Latest News | 29 April 2021
The key ingredients to Project D’s recipe for success
Small businesses that view disruptions as a path towards reinvention have faired well during the coronavirus pandemic, none more so than the award-winning doughnut makers Project D.
Here, co-director Max Poynton explains how the bakery, which he runs alongside friends Matthew Bond and Jacob Watts, was forced to perform a pivot that not only took them through the darker days of the pandemic but will also provide the company with long-term resilience and a future that is a bright as one of its highly decorated doughnuts.
Even in the best of times business owners know they will have to adapt their company – it’s the natural response to changing markets.
Of course, the pandemic was particularly ruthless and accepting that our business plan needed to be completely abandoned was just the start of Project D’s pivot.
We knew that in the midst of every crisis comes opportunity, we just needed to work out how to make that opportunity work for us.
It started with home deliveries of flour, yeast and eggs, armed with a card reader on the end of a two-metre pole.
Within 24 hours of announcing the service on social media we had received an incredible 1,200 orders for trays of 30 eggs.
The seeds were sown for the future of the business and we soon progressed to delivering doughnuts too – we could see that a sweet treat was just what the local community needed at the height of a terrifying global pandemic.
Once we had decided to move our operation online, we went from a landing page to a fully operational site in less than a week.
This allowed customers to place orders for doughnuts to be delivered direct to their doorsteps and before long we were covering a region from Leeds to Birmingham.
Such was the demand we moved into a new bakery, began recruiting new staff and unbelievably our turnover grew by 300% in 2020.
Luckily for us, little indulgences like doughnuts are what keeps people smiling.
We were determined to keep the momentum going and so we started 2021 by launching a national postal delivery service across England and Wales with DPD.
While we were expecting this to start slowly, with awareness growing in areas we hadn’t targeted before, we have been taken by surprise at the level of interest.
We were expecting around 100 orders on the first day, but we received 250 and in the first week alone we sent deliveries all over the country, from Cornwall to Edinburgh.
We have now invested £250,000 in a new piece of kit, which will allow us to increase our output by an incredible four times.
We also asked a local company, RJ Engineering, to make a bespoke piece of kit for us to help with glazing and this is already helping to speed up the process.
The bakery is already operational 24 hours a day, between Wednesday and Sunday – and we anticipate this will become a 24/7 operation quite soon.
Although our bakery is 11 times the size of our first home, we are already looking at ways to expand.
We are hoping to build a mezzanine floor for office space and have spoken to the landlord about erecting a temporary structure in the car park to act as a warehouse.
January – traditionally an exceptionally quiet time for bakeries – was a record month.
We have increased our pop-up schedule from six to eight and we’ve added in some extra locations.
We are having to stagger the timings so that we have enough stock to keep up with demand, so some of these pop-ups are in the evening, which means people can pick up a treat after a day at work.
Although the pandemic meant we left shopping centres in Derby and Burton we have no intention of abandoning the high street and will reopen some, if not all, of our kiosks as well as a flagship store.
We have already identified a site in London for this and have plans to make this a destination – think of the way Hamleys is a byword for the best of all toys, we intend to do the same for doughnuts.
The proliferation of coffee shops on the high streets show that customers want somewhere to socialise, to gather and meet friends, or even as a place to work and so we plan to open somewhere where the baked goods are just as important as the coffee.
We also recognise that today’s customers want to connect the physical world to their digital audience and millennials will choose a spot based on its ‘Instagrammability’.
With this in mind, customers want an ‘experience’ – somewhere that will look impressive on their social media feeds and offer an opportunity to try something innovative, creative and exciting.
Once a London store is open, we will look for somewhere south of the capital and then the next city on our radar is Leeds.
We are also in talks with several airports about opening kiosks in departure lounges and, since Derby is our home town, we’d love to have a high street presence here too.
Project D will always call Derby home – this is where it all started and we have been overwhelmed with the support we have received from customers and the city’s business community.
We’ve recently been approached to help pilot the Ascend programme as part of the city’s coronavirus economic recovery plan and would urge other businesses in the city to consider applying.
We are receiving support from them in growing the business sustainably and we know we have a lot to learn.
We are in the process of forming a board and appointing a financial director and we now have a HR department, essential when you are employing large numbers.
One thing we will never lose sight of, regardless of how big the business becomes, is our product.
Our customers expect brightly coloured, beautifully made and cheekily-named doughnuts which taste as good as they look.
Despite the investment in machinery, Project D doughnuts will still be hand-decorated and ranges will still be changed regularly to keep customers coming back.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that Matt, Jacob and myself were learning how to make doughnuts, visiting bakeries across the world to ask for advice and scouting around for cheap, second-hand equipment to set ourselves up.
We established the business with our savings alone and every penny earned was ploughed back into Project D – we didn’t begin to pay ourselves until 2020.
Of course, the idea of a global pandemic would have seemed unbelievable then and it’s not something that you can plan for; no emergency or contingency plan could account for a national lockdown.
We’re just grateful that out of the chaos came reward and that by embracing the unknown and keeping a flexible mindset we were able to both survive and thrive.
Author: Max Poynton, Project D co-director
