Sal's Bread
Sal’s Bread was a COVID pop-up micro-bakery that I operated in the spring of 2021, baking and selling loaves of sourdough out of my Brooklyn apartment. I started making sourdough during the first round of quarantine, and I continued the practice well after the trend had fizzled. I soon had friends and neighbors clamoring for my bread, which they dubbed “Sal’s Bread,” and so my side hustle was born. I created an Instagram account to function as my main promotional tool, and developed a unique small-business voice that emphasized my own story.
In all strategy, I focused on the grassroots and personal nature of my business, capitalizing on both the charm and efficacy of local community outreach. I ordered brand postcards with my logo and purchase information, which I distributed throughout my neighborhood and local parks, and gifted loaves of bread with attached postcards to local small business owners, many of whom became regular customers. Across all of my content, I linked my business inextricably with its human element—myself—by using the first person voice and weaving personal anecdotes into account posts and stories.
I organized a bread swap with another small baking operation in order to expand my account's reach to the other business's longer-established Instagram following, and exchanged bread for the services of a food photographer friend, in order to build a library of professional product images. I utilized UGC and made my customers' content a regular feature of my stories, and emphasized the time-sensitive nature of my product's limited supply with frequent calls to action and warnings of rapidly-dwindling opportunities for purchase.
