Sal's Bread
Sal’s Bread was a COVID pop-up that I operated in the spring of 2021, baking and selling loaves of sourdough out of my Brooklyn apartment. I started making sourdough during the first round of quarantine, and I continued the practice well after the trend had fizzled. I soon had friends and neighbors clamoring for my bread, which they dubbed “Sal’s Bread,” and so my side hustle was born. I created an Instagram account to function as my main promotional tool, and developed a singular and unique small-business voice that emphasized my own story as the basis of my brand story.
My social strategy was a combination of visually engaging, dynamic food pictures with irreverent humor (many a meme appeared on the Sal’s Bread page). In curating the account, I took note of the intense emotional environment of that first covid winter, acknowledging the cynicism that ensconced the city nearly a year into the pandemic, as well as the unique opportunity for non-traditional content and voice to offer cheerful distraction and product promotion in one.
In all strategy, I focused on the grassroots and personal nature of my business, capitalizing on both the charm and efficacy of local community outreach. I ordered brand postcards with my logo and purchase information, which I distributed throughout my neighborhood and local parks, and I gifted loaves of bread with attached postcards to local small business owners, many of whom became regular customers. Across all of my content, I linked my business inextricably with its human element—myself—by using the first person voice and weaving personal anecdotes into account posts and stories.
I organized a bread swap with another small baking operation in order to expand my account's reach to the other business's longer-established Instagram following, and exchanged bread for the services of a food photographer friend, in order to build a library of professional product images. I utilized UGC and made my customers' content a regular feature of my stories, and emphasized the time-sensitive nature of my product's limited supply with frequent calls to action and warnings of rapidly-dwindling opportunities for purchase.
