THE CLIENT: MISS JONES BAKING CO.
THE ROLE: FOUNDING CREATIVE DIRECTOR + PRODUCER
The CONCERN: CAKE MIX IS DELICIOUS YET DUBIOUS.
THE QUESTION: can WE MAKE SOMETHING BETTER?
THE SHORT ANSWER: yes, BAKING IS FUN WHEN IT’S FOR EVERYONE.
I partnered directly with the founder and CEO of Miss Jones Baking Co. in its earliest stages to bring a fresh perspective to baking (back in 2015, a time when vegan baking was still a fairly foreign concept on social media). We were the only entrepreneurs making organic cake mix and frosting at the time, but how could we convince Millennial and Gen Z customers to buy cake mix, a product that requires a commitment of time, space, labor, additional ingredients, creativity, and patience? Our product had the highest price point of any competitors, so we had to find an angle that would make us the easy and obvious choice.
I worked directly with founder Sarah Jones to create a brand experience that feels fun and inspiring, spending nearly 3 weeks picking out the perfect combination of colors to coordinate across our organic, plant-based sprinkle mix, product packaging, custom swag, and brand imagery. That final color palette translated seamlessly into content that our audience would go on to create themselves with those very same sprinkles. It sounds like a small detail, but it’s an important step in getting something to hit right both on and offline.
Sarah managed sales, operations, suppliers, and manufacturing contracts, and I picked up a camera and started sharing more of our story online. Engaging with our community very early on, I realized that plant-based bakers loved our products, and often had to make their own treats at home (due to a lack of vegan RTE baked goods at the time). I saw a major opportunity and decided to respond to this need for creative, plant-based baking hacks with a content sprint in the kitchen.
A self-taught home cook, empowered by my experience at Williams-Sonoma and informed by art school, I decided to spend some time in the test kitchen doing a few amateur-level baking experiments. Guided by the simple principle that if I could pull something off on the first try, our community probably could too. #madewithmissjones was created, and 50+ SEO-friendly recipes later, we had a library of cake mix hacks that inspired thousands of bakers to share their treats with us on social media.
What started as an experiment to make vegan cupcakes quickly evolved into a content portal of easy-to-execute original baking hacks conceived, tested, photographed, written, and uploaded by yours truly. The idea was to make vegan options for ALL of our recipes, supporting the thesis that serving the most marginalized or underserved community first is the best way to bring people together. And it did, solidifying our place in the baking aisle and giving us the financial boost we needed in the beginning.
Making cake mix mainstream again was a much larger goal. But we also wanted to disrupt things too.
Sarah and I even updated the back of our box to reflect this ethos and became the first cake mix in the U.S. to put plant-based baking instructions front and center, with conventional baking adjustments appearing as a footnote.
Miss Jones was an exercise in maximizing impact on a small budget, so special projects were our secret weapon. I created inexpensive plant-based recipe cards to hand out at trade shows and tastings, and cross-merchandised them as a giftable product on our site. They were a huge draw at all of our events, where people could browse and pull their own collection of cake mix hacks from our “library” to make at home—encouraging trial, sales, growth, and UGC from our wonderful community, and bringing our revenue up from a flatline to 3MM+ in the first year. This work helped us win accounts with Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts, HEB, Kroger, Publix, and beyond. It also gave me something new to share on the site and in an e-mail every week, driving steady traffic and sales.
About our site—we were selling cake mix and frosting through a DTC portal, and we weren’t getting many orders outside of wholesale, and I noticed that people who weren’t comfortable taking photos of their baked goods wanted another way to be part of this whole thing. I went back to the empty test kitchen to brainstorm, where I ended up baking all night and having a great time… then it hit me: we needed to lean into the baking process itself, making it feel more like a party. Like something you would really look forward to, alone or with friends/family. A Friday night plan. Something worth sharing.
I created our Baker Boxes the next afternoon, curating themed collections of our products in a format that was designed for gifting. I sketched out some temporary tattoos, designed the perfect high-temperature hot purple spatula, curated the right mix of products at a variety of price points, and designed a line of cozy, hilarious apparel made just for bakers. When the samples showed up, I shot, wrote and uploaded the finished products the same day. I shared it with our audience and hoped for the best. At the very least, I had a new favorite sweatshirt, right? We got lucky, and sold out within just a few weeks.
Fast-forward two months and the swag went completely viral. Organically. No paid sponsorship of any kind. Why is that important? Our small business gained free placements all over social media, on Ayesha Curry’s cooking show, and ultimately on the cover of Cherry Bombe magazine—worn by the party queen herself, Martha Stewart. Martha then gifted a sweater to her BFF Snoop Dogg, and the two of them were spotted in matching Miss Jones swag on a T-Mobile Super Bowl ad. Organic celebrity Super Bowl placements?! Does it get any better for a startup? Not often.
There’s so much more to the story, but let’s leave it on a high note.
