How Poppikit’s founders pivoted to virtual events

Guest posts

Dec 11

Guest posts

How Poppikit’s founders pivoted to virtual events

BoomPop Team · 11/22/2022

Written by Anna Helm Baxter, Co-Founder of Poppikit with Jade Zimmerman

Jade and I met as two new moms in 2013 and quickly bonded over our love of food and cake decorating. We had both been working in the food industry: Jade as a pastry chef in some of NYC's best-known restaurants, and myself as a food stylist and recipe developer for TV and print.

When I returned from maternity leave Jade and I started working together in the Hearst test kitchen, churning out recipes and styling food for 7 lifestyle publications (including Woman's Day, Good Housekeeping, Southern Living, and others). We spent a lot of time over steaming pots and piles of dirty dishes, dreaming up business ideas in the food space.

Jump to the end of 2018 and we finally took that leap with the launch of Poppikit (a combination of our two daughters' names, Poppy and Peri). With four children between us, we had attended countless birthday parties, and consistently found friends either asking us to make a cake or making comments that they could “never make a cake”—an obviously very important part of the event.

Baking is something many people want to do, they just might not have the right knowledge or all the right tools. We launched Poppikit to help parents bake and decorate cakes for and with their kids, with kits that included all the tools and non-perishable items they would need. It simplified the process, much to everyone’s delight.

Creating special experiences during COVID-19

When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, we saw desperate parents struggling to make their kids' pandemic birthdays feel special. We quickly launched a virtual birthday party add-on as an option on our site so kids could gather together online to decorate cakes. As a new business, we were able to be scrappy, and quickly to react, adjust, and even customize our offerings to meet our client's needs.

Soon after launching our kids' birthday party offering, we started receiving requests from corporate teams trying to connect with their colleagues. Unlike our previous kits, our team building kits required us to pre-bake cookies and cupcakes so that participants could just show up for an hour of decorating fun, sans baking.

By the end of 2020, 90% of our sales had come from virtual classes.

Moving our business to online classes enabled us to scale up our business and witness first-hand the fun and joy people experience when using our kits.

As adults, it can be intimidating to do something creative— not least in front of your colleagues. So we learned pretty quickly that our job as instructors is to not only teach fun and easy techniques but also to help our participants relax and get into a zen-like creative zone. Our classes are not supposed to be stressful and at the end (or anytime a craving dictates), there is something sweet to eat!

From a business perspective, virtual classes have been a hugely successful model for us and have allowed us to simultaneously grow our business and invest in more backend support. When we first started our virtual offerings, all our cookies were hand-baked by the two of us in a commercial kitchen—flash forward to August 2022, and we were able to hire a local cookie manufacturer to churn out 40,000 cookies for us in two days (something that would’ve taken us all year and many late nights to do by hand!).

What sets our classes apart from other baking classes is the quality of our ingredients. We use naturally-dyed sprinkles and food colors (no weird chemicals here!), and organic frosting mix. Our classes are taught by a team of highly qualified and enthusiastic food professionals so you can ask questions on baking and get some useful education while you have fun.

Whatever the occasion, our classes are fun, creative, and extra sweet. If you’re looking for virtual fun this holiday season why not book our highly interactive and extra-sweet Holiday Cookie class?

Keep in touch by following us on instagram @poppi_kit.