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Thank you for supporting SugarDanny

Posted by Dan Uharriet on
Thank you for supporting SugarDanny
To our early fans and supporters - 

What an energizing couple of weeks. SugarDanny is launched and I wanted to say thank you to all of you for helping support getting this company off the ground. We sold our first cookie on December 10th and today we passed 3,000 cookies. The positive feedback has been awesome - thank you! All of your encouragement means a lot to us.

I wanted to share a bit about how all of this came together and give you a preview of where we are heading. It takes a village and my hope in sharing a bit of the journey with all of our early customers and supporters is that you’ll continue to root for us and find ways to help.

On November 29, just a few weeks ago, we made the decision to start this business. But really the origin of SugarDanny has deep roots. I started the first version of SugarDanny back in 2006. After graduating with a culinary arts degree as a classically trained French Pastry Chef in 2000, I worked at a number of bakeries and local restaurants until I got the courage to launch SugarDanny 1.0 in the Portola District where we made cakes, cookies, and fresh pastries. We were pretty good at it, but having 2 kids under 3 years old, managing a storefront, and Geraldine working full-time, it was too much.

After SugarDanny, I worked at BiRite for years, ordering product and supporting 100s of local restaurants, helping them source the best ingredients.  But over the past nine months, I saw many of those businesses struggle and shut down. This year has been hard for so many — people have lost their jobs, others have lost family members, and being away from friends and family is tough. 

So I decided it’s time to bring SugarDanny back. Because now more than ever, people need joy in their lives and cookies are a great way to bring people together. 

This time I have a bit more help. I started SugarDanny v2.0 with my friend Chris Howard, who by day, invests in technology startups, and spent 10 years in consumer marketing helping brands launch new products and is moonlighting to get this off the ground. He’s been nagging me for years to start another bakery because when I make his family cookies they disappear in seconds. By combining our super powers, it just might be the right recipe for success — I can focus on making people happy through food and Chris can help with the business. 

It’s a family affair this time around too, with friends and family all helping - from designing the brand, to promoting us to friends, to even loaning us their mixer when ours broke - it’s all hands on deck and couldn’t do it without you! 
So what’s next for us? Here are a few things we’re working on:

  • New Packaging and National Shipping coming soon! We are fine tuning our packaging so we can send our cookies anywhere in the US in two days or less (so they stay fresh) without breaking. We're looking for people with experience in logistics to help us iron out the details.
  • Do it for the Gram! We are building out a social presence on Instagram and Facebook where we’ll announce new products and share some of the joy that SugarDanny is sparking. Be sure to follow us @sugardannybakery and share your unboxing and support with friends.
  • Scaling up! We are looking for a commercial kitchen that we can move to as we start to scale up. Right now we’re doing 100 orders per week, but we think this will look more like 500 orders a week a few months from now, and into the 1000s hopefully not long after.
  • Subscriptions! We are looking into adding the ability to subscribe to get cookies delivered on a regular basis. Stay tuned for this launch in the coming weeks and months. 
  • New cookies! We have a number of new cookies in development and will be launching soon. Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so we're already cooking something up that you’ll love. We’d love to hear your ideas
  • Reviews!  We just launched product reviews on our site — please visit sugardanny.myshopify.com and share feedback about your favorite cookie on the individual product pages. Reviews alone can produce a 20% lift in sales. 

SugarDanny is more than just cookies. We think everyone in the world will enjoy SugarDanny, because it’s a way to bring people together, to reconnect with friends. We’ll leave you with an unsolicited email below that we received last week from one of our early customers that we’ve never met! This gets us fired up and excited to see where we can take this. 

Thank you for buying from SugarDanny, for believing in us, and supporting us as we get started. Happy to announce that SugarDanny is reborn.

Sincerely,
Dan Uharriet

---------- Forwarded message ---------
Date: Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 9:34 PM
Subject: The BEST cookies
Hi there,
 
I just felt the need to write you and let you know that we think your cookies are AMAZING and the best cookies we've EVER had. That is seriously saying a lot because 1. we love food and have eaten at a lot of different places all over and 2. we eat a lot of cookies :)

I got a bag of your cookies this week from a dear friend/co-worker [redacted but thank you for sharing with others] and I'm so mad at her for introducing your cookies to us because now I cannot go a day without eating one and will certainly be ordering from you in the future.

I just wanted to send you a note to say THANK YOU for making these amazing cookies. I read your story and am so glad you found a way to do what you love and not manage a storefront (which, coming from a family who owned restaurants growing up, I know is very very challenging).

All my best to you and Happy New Year!

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