Sophie Evanoff is the President of Vanille Patisserie, a baking business specializing in authentic French pastries, desserts, and cake. Sophie discovered her love for pastries at a young age and knew she knew she wanted a career in the pastry arts. However, it wasn’t just about the pastries, it was about the baking business. She has built a luxury brand from customer experience and employee engagement, to three unique retail locations. Today, the bakery is known for its premiere quality, taste, and dedication to the craft.
READ FULL TRANSCRIPTSo Sophie, welcome to the Brand Labs.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
Stories have been written about Vanille’s croissants, that apparently they’re the best outside of Paris. Having eaten croissants in Paris and in your shop, I can say that that’s a true story. So what makes a good croissant?
Honestly, I think what makes the best croissant is in the baking. We definitely bake European standards, so we’re taking it a little bit further, the color is a little bit more golden and rich, which is something you don’t see in a lot of American bakeries, and that’s where the flavor is. And so that’s what we do, we wanna carry on the traditional French way of baking.
So let’s talk a little bit about your background. Did you always know that you wanted to be a baker or did you have the entrepreneurial gene and said, “Some day I’m gonna bake and own a business?” Talk about your back story.
0From an early age, I always knew I wanted a baking business. I loved baking, I loved anything around pastry and dessert, and what it signifies is everyone’s happy around dessert. But it wasn’t just the pastry, it was the business. I never fantasized or dreamed about being a chef or owning a restaurant, it was always some sort of business. And when I was 17, looking into colleges and my parents were like, “Go get a degree in business ’cause that’s what you need to be learning if you’re gonna run a business,” and I just didn’t take their advice. I was stubborn, I was scared, I didn’t wanna follow my dream, and I just did my own thing. And college took a whole lot longer then it should’ve, but I found my way back to pastry school, and I moved to Chicago to attend the French Pastry School, and I knew this was definitely the way I needed to go. And lo and behold Vanille came into my life.
Vanille is a luxury brand. Talk about how you maintain that quality of a luxury brand, and talk about why that’s important to you.
So a little background on Vanille, Vanille was an existing business that I acquired, and at the time they only had two stores, they were a really small store, but they were founded by a husband and wife team who were awesome chefs, and they knew quality inside and out. And so when I acquired Vanille, the brand already had that quality reputation, so it was a matter of how do you take it to the next level, maintaining the quality and grow the presence. And so with the quality being intact, I really focused on the branding and the marketing and really taking aspects of other luxury brands and adapting it to pastry. And the one important thing about pastry is we’re a luxury brand, but everybody can afford a $2 cookie. And so you’re not walking into Neiman Marcus spending $1000 on a purse, but you can come in here and feel luxury and feel important with a $2 cookie.
So Vanille is a luxury brand and a luxury brand experience. Talk a little bit about that, why was that important to you?
So it’s funny when I initially acquired Vanille I had no desire to be a retail brand, or really a luxury brand, or knew that’s what we were creating. When we came in I wanted to focus on wholesale and that’s kind of where my initial dream was, to have a manufacturing plant and distribute cookies all over the country. But when I realized the quality reputation Vanille already had, and the potential to grow as a retail brand, it’s just what happened. And I grew up in a family that was really giving, and really around hospitality, and so those just natural qualities translated into the brand, which was just a natural fit for a luxury brand. And we changed the logo and some of the marketing and just made sure it was a concise package and it just kind of fell in our lap, to be honest, it was not done strategically. [laughter]
So we’ll talk more about the marketing later, but your brand obviously transcends baked goods. You have a number of different stores as well throughout Chicago here. Talk about that brand experience when you come into a Vanille shop.
So I always say we’re not just a bakery, we’re not just selling you a cookie, you need to come in, and it’s the experience, and it’s enjoying the pastry, and enjoying our team members, and really feeling like you are special. We don’t offer Wi-Fi in any of the stores, and that’s done deliberately. When you come to a Vanille you’re here to enjoy and be in the moment and focus on a pastry and your surroundings and meet new friends, whether it’s a team member if you’re alone or the person sitting next to you, and that’s super important to us. And it’s not just about the cookie and the cakes, and even if you buy a cake from us, every pastry, we’re involved in family traditions, holidays, and weddings, and that’s important to me and to the brand, and we take that very seriously. So that’s another reason why we’re just not selling cakes, we know that we’re a part of your family.
Well, as you know, my own family’s been in some of your shops, and my work family’s also been in some of your shops, and you’ve always been kind to us, you’ve created great experiences, and we love all the different pastries in the case. But it’s quite a range. We talked a little bit about the croissants, you obviously have the macarons and some other things as well. So what’s your favorite, what’s the hardest to make actually as well and what’s the most popular?
I would definitely say the macarons, they’re very temperamental. We have to adjust the recipe based on the humidity and the weather, so the quality is gonna vary from January to August when it’s so hot and humid, we have to constantly change baking times, and you really need to be skilled and understand how to do that. And we’re at a point now where we make 5000 a week and the batch size is 3000 versus when we first started it was 500 and it was much more controllable. So we had growing pains as well. And we realized this is as far as we could go. We tried to max out even more and the quality suffered. And so that’s one thing, yes, we have four stores, but we’re still handmade and we can’t… We’re not run by machines, and we’re still doing things really old-fashioned.
So you mentioned that the macarons are a little temperamental, and you talked a little bit about being handmade. So as you think about this luxury experience both in terms of the store but also in terms of the taste and the senses, how do you control that luxury brand experience throughout the whole supply chain and the enterprise?
It is tough ’cause the more you grow, the more people are involved, and people wanna do things their own way. So it’s really up to us that we’re first training our team members properly, and they know our standards and what’s important. It’s important for us to have documentation, and so everyone knows the Vanille way, and that it’s executed properly. We have several quality checkpoints, but like any business, it’s run by humans, and there’s gonna be mistakes, and it’s a matter of how we bounce back from the mistakes. Things are gonna happen, and of course we’ve had, unfortunately, disasters, but we pride ourselves on customer service, so if we give someone a bad cake or they’re not happy, we’re gonna do everything in our power to make sure we fix that, but not only that, to the point where they wanna come back, and that’s what we do is to go beyond what’s expected.
o you just mentioned the Vanille way, and I’ve had the opportunity to also be behind the scenes a little bit in some of your shops. There seems to be a great culture here. Talk a little bit about the Vanille way and the people that work on your team.
We’re all very serious in what we do, and we love what we do, but it’s so important that we have fun. We’re a young team, a lot of girls, girl power for sure. [laughter] We have a disco ball in the kitchen, and we like to have fun. And when you’re doing things, especially high-volume production for kitchen staff, you need to have things that are fun and just create diversion because we’re all creative people, and you need a little bit of that outlet. The front of the house staff is a little bit different. They too… We like to have fun, but they’re the face of the brand, and they’re representing me, and I always tell everybody, “You’re an extension of me and you have to be nice to people and that’s what we do. And if you don’t like people, this really isn’t… Customer service is not for you.” But it’s, again, it’s training, it’s our management team, and we’re like a family, even though we’re four stores. But I treat them all like they’re my children. Can you take that out? [laughter]
So we obviously talked a little bit about the luxury brand, a little bit around the experience, and obviously now the Vanille way. So I wanna just come back to the customer experience for a minute, because any time you walk into any of your locations, it’s a pleasure.
Thank you.
How do you continue to make sure as you grow… You talked a little bit about the training, but what are some of the things that you like to do in terms of creating some of these experiences for your customers?
It’s really important that it’s just basics, too, and we’re honest, we have… Just an example, we have new staff, if they’re working the front, they wear a training badge, and we tell them if a customer comes up, say, “This is my first week. This is my first day.” And then that expectation kinda goes down and then you realize the customer is a lot more forgiving, and you can just have a dialogue, and that’s basically what it is. It’s also about having integrity too. But a customer comes in, we want you to feel like you’re in my home, literally. All the stores is an extension of my home. And so if someone walked into your house, you’re not gonna ignore them, you’re not gonna be like, “Get your own water, help yourself.” That’s not what we do, and that’s not how I was raised. Someone walks into your home, “Hello, how are you? What can we get you? What can we do?” You wanna make them leaving like they felt special, and they wanna come back and they wanna bring their friends.
So beyond the good experience, what is interesting is each one of your locations has its own character. Talk a little bit about that, why that’s important. We’re here in the Hyde Park location today.
Initially, the first store we built was Lincoln Park, and so that was kind of getting our feet wet, and what is the Vanille identity and what are we creating? And so we created the color schemes and the initial branding. We wanted a higher-end bakery. The next store we opened was Lakeview East. And so each store is a little bit of the community, and I wanted each community to have its own bakery identity, but still with the Vanille brand. So if you walk into a store, it still feels like a Vanille, but it gives you a reason as a customer to go to each store because each one is gonna look differently, each one is gonna have a different set of team members. But you’re still gonna still feel that warmth and excitement and the same quality of the pastries. And I didn’t want a cookie-cutter brand, I didn’t wanna have the same store, the same shop, the same layout and just like, “Oh, it’s another Vanille.” No, it’s another Vanille, and it’s gonna look different, and you’re gonna go in and you’re gonna be impressed by what you see.
Well, as someone who lives over on the West Loop, I know that you’re also active in the community in your location over there as well. So talk a little bit about the community. That’s clearly something that’s also important, both in terms of identity and experience, but also in terms of some of the non-profit and other activity that you do.
For me personally, I think that’s one of the most important aspects of being a business owner, and I’m grateful that I’ve been given a platform where we can help so many people. And yes, maybe it’s only by donating 100 cookies to their event, and I’m not writing $10,000 checks, but my mom always said every little bit helps. And that statement goes back to we’re not just a bakery, we are a staple in the community, we’re a place for people to gather and enjoy, and we wanna give back. The success of any business is really dependent on the community.
So we talked a little bit about some of the core fundamentals of a brand, we talked about your employees, we talked about your product, we talked about your service and ultimately your customer experience, which are all fundamental elements, in my mind, to a good brand. And then next comes, obviously, the marketing component of that. I think if you get that first part right, the marketing gets a little easier, but I also know that you’re a small business, so marketing can sometimes be a challenge. So talk a little bit about how marketing has helped you continue to grow and expand.
So yeah, definitely marketing is a challenge for us, and we’re not shy of ideas, it’s the time and how to execute and get the marketing out there. But it’s really… In my opinion, marketing is really telling a story, and what makes things unique, and what makes your customers coming back and want makes ’em loyal, and just having fun. A couple things we do here, for instance, our Stud Muffin line. Stud Muffins, aka cupcakes, [chuckle] I was… A few years ago, actually, I was interviewed and I was quoted, “Sophie Evanoff of Vanille will never make cupcakes.” Well, I learned that lesson [13:03] ____ marketing. [chuckle] And so we developed a line of cupcakes, but we put a macaron on the side, it’s kind of like a little hat. They all have boy names, they are all personal. Each Stud Muffin is named after someone I know personally, and that’s kinda how it grew, and people love it. And we’ve had a Stud Muffin naming contest around Valentine’s Day for people to submit their story of why we should name a Stud Muffin after their loved one.
We also do a macaron flavor contest every summer on Facebook, and it started years ago when we had zero budget, we just put it on Facebook, asked for suggestions, and then we pick three that we wanna make, and then customers can come in and vote for their favorite, and then the winner gets a Vanille gift card. So it’s really about having fun, and things that are low budget for us, but on the same side we do place advertisement, especially for the wedding cakes in the wedding industry in certain… To try and be strategic with our marketing as well.
Well, I love using a little co-creation and creating some new products or least some flavors on some products with your customers, that’s always a fun thing and shows, again, extending the customer experience out. And as someone who has a horrible sweet tooth, a lot of cavities, I can say that your Stud Muffin is nothing like a cupcake. To call it that would be a disservice, so… [chuckle]
Thanks.
So we’ve talked a lot about the Vanille brand, all the sweet treats that you have here, the customer experience, the employees. We touched just a little bit on your background, but I have the opportunity to know you better than a lot of our audience would. So you’ve been a very successful entrepreneur, Goldman Sachs 10K along like myself, James Tyree Business Award winner, so what’s Sophie’s secret ingredient?
It’s taken me a long time to figure it out, [chuckle] but it’s really to know your why, and why you do this. And for me, it’s not baking, it’s not business, it’s really just bringing people joy. And when I realized it’s that simple and that’s my motivation, everything makes sense.
So as we wrap up our conversation, what’s next for Vanille, and what can our audience and what can your customers expect in the future?
We’re just gonna keep growing the brand. We are definitely Chicago home-grown and based, and we definitely need to get into e-commerce, that’s an area that’s definitely my Achilles heel. Even though I’m millennial, I don’t know technology as well as I should. So we’re gonna focus on that, and we’re just gonna keep doing what we do.
Well, Sophie, it’s been great having you in the Brand Lab today. I loved hearing about your brand, your story, and obviously, as I mentioned more than once, my sweet tooth absolutely loves your products. So it was a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Tags: B2C, CPG, Brand and Marketing, Customer Experience, Employee Advocacy, Entrepreneurship
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