Pretty Lucky

Well, I think I can say that we’ve FINALLY recovered from last week’s $5 Friday. Overall, our day was a solid success and here’s why: we sold well over 1,000 baby pies, but better yet, we were 100% prepared and 100% not stressed out all day. I’m so proud of us.

We’ve learned along the way that the key to doing well with large events is simply preparing. I’m certain I’ve heard this advice 1,000 times - shoot, I’ve probably even pinned it to an inspirational Pinterest board - but I’m really good at living out an “I told you so” scenario. So that it took a few very stressful $5 Fridays to come around to conventional thinking? 100% not surprising.

We prepared well and set intentional goals and had a few solid conversations about what has worked on really busy days…and what hasn’t worked so well. And historically, we’ve struggled with maintaining any sort of real inventory for customers flooding through the door during the day. If you think I’m joking, then you’ve never been asked if you would like a Sour Cream Cherry baby or Egg Custard baby on $5 Friday. Perhaps what I noticed most from everyone who stopped by on Friday - especially in the afternoon - was the exclamation of “woah - there are so many choices”. YEP, THAT’S RIGHT, SO MANY CHOICES. (With the exception of White Chocolate Strawberry, because you could make 1,000 of those alone and they still wouldn’t stay available for purchase for more than 10 minutes.) We even had a customer drive all the way from St. Louis just to visit us on $5 Friday. Holla to not sending her home with the aforementioned Sour Cream Cherry or Egg Custard, right? That would have been awkward.

The surprising takeaway from last Friday is the cumulative effect of our preparation on the customer experience and then the customer experience on our ability to keep working. That’s just a super wordy way to say that we worked really hard to be ready, our customers were appreciative and super happy, and that helped us to just keep baking and to have fun together. So I guess we all now know that it is possible to bake over 1,000 baby pies AND have fun AND have happy customers. Call it a PJP hat trick. (I think. Andrew just taught me this term and please remember that sports analogies are seriously not my thing.)

Today I rounded up all the gift cards for Team PJP, who more than deserved it after working very long days last week. Almost everyone stayed to the bitter end at 6 pm just to see it through - thankfully our last customer of the day is a PJP VIP and she didn’t mind that eight pairs of eyes stared at her while she checked out, just so we could see a final item count.

And then 12 hours later on Saturday morning, we turned it all around and did it all again, though at significantly lower quantities and regular pricing. On Saturday night, a good portion of Team PJP came to hang out at my house, proving that we enjoy each other’s company even when we aren’t trying to guess which flavors will be most popular on a super busy day. We’re pretty lucky that way.