How to Accommodate Small, Last-Minute Cake Orders - And Preserve Your Sanity!
If you’ve been in this business long, you know that our most common inquiries are small, last minute cakes.
It’s not surprising, as everyone has a birthday every year and annual birthdays are generally not the type of events that people spend months planning.
As cake designers, we often grow to dread these requests. Creating a well thought out custom cake takes time and the back and forth involved in designing and executing a small custom order often outweighs the price that clients are willing to pay.
To help streamline this process, we created an online shop with a variety of designs that we’re excited to make. We just brought on semi-custom options where clients can choose their color scheme, but we do everything on our terms and eliminate that back and forth of creating something entirely custom. We set order cut-offs at a time frame that works for our business and create some design elements in bulk so we’re prepared for orders in advance.
Guidelines we’ve set to ensure success:
Pick-up dates are limited to Friday and Saturday so that the last minute cakes fit with the workflow of our larger event cakes.
We limited the flavor options from our full menu so that we have more repeat flavors and building goes faster.
These cakes are pick-up only so that we have time to execute our deliveries for larger events.
Our Everyday and Signature designs are the easiest for us to make as there is no customization available. Our order deadline for these designs is Thursday at 9am for Friday or Saturday of the same week.
The order deadline for 2-tier cakes and cakes with custom colors is Wednesday at 9am for Friday or Saturday of the same week. This allows us a little extra time to prepare for these orders.
We set pick-up hours that work for our schedule.
We block off dates when we have hit capacity for the week. Because of the way that our website is set up, we can be specific about this, like blocking off Friday orders for the more elaborate designs and leaving the cakes we are able to execute more quickly.
For custom cakes, we have a minimum of $600 in our slow season and $1000 in our busy season. This helps to ensure that we are compensated for the amount of time and effort that it takes to create custom orders and we are able to meet our weekly financial goals without overnight cake sessions or sacrificing the quality of our work.
This model works amazing for our team of 5, but there may be a model that suits you better. The important part is making sure that the schedule works for you and you’re selling cakes that you’re happy to make.
Here are some examples of how other cake designers we love have approach their predesigned offerings:
Ready to learn more?
For more details about how we make a profit selling the work that inspires us, check out our Pricing and Selling Intricate Work online course!
