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Rachel: I’ve been working on my jams for about thirteen and a half years, and I wrote
my book three years ago, after working on it for about ten years. The company Blue Chair
Fruit is about three and half years old now.
When I started selling my jams, I was managing a café, and I was making them at home and
selling them out of the café. It was great because I got to ease into it gradually. When
I first started it was just me, and now I have four FT staff.
Selling at farmer’s markets has been a really key way of connecting with our public. Initially
I was in one market. Then we were up about five markets at the peak, and now we just
do the busiest, most profitable, most fun ones.
The last 24 months have seen a huge change in our business. I would say even the past
six months, our production has gone way up because we’ve started selling to Williams
Sonoma. Williams Sonoma is a huge national chain that carries only the highest end food
products. They have 300 locations, and we are in over half their locations. We are going
to be making 30, 000 jars, give or take, a year for them, and we’ve already started
– actually these tomatoes are for them. So it’s just been an astronomical change
in our business.
I have meetings about once a week with the book-keeping employee, her name is Jamie.
It’s to discuss where we are, it’s mainly cash-flow wise… she’s the one who pays
our bills, we figure out together what should get paid, when, things like that.
Jamie: My job at Blue Chair Fruits is to do everything that happens outside of the kitchen,
so that Rachel can spend as much time as possible in the kitchen. Once a week, Rachel and I
get together to go over the accounts. We use that opportunity to pull up any reports that
we may need, we want to stay on top of money that we owe, and money that we can expect
to come in.
From time to time Rachel has a special request, a particular report or data that she wants
to see, usually whether or not a particular sales outlet is doing well, or if it needs
more resources. Xero allows us to use the numbers we’ve inputted to work for us and
to see the big picture.
Shopify provides a really clean interface for both our shoppers and for us, as administrators,
of our online store. With shop we’re able to check our inventory, we make over 50 jam
flavours a year, and there’s no way we could store that information in our heads. So with
Shopify we have really precise and accurate inventory levels. We log in, we see our orders
for the day, and within the same system, we’re able to fulfill them, package them, print
the shipping label.
Rachel: Every detail is something we built from scratch. From the brand-named website,
to my cookbook, everything just started from zero. So no pun intended.
I have to be honest, I feel with Xero, we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can
do, but already it’s helped us dramatically, just in terms of having a complete picture.
So at any given time I can look and see exactly what’s happening in our business. It’s
been so great to have a foundation where everything’s in one place, and it’s very organized and
easy to use, which is great.