The counter manager at Little Rind Specialty Grocer had been telling herself for two years that mail order was the thing she'd get to eventually. Then a second wave of indoor-dining and shopping restrictions started showing up in the news again in late October, and "eventually" turned into "this month."
"I kept waiting for a slow season to figure out shipping," she told us. "There wasn't going to be a slow season this year. So I just did it in a fast one."
Building the box in three weeks
The hard part wasn't picking cheeses — she had a holiday lineup half-planned already, built around a washed-rind wheel that ages well in transit and a firmer alpine-style that can take a few days of variable temperature without complaint. The hard part was everything around the cheese: insulated packaging that wouldn't blow her margin, a courier that could reliably hit a two-day window through the holidays, and a way to tell a customer honestly that a cheese arriving a little softer than it left the shop isn't a defect.
She landed on gel packs sized to the box rather than the order, a printed card explaining what to expect on arrival, and a hard cutoff date for guaranteed pre-Christmas delivery that she's advertising two weeks earlier than the carriers' own published deadlines, on the assumption that a season already expected to set volume records will run slower than usual. "I'd rather turn away a late order than ship one I can't stand behind," she said. It's the kind of tradeoff that's easy to say and harder to hold to once the orders start coming in faster than expected — which, in her case, they already have.
What she'd tell a member starting from zero
Retail cheese sales have held up well through the pandemic as more people cook and eat at home, and she'd seen that show up directly in her online order volume even before her packaging was fully worked out — customers were asking to ship well before she was ready to say yes. Her advice to a member weighing whether to start now: don't wait for a fully built system before you take your first order. She shipped her first few boxes in coolers from a hardware store before she'd sourced proper insulation, and used what she learned from those to fix the packaging before volume picked up.
The other piece of advice, less glamorous: price the shipping honestly from day one. "I almost ate the courier cost to make the total number look better," she said. "Then I did the math on twenty boxes a week through December, and I would have been paying customers to buy from me." She built the real cost into the box price instead, and hasn't had a complaint about it — customers understand shipping isn't free, especially for something that needs to stay cold.
The holiday boxes at Little Rind Specialty Grocer go live to its mailing list this week. If you're building your own mail-order program from scratch this season, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting notes like hers from members doing the same thing in real time — worth a call before you build your own packaging from scratch.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.