PR and the launch of Fat Bastard Pie Club
We caught up with Simon from Fat Bastard Pies during Global Entrepreneurship Week to talk about how he has utilised PR and marketing to grow the business.
“Hey team, it's Simon here from Fat Bastard Pies. We're a local bakery here in Invercargill, that has been operating for almost a decade.
Our brand has always been about, not bespoke gourmet pies, but doing the classics really well and dominating in that space.
It's not about loading a pie up with salmon and cream cheese and trying to reinvent the wheel with some quirky flavor, it's about doing a mince and cheese and doing a steak and cheese, and doing it to the best of its abilities.”
Marketing & PR
“Our biggest marketing asset is word of mouth and that comes from the product itself and the branding and everything else we have put around it.
With small businesses the PR side of things is your biggest friend. With PR you can get mass exposure with very low budgets. A lot of the media that we get is completely free. It's just around what is a news story that is clickable, entertaining and is going to get media platforms clicks onto their site, and therefore getting them ad revenue. You really need to think of a story that's entertaining and is going to resonate with a wider group.
Luckily, people like to talk about pies so that naturally helps us. If you were more of a moderate, boring, stable industry it's harder to get traction. However there are definitely ways where you can put yourself out there or do unique PR stunts where the media will pick up on what you are doing.”
Tell us about the Fat Bastard Pie Club
“We’ve had a really good following locally but thought, where do we go to from here?
What is the best way to grow and scale this, but remain in control of the quality of our brand, our story and how we're presented to customers.
We've developed the world's first pie subscription service. Quite revolutionary technology where you can sign up, get your box, and it'll be delivered at the frequency you set to anywhere around New Zealand. It allows us to send our pies around New Zealand from Invercargill and opens up our market to a much bigger audience. It’s been about three years in the making to actually launch this service. It may look like an overnight success but it's been three years in the making.
Those three years have been a complete whirlwind of reverse engineering. Understanding the courier industry, software platforms,and how we are actually going to make this increased amount of pies. We're already selling 1000 pies a day locally so you add the online stuff on top of that, we'll want to be able to fulfill it and ensure the quality. The last three years have been basically us figuring out how we're going to do that, and then we've launched it so it's been a chaotic time.”