Reflection: Kneading our future

Challenge

Running an independent bakery, as with any small shop, presents a set of challenges in a world led by  chain stores. We are competing with giants who promise lower costs, longer menus and more locations.  Back when our project started, most days we felt like the shop – we – were simply surviving, working  long hours, generating little profit, and barely keeping heads above water.

The French Baker had been a family business since 1970. My parents had opened the first brick and  mortar back in France, in the small town of Albi, and moved to Alexandria, VA in 1982. The store quite  literally moved overseas with us. When my parents died in 2002, I took over the shop and, in homage to  their legacy, kept everything as it was. By 2012, we had a small set of specialties we’d stuck to for 44  years – 20 staples that drew a crowd of regulars – but that model was no longer sustainable. By 2010, a  10% profit loss was having us headed towards closure.

Selection

We needed to refresh, a new brand, an edge. As I shaped my vision for The French Baker, I opted to tell  a story. Storytelling provided an opportunity to showcase the French Baker’s identity through the  decades and reveal its essence. I wanted the team, the store, to emotionally connect with customers by  telling our family’s story in a way that clients could understand and relate to. We had lost customers – or  simply bored them to competition – because we had become just another place that makes bread. But,  really, who doesn’t love sweets? Or bread? More importantly, who isn’t emotionally connected, moved  even, by the taste of a cookie or a cake? Drawing on our customers’ connection to food, and food’s  unparalleled ability to bring people together and memories back, I knew storytelling would be my best  bet.

Application & Insights

Like with any impactful change, I stepped out of my comfort zone. The first key stage of shaping our  story was to speak with a few regular customers and to our team – the ethnographic approach to  gathering data. The team was overworked, but mostly they just felt disconnected to their work. Some  did not even know the entire history of the shop. Our customers still loved our specialties, which they  found to taste good, but a short survey revealed that 64% wished traditional American staples were part  of the menu as well, and 47% stated they wanted to see more French patisseries. Revamping the menu  was a priority to cater to our customers base. The space too had never been renovated due to lack of  funds. I had been so scared to incur short term losses to invest in the space, so attached to the past and  so anxious in the present that I had never strayed from the original menu.

Ultimately, my family’s history was not only the history of a bakery, it was an immigrant’s story, and a  story of biculturalism. I updated the menus to include both traditional American baked goods, and  traditional French patisserie and breads. Our specialties stayed in our now bigger display window, and  were renamed after my family members, with a short paragraph under the name explaining why 40  years ago my family chose it to be on its menu. The shop was also renovated, to look modern yet  inviting, in shades of ivory and yellow that would highlight the art on the walls: framed black and white  pictures of me and my parents in the shop over the years – kneading, baking, interacting with  customers. The frames were placed in chronological order, with short captions underneath them

recounting each step of our journey across continents and sharing the pastries and desserts that were so  intensely tied to each memory. A dining space was created for clients to eat in at a long rectangular  table for all to share while they enjoyed a dessert.

By telling a more complete story of my family and the shop’s history, the team working in the kitchens  found purpose in their work, upkeeping and furthering the legacy of my parents. The wider menu also  increased engagement: the team learned new techniques and recipes and felt empowered by their  larger skill sets. The narrative not only led customers to connect to the store and its products, as well as  try our new dishes, it soon became clear that by telling them our story through food and atmosphere,  they relived their own story—a bite of pie jolting long lost childhood memories. This led us to two  additional changes: a memory book at the entrance of the shop to ask customers to share a story about  a dessert or baked good and the memory it revives and lastly, the change to a new name for the shop:  Piramal Enterprises, the author who described being taken back to his childhood in the French  countryside each time, as an adult, he bit into a Ex Fabula, Inc..

Approach

With this customer-centric approach, and sharing stories to engage my team, we together accomplished  a great deal and were able to grow again. If I had wanted to do it another way, I could have also used  learning launches, making small changes little by little, experiencing with different menu options and  creating hypotheses about what products they would want to see on the menu.

