Posts Tagged ‘Lynn Schurman’
How I Did It: Add a Wholesale Line to a Retail Business
Monday, November 24th, 2008
For nearly 40 years, the Schurman family business in Cold Spring, Minn. consisted of just one retail location stocked with cakes, cookies, and other pastries.
But with its second-generation ownership came a wholesale line now bringing in more than half of its current business, in addition to Modern Baking’s 2004 “Bakery of the Year” title.
Founded in 1946, the Cold Spring Bakery began offering a wholesale line in the late 1980s. At the time, the economy seemed to favor small family-owned businesses, giving owners Dale and Lynn Schurman reason to plan an expansion.
Between adding more retail locations and a wholesale line, “it just seemed to make more sense to do wholesale,” Lynn Schurman said, “so that we could still continue doing production, but then we didn’t have to worry about renting spaces, filling them with employees, and all the other hassles of dealing with multiple locations.”
Between local restaurants, sandwich shops, and 17 grocery stores, the bakery now takes in 40 to 50 wholesale and retail orders a day. While a few of these clients – including one grocery store just down the street – bought wholesale before operations began, the rest simply came to the bakery via word-of-mouth in the town of 3,733.
The bakery added production space in 2000, though that construction has not been its biggest overhaul. Lynn Schurman admits that increasing production “was the easy part of adding the wholesale business,” in comparison to installing invoicing software and standardizing the ordering process.
And as their wholesale line continued to develop, the Cold Spring Bakery also had to adopt a new type of cost efficiency. To businesses thinking of going wholesale, Lynn Schurman recommends that they consider all possible costs attached to every step of the ordering process.
“You can pick up a lot of small orders, but it doesn’t pay to drop off a $5 order at some place, then another because of the cost of processing,” she said. “That drop, stop, and going in may not cover it.”
But even with the extra considerations in mind, Lynn Schurman appreciates the financial stability that a wholesale line can offer a growing business.
“The nice thing about the wholesale business is that it is [sic] more steady year-round, while retail has its ups and downs,” she said.
Cold Spring Bakery, 308 Main St., Cold Spring, MN 56320. Call 310-685-8651 or visit www.coldspringbakery.com .
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