Gina Butler's vision for Gigi's Cupcakes powerful and very clear. Her vision embodies not only every print piece the company creates, but also their retail locations, product packaging and the cupcakes themselves.
What was clearly missing was a modern web presence. And that's where Generator came in. Four weeks of homework on our side gave us a very obvious path to take.
Strategy
Over the last five years, the upscale cupcake category has been one of the few restaurant concepts that has seen explosive growth. One of the true leaders in the category is Gigi's Cupcakes, which recently embarked on an aggressive expansion plan that is quickly taking their spectacular food-as-art concept all across America.
The goal for their new web presence began simply enough: Sell more product online, and maintain Gigi's well-honed sense of style. But as so often is the case, that singular goal quickly became much, much larger. Very early in the discovery process, Generator realized that this was an opportunity to completely rethink how the entire organization communicates — both with its customers and its franchise owners.
Challenges
Gigi's has a very unique business model that required (and still requires) a remarkable amount of out-of-the-box thinking. Here's why:
- The menu changes every day. Some cupcakes are available every day of the week, some only one day a week, and others at completely random days of the week.
- Each local franchise has (slightly) different operating policies, including store hours, days of operation, delivery policies, price differences and unique menu items.
- Growth was imminent. Whatever plan was implemented had to be flexible enough to accommodate rapid expansion. When we started, Gigi's had eight locations, and half of those were corporate-owned. Nine months later, there are 33, with plans to triple that number in short order.
- The product had to remain king. Every cupcake that bears the Gigi's name is a true work of art. We had to design the site in such a way that the cupcakes remained the heroes of the site.
- Owners had to be a big part of the new site. Gigi's Cupcakes is a franchise. That means the new site had to become the home base for the growing family of franchise owners, including store policy statements, art downloads, ecommerce, corporate communications and email. And that section had to be password-protected, so only the owners could see the content.
Design
The site's design had to live up to the high standards of the product. That's why we spent countless hours carefully crafting meticulously designed icons, typography and photography that made the product shine.
There's a lot to discover at the new site, but the "wow factor" certainly hits you at the home page. The big cupcake image randomly changes every time a customer revisits the site, and the scrolling cupcake gallery has rollover effects that make an immediate and lasting impact.
The design statement goes to the next level on the site's interior pages. The deliciously elegant cupcake images in the header randomly change with every page load, and link directly to their respective "Hero page" (like the one here, that features the cupcake Gigi appropriately named Chocolate Malt).
Technol
ogy Features
The site is a content management behemoth, using virtually every bell and whistle available in the biggest and most powerful websites — and them some:
- Mobile version of website, custom designed for online ordering and store directions
- Custom ecommerce store development (allowing customers to select from a menu of options that were presented by day and time of order pick-up)
- Photo galleries
- Mass Email marketing with detailed reports, and smart email lists sortable by date of birth and zip code
- Google Maps API integration for locating local stores
- Coupon codes
- Sales promotions capable of Buy 1/Get 1, But a Dozen/Get 1, and countless other options
- Authorize.net credit card processing
- Customized customer receipts
- Email and fax order alerts to local store
- Blog
- Flash and HTML5 animations
- Site Membership
- Forms
- Invisible pages
- Search engine optimization
- Password protected pages
- Automated daily menu display
- Random image loads without the use of Flash
Ecommerce
The bottom line of the new Gigi's web portal is ecommerce. Generator created one corporate site for all national communications that features a web store to sell Gigi's merchandise directly to the customer. Then, Generator created stand-alone web stores for each Gigi's franchise location that were each linked to and from the main site. The design of the local stores reflected the brand design of the corporate site, making a cohesive user experience for the customer.
But, unlike many out-of-the-box ecommerce stores, sales are directly deposited into the local store's bank account — not through Corporate. This makes accounting easier, and puts the local owner directly in touch with their customer.
Social Networking
Gigi's has thousands of passionate fans who are extremely active in Facebook. Generator helped them work through the logistics of creating a comprehensive site and marketing plan that linked to both the main corporate Facebook page as well as each local store's Facebook.
Email Marketing
Email is the single most important way that Gigi's communicates with its customers. We created a site membership paradigm that enabled Gigi's to collect not just email addresses, but gender, birth date and zip code. This has enabled the company to build a database that is sortable for local promotions, as well as by month of birth. And as the company grows into new territories, their back end databases are fully capable of collecting, sorting and deploying all of the new customer data the moment it arrives at the site.
Look who's talking
From
The Dallas Observer: "The website is a marketing tour de force, complete with bright colors,
inviting fonts and tantalizing pictures of cupcakes. The most
intriguing part of the website, however, was a small photo in the very
top center part of the page...Gigi."