Hello! What’s your name and what do you do?
Hi there, my name is Ella! My partner Mark and I moved from London to Singapore around 5 years ago. We moved over and got jobs in our fields of expertise, which was IT project management.
About 1 year after arriving in Singapore we took our first entrepreneurial steps, and started our own business, Baggie’s. We started out producing biltong, an artisanal cured meat, and gradually expanded to a full Deli shop, selling all sorts of delicious foods and wines as well as fresh meats which we deliver to all of Singapore.
Where does your passion for meat & deli products come from?
My partner Mark is South African, so he introduced me to biltong and other South African meat delicacies, which I instantly loved. We love delicious foods in general, and when we couldn’t get biltong in Singapore, this is what spurred us on to create our own. Because it was so god damned good, we decided to make a business out of it.
When did you decide to turn it into a business?
In November 2017, about 1 year after arriving in Singapore, our craving for one of our favourite snacks, became so strong that we took matters into our own hands and made it ourselves.
We first made biltong at our friend’s restaurant as he had a temperature and humidity controlled food chamber. It turned out absolutely delicious on the first try, so good that I knew we had to take this further than just occasionally making it to fulfill our own cravings.
Walking back from our first biltong tasting I declared that our product was so good that we would be in supermarkets and then proceeded to say that we should call our new business Baggie’s Biltong! My partner Mark pretty much rolled his eyes at the crazy coming from my mouth, but I proceeded to advertise to our friends on facebook, and very quickly our first batch of biltong was gone!
The feedback was amazing, and the people coming to us for biltong continued to grow. We bought our own wine fridge and converted it into a biltong maker and started to make it in our own apartment. We got to the stage where we were quite busy and it was starting to interfere with our day job. That and the fact it was driving us absolutely crazy walking on coriander seeds pushed us to start our own business. In January 2018 we incorporated our company Baggie’s and we opened our first shop in April 2018, in a mall (which turned out to be a vegetarian food mall) a short distance from our apartment.
Do you have a team or are you planning to have a team?
We have a team of kitchen staff and retail staff in our shop, an operations manager, and the lovely G working with us on advertising and marketing, and one of my best friends who works on our branding and design. The team fluctuates in size, but it is generally around 5 full time and 3 – 6 part time members.
Who are your customers?
Our customers started out being South African expats living in Singapore, however our Singaporean customer base has been growing, and I would now estimate it is at about 50/50 expats to locals.
How long did it take you to breakeven?
When we first started out it was very important to not invest heavily and so we did everything on a shoestring.
My partner and I were both still working full-time. I paid 5 USD for our first logo on a freelancing website, and I set up the website myself using free time in the evenings and on the weekends. We found the cheapest rentable space and did functional renovations only. Our first store was not pretty, or on-brand!
We started out with just one employee, yes just the one! This helped keep our costs low. We were lucky that with our thrifty spending we were breaking even pretty much immediately, and due to our existing following we were turning a small profit within 6 months.
Let’s talk about the digital side of your business. When did you establish your online presence and what made you do that?
We created a facebook page first of all, before our store had even opened and that was how we built our initial following. We communicated by facebook messenger and had a spreadsheet with all the details for peoples orders.
I created our first website using Magento an open source ecommerce platform. I chose it as I knew it was flexible, very feature full and it was a platform I was familiar with from previous jobs. I was confident that I could use it to support our new business.
Magento was quite error prone though as it was so configurable it meant that extensions and add-ons were far more likely to cause it issues. I had a few all nighters where new extensions took the platform down entirely and I was working furiously to restore it to its previous working state.
Towards the end of 2020 we decided to move to something more stable and user friendly, and so chose shopify. I set this up again, which took quite some time, as by now we had a large product catalogue. We purchased a great off the shelf designed theme and then my amazing designer friend created some screens and style guides and I implemented our branding on top.
Old website header
New website header
This shows our audience growth by month since starting out
Today, how much of your business is traditional and how much of it is digital?
When we started out our online sales definitely accounted for the majority of sales, probably a 80/20 split. With the brand growth and a recent location move the popular Joo Chiat road it is now a much more even split, probably 60/40 website to in-store ratio.
Do you have a chief marketing officer or a dedicated digital marketing/tech team?
Giulia has been wonderful in taking on a CMO role for Baggie’s. Between G and myself we do the following:
- Social media posts on facebook and instagram
- Weekly emails with new products and offers
- Automated emails to specific customer segments (e.g. 0 order customers)
- Blog articles
- Facebook advertising
What tools do you use in your business?
We currently use Shopify and Shopify POS so we have a centralised stock location for both these sales channels. We recently moved to add in our other sales channels through Shopify in order to have one single source of truth for our stock.
For content creation we use the free version of Canva for any designs we need to put together.
What’s your advice for someone in your industry who wants to modernise their business?
Shopify all the way. It is an auto setup situation, so you can do it entirely on your own if you don’t mind investing the time. I also strongly advise you to buy a theme, this really improves the aesthetics and gives better content options and SEO.
Where can we learn more about you?
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baggiesbiltong/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/baggiesbiltong/
- Website: https://www.baggiesdeli.com/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixl3IycRd0A09MzOwsU0Ww
