How The Brulee grew sales 36% when nobody walked past
A dessert kiosk tucked off the main street, with a product people loved and no way of finding out about it. Every owner in a quiet unit knows the arithmetic: if nobody walks past, every single customer has to be sent.
The Brulee · Aliwal Street, 2024
Nobody walked past the shop. It sat in a quiet stretch off the main road in Kampong Glam, the sort of unit you only reach if you already decided to go. There was nobody walking past to win over, so every customer had to be sent there by something.
The product was not the problem. They made a crepe brulee with a caramel top you crack, and people who tried it came back. The problem was that almost nobody was trying it.
They had been posting. Twelve videos went out over two months, dessert shots and product close-ups, the kind of thing every dessert shop makes. Those twelve videos did 18,348 views between them. The best one reached 2,065.
A good product in a unit nobody walked past, and content nobody watched. That is the position most quiet shops are actually in.
We stopped posting desserts and started running a story. A shop with no footfall cannot be saved by another photo of the product, because a photo gives nobody a reason to make the trip.
So we built a character and gave her something to lose. Wiwi was the niece in the story, and on camera she took her uncle’s dessert shop on for ninety days. If she failed, he would not make her a partner in the business. Then we ran it as episodes with a cliffhanger on each one, and the audience came back for the next instalment rather than for the dessert.
The results
111K
454K
63KThe second episode did 454,300 views on its own. Five episodes carried 688,100 views between them, more than half of every view the shop got while we ran it. Across all twenty-three videos the account did 32 times the views per video it had managed before.
Sales grew 36% across the campaign. Every point of that had to be sent there by a video, because nobody was walking past to find it. By October she was on camera thanking people for coming down, because the shop had sold out.
Before and after
So how did The Brulee grow sales 36% when nobody walked past?
We gave people a reason to come that had nothing to do with dessert. A character, ninety days, and something she stood to lose. By the time anyone arrived they were finishing a story they had been following.
Your shop has a story like this too. You might just be too close to see it. That’s literally what the call is for.
What we run today: at least 500 new orders in 30 days, and every one is a code redeemed at your counter, so you can count them. Muslim-owned and halal F&B only.
See if we can do it for your shop →