one morning and said, I'll meet you in your office.

That's hilarious.

So I decided, here I am, I'm in Guntersville. There's nothing here. I couldn't find a bakery. I had to go 30 minutes, 45 minutes away to find something. And so I talked myself into doing it again.

I didn't know this about you. And so here's what I want our listeners to learn from this. You tried it the first time, it failed and it didn't fail because, you know, you didn't have great things. It just failed because you weren't prepared for it. Okay. That didn't stop you. You tried it again. It didn't work out the way you wanted to. But here you are now, several years later in a completely different town and you're trying it again. And I just love this about your story because you're not giving up. You can see the potential there and maybe you weren't right for it at 2009. Maybe you hadn't learned enough about business then and maybe things in life weren't right for it the second time you did it. But now here's the third time. It's a different scenario. You're a different season in life. You're probably learned a lot more as a business owner at this point. And you're like, you know what? There is a gap in the market here of this new town that I live in, and I know that I could serve this gap. And maybe it hasn't worked out in the past, but you didn't let that stop you from trying it one more time.

That's true. I did. I saw a big gap here, just the clientele, what they needed for entertaining, what they needed for parties. And I knew that if I couldn't get what I needed— and I didn't do a lot of entertaining, these people, they were going to Birmingham to get it, or they were going to Huntsville to get it. And both of those are 45 minutes to an hour and a half away. So I took all of the things that I had learned about what not to do and sat down and decided how I was going to do it this time. And we opened here at this location in Guntersville in 2018, and it has been nonstop since. But the biggest thing there was I put in place some of those business aspects that I didn't have before. And I put in a team instead of trying to do it all by myself. That's a whole nother podcast in itself, right?

Yes. Because you can't do it by yourself, especially when you have a physical location, you are tied to that location. And if you don't have someone that can help you with it, it feels like a heavy burden all the time.

Very much so. I have an amazing team.

So now we're at 2018, things are rocking and rolling. You're thinking, okay, this is successful. I've got it this time. I'm going to do this, we're doing it right, and this little bug is still in your ear about how can I do this goody of the month box, right?

It is. I wanted to do that box from the very first time I stepped foot in my first bakery. I just knew that if people could get what we were giving every month and they would be so excited about it. But all through that journey, I was scared to death, scared of the logistics. I didn't know how to make it happen. I didn't know how to ship the product. I didn't know how to package the product. How was I going to keep it from getting damaged? What if it took too long to get there? All of those things. And then the tech side of it, how do I get them there? How do they choose it? What if they don't like it? And I just stayed in my head about it for so long, not laying out the logistics. And then in March of 2021, I came across Sarah. This little ad pops up. Of course, I'm about 4 months pregnant. I see this how to start a subscription box. So I started digging in a little bit and I started going through sales page and this is it because I'm a box checker. I have a creative side. I want to do what I want to do when and how I want to do it. But having a roadmap is what I need. So I clicked on that. I signed up for coaching week. I did coaching week in my bed, sitting up very pregnant and decided that's what I was going to do. The question at that point was, do I do it before baby comes or after?

And what'd you decide?

I did after, and I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did. I tend to just jump in and put it all together, but I did. I waited until he got here and I just soaked up as much information as I could. I went through every training that I could get in. I was, every time we were live, I was there soaking it up, putting it in my notebook. And then after he was born, he was in the hospital for a little while. We spent that time. I was able to step away and do that. And then when we came back in, I just said, it's time. If we don't get it launched before fall, everybody eats it all. If they don't eat sweets and good food any time of the year, they're going to eat it in the fall.

Right.

So I knew I had, had to get it in their hands.

You got to get them hooked on the, on the sugar and chocolate before January comes around and everybody's, everybody's going on a diet.

Yes. Unless I was planning to ship salad, it had to go before January 1st.

Yes. So tell me how you built your launch plan. Let's talk about that. So we're gearing up to launch now. What does this look like for you?

Oh my goodness. It was so messy. I started just putting it out there. I had a big following from my other bakeries, from the town that I lived in, from the following that I had built where I am. And these people come in my store every day. They're on my social media. They see it. So I started talking to them about it and I had to figure out how to transition those people to purchasing what we were doing and sending it to someone. I needed them to take what they believed in with us and what they had tried and, and they knew the quality of our product and I needed them to send it to someone else so that we could get it out into the world and do that. So I just started talking to do that. I went to, into our website, which I had not paid much attention to in the 3 years that I had been at this location. It was literally the website and just a couple of things on it. And it's not much different now, but I built a landing page. And I started sending people there. And then we just decided on a launch date. It was right around Halloween and we just put it out there. I opened the link and sent it out the door.

And so what'd you, what'd you end up with your first launch? How many subscribers did you have?

We had 11.

11. Okay. So it was a start. It was like, it was like, okay, I'm finally, I'm, I'm starting this. We've got 11 people that said, yes, I want this. Um, and I think that's the biggest first milestone when we, when we start this subscription box journey is just getting the thing launched because it's a lot, it's a lot in your head. It's a lot of overthinking. It's a lot of thinking that things have to be perfect, but just getting it out in the world. And now that you've launched, you've got 11 subscribers. You said it was messy. A lot of our launches are messy. Um, and then what happens, what happens over the next several months? As you continue to show up and show people the subscription box?

So we, when I started, I thought that I wanted 50 and I thought, I'm just going to throw this out the door. I have so many customers. I have so many that come in every day. This is what I want. And when they started coming in and I got to 10, 11 and I closed, I was a tiny bit disappointed. But then once it closed and I started building that, I was actually very thankful that I had a small amount. Because it enabled me to put the stuff in the box and get it together and make some mistakes that first round that I could fix without it being on a mass scale. So I was, I was very thankful to have just put it out there. I had been waiting and waiting and waiting on building this huge launch that I'm very thankful that it didn't happen that way, that I just went ahead and said, I'm going to put it out there. I'm going to put my things in a box, even if I only have 2 to see how it works. And so they went out into the world. And people started— they were just loving them. They were so excited that I have people, fans that are in Arizona, and they were actually able to get— they were like my third subscriber. So here I am, I'm in Alabama and they're in Arizona and they have my product and they're so excited. And then somebody else that they're talking to or that they give the giftable to is trying it and they're finding me. So in December we had 3 more subscribers. Actually, we didn't— we had one more in November. I made an extra box. And I had— we sold it. In December, we had 15, and I made 2 extra boxes. And so I put out 2 spots. I have 2 spots left. So by this time, I've done a box opening. People can see what's in the box, because when I launched the first time, they didn't. It was kind of secretive, you know, what is this product?

So I'm, I'm saying someone in Arizona who's not local has no idea how delicious your things are, right? So they're taking a chance on you, right?

Yes, yes, very much so. So I made 2 extra boxes, and after I'd done the box opening, there was just a tiny bit of buzz about it. Then all of a sudden there's these 2 slots, and they grabbed them immediately. And then I'm in Christmas because it's November, Christmas in the bakery. So I was very thankful to be small. And then the week of Christmas, people started buying them and sending them as gifts, subscriptions. And in January I had 31.

So you've tripled it. You tripled it from November to January. How does it feel at this point? Does it feel doable? You're like, okay, I went from 11 to 20 to 30. Like, how does it feel now?

It was, I had the, I had the basics down, but now I had to do it and figure out my time, figure out the perishable items that I'm putting in it, because I can't just figure out these few boxes. I had to plan out a little further and look at how we were repackaging them, what their shelf life was to go to fix 31 boxes. So the logistics of that changed again a little bit. And then in February we had 38. Okay. And I did the same thing both months. I have made an extra box and got on and created that scarcity a little bit. Okay. When I'm posting all these things, they want the box now, but we're closed. They want it now that we're packing and they see that we're packing. So when we finished and we shipped, hey, I had these 2 extra boxes and had subscribers jump on.

I think that's a great way to continue to grow, but to manage your growth, you can't just open it like unended because you You're physically creating everything that goes in that box and you have to do it in sort of these batches. Right. Um, and so being able to control your growth and know your limits and just the steady climb is what's happened over the last 4 or 5 months.

It is. And I have 42 right now going into March.

And so what do you feel about growing for 2022? What do you, what's your vision for where you're going to land this year?

I would like to get up to the 100, 150 mark this year. I'm not sure how large I really want to get this particular box until I can see it on a bigger scale, just because of the logistics that go in it. But it opens the doors as a bakery to shipping anything that we have because we took the time to do this in this controlled manner. Now we can get anything just about anywhere. We've shipped overseas to Hawaii, to some of the troops. We've shipped several places.

So let's talk about shipping for a minute because we get questions like this a lot in the group for people that don't have experience with shipping, you know, products that are perishable like this. So I know you went through some like testing, um, lots of things. Let's walk through what you did to kind of figure out what kind of packaging and shipping that you, you ended up with.

Terrified. I was absolutely terrified to put cookies in a box and ship them somewhere because what happens to cookies? They crumble. So the first thing that we did is I took a box similar to the size of what I have now. I use a 10 by 10 by 5 mailer now. A good sturdy box, and we packaged each one individually. I bought a heat sealer so that when we got the little cookie packages in, I made sure they weren't too big. You don't want your cookies sliding around inside the package. We heat sealed it, that locked in the air, and then we packed it with peanuts as we possibly could around it to shut the box to send it to Hawaii. And we sent out several, I think we sent out 3 boxes that first week. We just asked for addresses. We asked people, hey, do you have somebody who's in the military that we can send a box to? We wanted to test their process, how long it stayed in the mail system, how long it stayed in the military system. And then, you know, do you have somebody special that we can send it to that's in this part of the country? And we individually wrapped those and did them 3 different ways and sent them out and had a piece of paper when they opened their box that said stop. And it gave them their call to action for what we needed for our test. They got these free goodies from us to enjoy, but we needed them to take a picture of it. We needed them to tell us how each item was. We created a survey and then they brought that information back to us with photos and we could see what we needed to do differently and adjust.

That is so smart. That is probably the best thing I've heard in a long time. The way that you just sent them out, ask them to be your your, your test group of people. Okay, we're— we know how, how good our product is. We don't need taste testers, but we need shipping testers. And so we're gonna have to send this to different parts of the country and the world and see what happens when we do that before we charge people money for it, right?

Exactly. My biggest fear was to get things out, send it all out, and it arrived just a mush or crumbles or— and have to refund all of that money.

So did you learn from that test?

We learned that the cookies did need to be individually wrapped. We have a crinkle cookie that's a softer cookie that we can wrap in threes and to not move at all inside their packaging. The butter cookies that we shipped in the beginning, they did move inside the packaging and they cracked. So if it's a tight fit in its portion of the box, it will make it. The other thing that we learned is that So you can't control which way your boxes are going to turn. So you have to be able to— nothing can crush it. So in this box we have shipped preserves, a jar of strawberry preserves, a large coffee mug. And so we had to find a way to isolate those items and putting those in a corner. The coffee mug, we actually put holes in the box as we folded it. And put a zip tie to the mug so that it wouldn't let it shift across the box. Used a different kind of mixture of peanuts and shreds this month to keep the jar from shifting and made sure that everything was packed in its place and it just wouldn't shift at all. If you can keep it from shifting and you can individually package it tightly, it will actually make it.

You've actually sent me 2 boxes at this point, and what impresses me about your boxes is that not one thing is mushed or broken in either time that you've sent me a box. And so that's a really hard thing not to do. Right. And so I think you've figured it out and I think it's really great. Now I did notice that the first box that you sent me had, did it have ice packs in it?

Yeah. So we have, um, if you, I've done it two ways, I've taken the ice packs and putting them as for the way we wanted to settle. So in the summer months, we will test this a little bit more because we don't want to ship fudge and, you know, it melt on its way. But I had some products in it last month that I thought just needed to stay a tiny bit cooler, so I put the ice packs inside a Ziploc bag so that they wouldn't sweat or bust onto the product, put them in the bottom of the box just to create a little bit— I didn't necessarily need it to be cold, I just needed the atmosphere inside the box to be a little different. And I tested those in the first time that we shipped as well to see if they would make it. And I asked in that survey what temperature it was when they felt the items. Were the items cold? Were they warm? So that we could know how long those were lasting. And they actually make little bags to go in it. You just put them in your freezer. They're one-time use and they make them for different time periods, a 2-day or a 4-day. We've shipped with dry ice as well. I've shipped a cake, an entire cake, with dry ice, and it got there with just a little bit of icing coming off of the side. So it just needed a little more of the dry ice. But you can take those cold— for lack of a better term— products that are out there and use them to control the climate that's in your box for whatever time you need it to.

That the February box that you sent me was full of chocolate, right? But there wasn't any—

there wasn't any cold packs in there because it was a different kind of chocolate. It did have one piece of fudge in it, but the harder semi-sweets that we used to dip with, um, it didn't need it. And because it was February and it was so cold, I didn't need it.

Okay, so that was going to be a real big test for you being in Alabama and shipping across the southern states.

We will not ship buttercream in the summer, and we will probably not ship much chocolate, that's for sure.

Yeah, you just have to plan around that, and you have to think smart about it and not, not send everything out on a wing and a prayer hoping it gets there. You've just got to be smart about what you do and when you do it, right? What's the future look like for the physical bakery? Now that you've got the subscription box launched, you're growing every month. What does the bakery look like?

We are, we have become a destination place because we're in a lake town. People come here and they have to go to the bakery. That's what everybody wants to do. So we're expanding, we've expanded our dining room this year. We have a very big lunch business. The boxes are going to expand into other items. So people will be able to say, I would like almond butter bars shipped to this. Missy in Indiana is the first one who's waiting on our almond butter bars. To get to her. So we're going to expand shipping this year and just our online presence and converting what we've built here in town to where it will speak to the people online digitally and bring in the rest of the country.

And you just mentioned that you're kind of a destination spot. So do you have tourists or visitors there a lot?

We do. We do.

Talk about the box when they're visiting. Do they get, do they get to see what the box is? Because if someone's visiting and they're going home, this is a prime way to attract that traffic over to your site and get them to become a subscriber. They can get this every single month. They don't just have to visit the lake to come, you know, to get Jonica's Bakery. They'll be able to get it every month. Do you have a display or something in the bakery that shows your subscription box?

We do. So I make an extra box every month so that we can do our own box opening. And then we display that box opening near the register so that as customers come in, they're asking, what is that? And if we're talking to someone who's out of town, or in this case, we had a a customer who came in every single Saturday and they moved to be closer to family this weekend. And as soon as they got to where they were going, they subscribed. So now they're getting our box in Georgia.

I totally think you should get like a little QR code sign with your box and you could put a little sign next to it that said, uh, because bakery, no matter where you live in, and then you could put your little QR code on there. People could scan that and get more information about it too.

This month we put a sticker on the sides of the box, and I laughed about it when you did our box opening because when I went back to do your box, I didn't put those two stickers on the outside. But this month's box actually had a sticker on each side that said what's in the box with a big arrow and a QR code on the outside so that anybody, post office or wherever they are scanning the box, could scan it and see what was in it.

Yeah, they're like, oh, what is in this thing? That's great. Because, you know, it's like I always quote this, but Marcus Limonas on The Profit, he— when he talks about your boxes, he talks about them as like they're a billboard that goes out into the world. So this billboard of yours, this box of yours, is just traveling the country and it's in a lot of different people's hands and it goes across a lot of different people's eyes. And so if people are curious, um, that QR code on the outside of the box, like, what is this? I wonder what this is. And they can easily just click it and go check it out and Maybe become a subscriber or share that with somebody else too. So let's talk a little bit about— I've got, I've probably got some bakers or other, you know, people listening that have perishable items. And if they're listening, what advice would you give someone who's just getting started with perishable items? Like, you've done the test, you've done the hard work, but what advice would you give them to help them get going?

I would tell them to actually go physically get a box and put their items in it. And that sounds very simple, but it changes your perspective when you look at it, when you physically have it in front of you and you're trying to package it and put it in there, it changes something about the way that you look at it. And then mail the first box to yourself, go put it in the post office because it's not going to go very far or take it to the next city, drop it in and see how it comes back to you first, because that first one's probably not going to fare very well unless you've put tons into it. So it's a real good way to see it from your own eyes as to how you receive it and open it. And then the next thing I would say is hand that box to someone else and watch them open it, because watching someone else open and go through it, um, it tells you a whole lot about it as well.

Like me going through your box and I'm like, okay, I don't know what a crinkle cookie is, and I'm looking through the box and you're like, how do you not know I've never heard of that term before. Those were delicious, by the way. Can I just say that? Um, okay, Jonica, I think you've given us so much knowledge here about, um, the shipping and the packing and just how important it is to do your research up front. I'm really excited about your bakery box. I'm excited about the consistent revenue that it's going to bring to your business, and I'm excited that people outside of where you live get to enjoy your items now. If someone is dying to see what's going on in your box, where can they find you?

They can find us at jonikasbakery.com.

Awesome. Jonika, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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