The Sprinkles footprint continues to grow hand-in-hand with the expanding and connected Sprinkles community. In this episode, GALE Chief Innovation Officer, Ben James, and Sprinkles Cupcakes Chief Marketing Officer, Michelle Wong, sit down to discuss inspiring repeat customers, maintaining a connected customer journey, building a global, female-led brand and so much more.
They discuss:
- (4:24) Michelle’s culinary background and her journey to CMO
- (10:55) Connecting with customers and communities to make them repeat customers
- (16:04) Finding ways to ensure customer touchpoints are cohesive and connected
- (19:54) How Sprinkles is expanding digitally with a DTC channel and physically with new national and international franchises
- (22:22) Being a female-led company and the importance of having diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation at the core of the business
We’ve included the full transcript of the conversation below for easy reading, plus have a listen on Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible, iHeart, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever else you get your podcasts!
TRANSCRIPT
Ben James:
In 2021, you became Sprinkles CMO. And could you tell us a little bit about Sprinkles also, what has it been like to lead in this function so far? Like how are you bringing Sprinkles Cupcakes to life for the people out there? Would love to hear a little bit about that from you.
Michelle Wong:
Yeah, I mean, it's been an awesome time working at Sprinkles. I actually started as a consultant. I started as a short-term project thing and after a few weeks it became very clear that we wanted this to be a long-term relationship. And so when I joined, this was really funny because I had my orientation day, my first formal day, and they were going through the menu and they're like, so these are all the cupcakes we offer. And I was like, oh, I'm aware. I'm like, I know what's on the menu. I've been a fan of this brand since day one. I've been a fan and a guest. And so to be a part of a brand that is truly so storied and really part of popular culture, and especially coming from LA, I was like, this was a dream for me. And so coming onto the business was really interesting because a lot of the different brands that I've worked on in the past in my advertising life, sometimes you do a lot of turnaround stories, right?
It's like a fading brand or you're trying to launch something new. And there was those sort of business challenges. With Sprinkles, it was very different. It was this brand very much still in the ether. People love it. People think about it, people are shopping for cupcakes still after the cupcake bubble. All these things had happened over the course of 17 years that Sprinkles has been around. And my job really was to keep us in the spotlight and to keep Sprinkles top of mind and to reach more people. And so it was a very different challenge that I had faced before, and it was really nice actually coming onto something that people already love. So how do you just kind of build on that even more?
Ben James:
That's amazing. I mean, I myself am a long time fan of the brand and the product, and as I think about your community and the 20 years of what's been going on in the Sprinkles world, I think about occasions and moments where it has entered my life. I can remember the first time I tried it, but I can remember last week being in an O'Hare airport and picking one up on the way into the plane. And that seems so interesting to me that you're trying to go into where these community moments are, but then create new moments for the brand moving forward. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you think about what moments to bring Sprinkles to the community?
Michelle Wong:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what's great is Sprinkles by nature and the product by nature, you're naturally going to be a part of really joyous, happy occasions. So people associate us with birthdays and celebrations and parties and gifting. And so again, a really great place to be. We're already sort of living in our guests' hearts and minds and have that emotional attachment, but we also can't just be for birthdays and there's lots of other reasons to want to have a cupcake or have a cupcake. Traveling in an airport actually is a really good one. So I know I definitely find myself,
Ben James:
Totally.
Michelle Wong:
A delayed flight or whatever. The only thing that'll sort of cure my woes is a red velvet. But there are so many times, right, I mean, there are so many times I think that we can continue to sort of integrate and sort of be a part of people's lives because it's always connected to a moment of happiness and either it's something that you're enhancing or actually bringing that joy to someone at that time.
Ben James:
So I wanted, I'm eager to talk a little bit about the community, but I also want to hear a bit more about you and your background and things. Can you talk about some of your culinary background and that expertise that you're bringing to this space? And yeah, then would love to talk about the communities that you're bringing it to and bringing into the fold here, but a little bit more about your culinary background would be awesome.
Michelle Wong:
Yeah, absolutely. I went to culinary school. I studied at Le Cordon Bleu in London, and I graduated with a French cuisine in Patisserie Grand Diplome.
Ben James:
Oh, wow.
Michelle Wong:
And I worked as a pastry chef. I worked at the Grosvenor House Hotel, and that was all before my advertising and marketing career. And being in a big kitchen like that and working with these big, bold, creative personalities. I mean, the work was always about precision, execution, beauty, and just things just had to be right. They had to be perfect. And that doesn't always happen. And so you get these really fiery personalities and it was really intense and it really set the stage for me. It was also incredibly male dominated. So when I eventually made the switch to a totally different field, still obviously creative, working in advertising, I always joked that it felt like I was back in the kitchen, just like there were no knives around.
I mean, being in a room full of creatives is very much like being in a kitchen with a bunch of chefs. And so those experiences, I think really shaped my approach to work and how I relate to people and develop creative and all those things, the need for collaboration, the need for discipline. And really, I don't know, I think some of it is being tolerant of all types of personalities and being able to work together. So that sort of was a great influence.
And I think landing at Sprinkles really was, I feel like it was a manifestation of everything that I wanted to do in my life, being able to marry what I'm really passionate about in my personal life. I love food. I love going out to dinner. I love to cook. I love to bake. And actually having training in that and working on a business that's all about those things. And so I have an incredible team. Our head of culinary is fantastic, and I think that they really appreciate that I can come to the table and we can collaborate and share ideas and build on each other's work without me having crazy, outlandish things that they know we can't execute. And so I think having that back and forth has been useful.
Ben James:
Incredible to feel culinary, community, and the cupcake coming together in such really amazing ways here. And you're doing just a beautiful job with it. It's amazing. As a marketing craft for that community piece, we've had this era of being very personalized, individualized, addressable to how we do it. We have social, lots of different ways to think about it. And it seems like we really are coming into this era that's really great about community. And when you factor those elements together of community and culinary and the cupcake in that sense, what does it mean to bring in different perspectives? How do you find those new spaces that you want to program with the Sprinkles experience today? How do you go about pulling all that together?
Michelle Wong:
Well, I love the focus on community because I think so much about community is about connection. And for me, there's no deeper connect. I think there's two huge ways to connect people. And I really believe that food is a very powerful connector and music and art, and I think they all kind of sit in the same space. But food has a very specific place in people's memories and sort of the emotions that they hold because it's not even just about, I love this particular flavor or this taste or this food, this dish. It's always tied to a moment in time, a person, a feeling, a smell, an environment.
And so being able to tap into those things is so powerful. And what we've started to do is play in that space. So yes, we're for birthdays and baby showers and parties, but how else can you create that connection to the brand and the product by tapping into equally powerful moments of food memory and tastes and flavors. So I'm sure we all have things that we just absolutely adore and love to eat and, but I'm really curious to know sort of like when it comes to food memories, what are things that come to mind for you that bring you back and make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Ben James:
Yeah. No, thank you. It's so nice to think about it. And as you were talking about it, I was thinking about yeah, just my family experience with food and the family time around it. When you talk, a lot of what I'm thinking about is my grandmother's lasagna. And my grandmother was into lasagna down to, she had a blueprint for lasagna, very design kind of family. She had a blueprint for lasagna in her kitchen. And today my mom has that blueprint for lasagna in her kitchen. And I can, everything that you're saying about the taste of it, the feeling of it, just the warmth of it, it's one of those things where it's like even if we could replicate it down to exactly what we have in the ingredients, I will never have my grandmother's lasagna again, even if the ingredients are exactly right.
So that's the thing is, so many times community does come around all of this to bring it together. And I think about that in relation to my first experiences with Sprinkles Cupcakes and that's kind of a one time special thing, but then you want to repeat that and provide this consistency, but also provide these celebratory occasions, or not just the celebrations, but the everyday kind of moments. How do you move people from the first time into the many times across the Sprinkle fandom and family?
Michelle Wong:
Yeah. I mean, I think again, sort of, I think a great example of tapping into occasion and community and emotion and attachment, all of those things. So in September, this past September, we partnered with a celebrity chef, Claudette Zepeda. She's an incredible woman. And she came to us and said, this is the cupcake that I want to make. It's an ode to my favorite childhood candy that I had as a kid that I would go and get with my grandmother called Glorias and it's pecans and cajeta, which is a goat's milk caramel candy. And she's like, I want to turn this into a cupcake. And we're like, great. This sounds awesome. And so our chef made the cupcake and we had the first tasting with her and she goes, you know what? It's not there yet. I just, its something's missing. Can we go back?
Ben James:
Oh, wow.
Michelle Wong:
And she had feedback and all this. And can we go back? And so of course we're like, yes. Charles Craig, our head of culinary is fantastic. And he was like, I got this. He's like, we'll go back. The whole time I was like, we're never going to nail this. I was like, this is such a deep emotional thing. Right. It is a food memory. Like you were saying, how is anything going to match that lasagna? How is this going to match this experience that she had as a kid with her grandma? Round two, we bring her the cupcake and it was pretty emotional. She was, she,
Ben James:
Wow.
Michelle Wong:
She said, we nailed it. She said the dulce de leche core, everything sort of hit the notes and you could see it in her eyes that it touched something in her. And I was like, this is going to be really special. I mean, just having this moment was really meaningful. When we rolled out the cupcake, we did it in September because we wanted to honor Hispanic Heritage Month. We partnered with the Hispanic Heritage Foundation as our charitable partner, and Claudette was the face of this flavor that we launched for the month. And something really unique happened.
Something changed within the company and also with our guests. So we were getting internally, our back of house teams, our bakery associates, people at HQ were emailing me, DMing Claudette on social media saying, I never thought Sprinkles, a brand like Sprinkles would do something like this. I feel like this is for me. I'm seeing a part of my culture growing up as a child in this flavor, and then but really in the end, it was this incredibly decadent caramel pecan cupcake. Anyone will love this, right? But it had this deeper meaning to it and a very specific audience that could feel attached to it. And that was reflected in the market. I mean, we saw it in the sales, we saw it in the reaction that our guests had. And for me it was we’re on something and this was a space that we wanted to continue in because there's so much power in telling stories through food and connecting to that truth that people have in those experiences.
Ben James:
That's amazing. I love that story. There's so much storytelling in that, that I could think of all these different, this potential for places that you could put that story to be, I don't know. I feel like in marketing we get so wrapped up in this is for engagement and that is for entertainment and this is for conversion, and we spend so much time. And then here you are when you just truly bring community culinary and cupcake together like that you've collapsed the funnel. And like that's the whole thing. It's like hooray, we have collapsed the funnel, but what is really going on here is something visually incredible.
The packaging is incredible. The community vibe is there. There's care and craft that goes into all of it, the cupcake, the packaging. If you go into your stores, you feel that, and you've got this multi-sensorial experience that you're trying to channel through the lens of marketing. Nobody's thinking about the funnel, they're thinking about that pecan flavor and that caramel flavor that's inside of it. So are we getting carried away with collapsing the funnel? And when we try to think about where we can do this in emerging media spaces, where can we do this more, where we can communicate to these audiences and expand into new audiences in emerging connections in new spaces? How do you think about that?
Michelle Wong:
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to think about it that way. Right. It's you have all these different touchpoints, but to treat them as in bakery does this, digital experience does this, eating the cupcake does this, but really it has to be all encompassing because any one of those things fall short, in the end that cupcake experience isn't going to be good. Right. So it's like, what is your digital experience like? What is it like when you walk into the bakery? How friendly is the person that's talking to you? How perfectly frosted is that cupcake and the texture and the bite and all of those things have to work in concert. And so when we think about expanding our footprint and how else can we connect with guests, it really has to come back to are we enriching that experience? Are we elevating that experience for our guests and making them feel more a part of the brand and making them want to come back for more?
Ben James:
That's amazing. I just can't get away from it. It's like in this marketing sense, it's dividing the funnel up, dividing the formats up, all these different groups trying to get on the same task because everything you describe has, there's a deep amount of craft that goes into every step, like every part of delivering that experience overall. With your experience, having studied at Le Cordon Bleu, have you thought about how you're actually bringing all these different pieces together as different ingredients inside of marketing in order to make it all work? Has that influenced the way that you bring all of these pieces together? How do you go about that?
Michelle Wong:
Ye ah, I mean, my influences really absolutely come from my time in the culinary space, certainly from my many years in advertising. And for me, it's always come from a place of what are we trying to achieve and then how are we getting there. It's just really, it's really basic, but it's a lot of moving pieces. And I've always tried to just hold onto what the vision is and we'll just figure it out how we're going to get there. We had never run campaigns with celebrity chefs before. We had never done limited edition flavors that were niche to different cultures and things like, those things hadn't been done at Sprinkles. And so I just was like, no, we're having a chef series campaign this year and we'll figure it out. I mean, the other great thing is you also have to surround yourself with people that want to do that.
I joined Sprinkles because everyone at HQ and in the field, they just want to make it happen. And when I came on board, creative production was a totally different animal too. And so basically I turned our internal team into a production crew. I was like, great, guess what? Culinary you're now a food stylist, and this is how we're going to go about it. And my senior marketing managers are lead producer on these things now, and it's changed since then. But so much of it is having the right people in place, knowing what I want in the end and just figuring out how to get there.
Ben James:
I mean, amazing. It seems like we have, it's, oh, I'm about to do so many puns.
Michelle Wong:
Oh, ready. I love it.
Ben James:
I don't know. Everything is ripe for innovation here, and we have all the ingredients in place. Speaking to that, of innovation and sort of where we're going, can you give us some of the Sprinkle secrets about what we can expect? What's coming up? I mean, you've got franchising going on, other things going on. What can we expect from Sprinkles come this year?
Michelle Wong:
I mean, we're going to be taking over the world, Ben, a little bit. We're going global.
Ben James:
That's very exciting.
Michelle Wong:
It's very exciting. It's huge. I mean, what also impressed me about Sprinkles, right? We have 24 bakeries. We're not in every state, but this brand is so well known.
Ben James:
Oh wow.
Michelle Wong:
And so beloved and so two years ago we launched our DTC channel, so we can nationally ship cupcakes anywhere in the country. So you can live in Miami, there's no Sprinkles there yet, and you can still get cupcakes and,
Ben James:
Oh, great.
Michelle Wong:
What's exciting about franchising is now we're able to have more of a physical footprint across the US, but we're also going international, which is huge. I'm so excited for this.
Ben James:
That's very exciting. So I'm thinking of all the airports I can pick it up in. I'm thinking of all the places. To make the excuse of go on business trips and things to then make sure that I'm in a Sprinkles town. It sounds like I'm going to be in a lot more Sprinkles towns. It just seems like there's just amazing growth potential here of what you got going on.
Michelle Wong:
Yeah, I mean, think what's an incredible thing is, right, Sprinkles was born out of innovation. Candace Nelson, I talked with her a couple months ago. She's so exciting, so interesting, and just really brilliant. Right. So she was saying, she's like, I started this company 17 years ago. So today you can have a fancy version of anything, donuts, popcorn, any snack that you want, a cookie, you can have the glamorized version of it. 17 years ago, this didn't exist, and she really wanted a unique experience. And again, going back to the discussion about all the touchpoint, like when you walked in the space, it felt different. It was so clean. The design had this really beautiful aesthetic that you weren't seeing in other places. And so that being in our DNA is really how we're driving all of our innovation. Everything has to come from that place.
It's how the ATMs got born. It's how they're continuing to grow. It's our delivery of the product. We're also launching some new products and formats very soon as well. And all of that is through that lens of what is truly going to be unique and special and beautiful and unlike anything else that you've had.
Ben James:
I mean, one thing when you talk about Candace there, what strikes me to think about and talk a little about too, is this is a female founded and led company, and DEI is core to so many parts of the Sprinkles brand. And not even just the Sprinkles brand, but the company. It's really, it's in it. Can you talk a bit about brand values and how that guides your partnership setups and how you go about that lens in marketing with DEI and being a female founded and led company?
Michelle Wong:
Absolutely. Having diversity, equity, inclusion, representation, that is hugely a core to our brand values and something really powerful came out. We did some research last year and we're in the hospitality space. It's a bakery, but we're basically in the restaurant business. Right. And in this field, most GMs aren't women. Most restaurants and bakeries and shops are run by men. At Sprinkles, over 70% of our GMs are female, which is really unprecedented in our space. And so when we think about our values and the actual makeup of our teams across the board, it is absolutely critical that the work that we do reflects not only the people that are inside our own house, but the people that are buying our product. And so for us, it's really been the driver behind who we partner with and who we want to work with. And it's a great place to be.
We partnered with the brand, the wellness brand Golde, and I've always been a huge fan of Trinity Mouzon Wofford because of her incredible entrepreneurial mind and this business that she grew. And her whole mission was about making wellness accessible to people. And I was like, this is what we're all about. We want everyone to be able to enjoy what they want to enjoy. And so when we launched this matcha, we did a matcha cupcake. That one might be my favorite. It's hard. It changes every time. Every week someone's like, what's your favorite? It's a different cupcake, but that one is close to my heart. And we partnered with her on it, and it was great. It was a fantastic success. We were able to be a part of a brand that was doing wonderful things, and our people saw that. They saw that reflected in our values.
Working with Gold House, we just launched our Lunar New Year cupcake was a really huge piece. I mean, it was again, people are sending us emails and messages saying, I never thought that I could see this. I never thought I could see a piece of myself reflected in this way. And it's really become a part of who we want to be as a brand, because we know the powerful effect that it has. We know how much it rallies our internal teams, but it's also driving the business. We're seeing it in the numbers. So there's no real debate in sort of how we live those values.
Ben James:
Amazing. You can feel it, you can see it, you can taste it, you can smell it. It truly is something special that you've brought together. And just talking to you get so excited about seeing the future of this and trying all these different flavors in the future. Thank you for what you're doing. It's amazing.
Michelle Wong:
Oh my gosh. I mean, it's not a bad business to be in. To dream up cupcake flavors and working with people you want to work with, I mean, it's pretty awesome.
Ben James:
Well, I don't know if you could tell, but we did a lot of research for this. I mean a like lot. And so no, it was so nice talking to you and it's so good getting to know you more and really, so thankful you spent time with us. Thank you for sharing your story, the Sprinkle story, and a bit on where things are going. So thanks very much.
Michelle Wong:
Thank you for having me. It was really fun.
