Transitioning from Events to Ecommerce
This week, Emily chats with Emily Harpel, Founder and CEO of Art of Sucre, a luxury cotton candy company. In this episode, Emily Harpel discusses building an events-based business and transitioning to ecommerce in the wake of the pandemic. She discusses her approach to social media, collaborations and the journey of a business pivot.
Emily Harpel, Art of Sucre
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Tune in for topics like:
00:45 What is Art of Sucre?
1:28 The idea that sparked the brand creation
3:18 Creating cotton candy from scratch
4:15 Identifying as an entrepreneur
5:30 Growing at your own pace
6:24 Art of Sucre’s early years and building brand awareness
9:08 Emily’s advice for a successful collaboration
10:13 Transitioning from events to e-commerce
16:27 Advice for brands wanting to switch to selling online
18:42 What’s next for Art of Sucre
Listen to this week’s Local Marketing School conversation!
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Emily Steele (00:13)
All right, we are live with another episode of Local Marketing School. I'm your host, Emily Steel, and I have another Emily on the podcast with me today. It's always fun. I was like, it's probably everyone in five to 10 episodes will have an Emily, right? We just are very common names around here.
Emily Harpel (00:28)
100%. Stasticically speaking, there's going to be one of us around for sure.
Emily Steele (00:31)
Absolutely. Yes. Well, Emily Harpels with us with Art of Sucre and we are so excited to dive into her journey and what she is creating in the world. So Emily, can you kick it off by telling us a little bit about you and your background, how you started the company and where you're at today?
Emily Harpel (00:46)
Yeah, absolutely. So I own Art of Sucre, which is a gourmet cotton candy company. This is not the cotton candy that you're used to having at the fair, at a baseball game. It's not just that generic pink or blue where you're not really sure what the flavor is. It's unique flavors like champagne or Manhattan or something crazy like pickle or onion. We've basically, any flavor, we have turned it into cotton candy. And what we're really known for are cotton candy drink glitter bombs.
Emily Harpel (01:14)
So essentially it's a fluff of flavored cotton candy with edible glitter on the inside. You drop it into your favorite clear and bubbly beverage. The cotton candy dissolves and edible glitter flows out, making your drink a little bit sweeter and nice and sparkly.
Emily Steele (01:26)
That's incredible. How does one come up with this idea?
Emily Harpel (01:30)
Honestly, excellent question. I'm not really sure how I ended up here. No, I'm just kidding. Funnily enough, I was planning my wedding back in 2016 and was on Pinterest like, you know, most people that are planning their wedding are, right? And really couldn't figure out what I wanted to do for wedding favors for whatever reason. That was one of the hardest parts of wedding planning. Everything that I wanted to do was just extremely expensive or wasteful.
Emily Harpel (01:58)
And so was just stumbling upon different desserts. And this was really at the height of when Instagram was at the top. Bloggers were becoming very popular and the term influencer was being flown around, you know, left, right and center. And desserts were really having this incredible upgrade. So it was the beautiful like sugar cookies that looked more like art than they do a cookie, the age of cake pops, a donut wall. That was really at the peak of all of that movement.
Emily Harpel (02:26)
And while I was looking for these wedding favors, cotton candy popped up on Pinterest. And I, at the time, thought to myself, that's so weird that this is one of the desserts that I think has a really nostalgic vibe to it, but nobody's touching it. Nobody's doing anything with it. It's this really scary packaging that looks like a red clown on it and bags that you can't reseal. Who wants that? It's not aesthetic. It doesn't look delicious. What is this? And so ultimately, I decided to start an events -based business.
Emily Harpel (02:56)
around the cotton candy. And what's so funny is people assume that I then had cotton candy at my wedding. I didn't. We used books as our wedding favor. And then I took the money from our wedding and bought my first cotton candy machine and started doing events for four years. So that's really how I got started.
Emily Steele (03:02)
Oh, cool. Yeah.
Okay, yeah, and did you like know anything about creating cotton candy or are you just like YouTubing it? Like I'm gonna buy a machine, I'm gonna look like Craigslist, where does one find a cotton candy machine, right? Okay.
Emily Harpel (03:24)
I think I bought my first one on Amazon, actually. And what's so funny about this is I really kind of dumped this idea on my husband, like on the car ride back from our honeymoon. I was like, so I have him trapped for 20 hours. What do you think about me not going to graduate school? I'm a start a cotton candy company. And he was like, no, that's, let's do it. Like, that's great. You should do that, which is a wild response. That's not my response. If he would come to me with it. And so I literally secured the name, the Instagram handle, the LLC, everything in that car ride before I had ever once in my life touched a cotton candy machine. So I was YouTubing lots of trial and error to figure out how to even begin to make this work.
Emily Steele (04:02)
Totally. And did you identify as an entrepreneur? Or are you just like, here's an idea and like, I'm curious enough to figure it out.
Emily Harpel(04:16)
I grew up in a household of entrepreneurs, so to me, it didn't seem as much of a crazy jump. Everybody when I told was like, you're gonna give up graduate school to make cotton candy, like was very confused by this. And to me, it didn't feel like a risk. I would argue that I'm not a big risk taker. I don't like roller coasters. You're not gonna catch me skydiving. But in this instance, it really felt more natural. for whatever reason. So I think looking back on it, I have always had that entrepreneurship spirit, but I don't know if I would have identified as an entrepreneur at that age.
Emily Steele (04:42)
Yeah, and it's interesting, like you took a bet, obviously, like financially to buy the equipment, but it wasn't like, you got like a five year lease on a brick and mortar building and like, like, I'm gonna do this and figure it out that way. I think like, what a cool story to be able to show kind of this like event based pop pop up type of nature because it does de risk it quite a bit. So then you can figure out, okay, is this actually viable? Is that kind of what your your path?
showed you like four years of event business and where did you kick off the company?
Emily Harpel(05:21)
So we're still based in Cleveland, Ohio to this day and you're spot on with that. And one of the things that I talk about a lot is growing at your own pace. And for me, I think part of the reason it didn't feel risky is because the upfront investment was not that much money at all. I think all in it was under a thousand dollars and was able to start this. And if it failed, I guess I could go back to graduate school, you know, and make it work type of thing. But you're right. It was not this like, crazy, all -in, hundreds of thousands of dollars to pour into a brick and mortar or manufacturing or anything like that. I was able to do that as I grew the company and really proved the concept.
Emily Steele (06:00)
Yeah, yeah. So talk about some of those early days. Like how did you get the name out there? You're obviously like great to be on Instagram in 2016, right? And 17 like that was really like such a peak and I remember launching a business around that time too of just like the adoption the algorithm was so in favor of like everything. Did you experience that or how did you, what were those early years like?
Emily Harpel (06:20)
Oh, yeah.
So it was one of those things that I didn't have enough money to have a website. So Instagram was really it. It was how people were finding our email. It's how I was communicating with people. But my problem was Instagram was very, very aesthetic at the time. And I would argue that it still is less so than it was then. It was all about the perfect grid. It was about having that professional photography. And if I am one thing, it is absolutely not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination. And so I was...really lucky enough to kind of put myself out there and find a friend from high school. And she was starting a photography business at the same time that I was starting Art of Sucre. And so we really partnered together to trade of service. She needed people and things to photograph for her portfolio and I needed photos. So we would have coffee once a week and brainstorm and network and then from there we were able to share each other's network and hey I you know I booked this event how would you want to photograph it for me and those sorts of things so we really grew alongside of each other at the same time and we were in the same place so it really worked well for both of us.
Emily Steele (07:28)
Yeah. Yeah. So you're getting basically your Instagram feed curated with the Instagram aesthetic that everyone is apparently looking for. Thank god those days are somewhat over from even the personal perspective too, especially. So you're doing this. And how are you starting to book events? Like, remember those early days?
Emily (07:41)
The very first event that I ever did was unpaid and it was for like an open charity public event that 2000 people came to. I had never spun, I don't even spun cotton candy in my kitchen. I was like, what is this gonna be? And it actually went off without a hitch. We had a line the entire time and actually stayed an extra two hours after the event was done to make it through like these thousands of people that wanted cotton candy. So that really got my name out there, which was great. And then I started doing local bridal shows. And I think my brain was in wedding mode because I had just gotten married, but that was when I booked my very first paid event. It was for a local dress shop that sells wedding dresses. And then that was a huge connection in the industry because obviously she has all of these brides coming in and I was featured on their Instagram. And from there, it just really snowballed into picking up honestly pretty quickly.
Emily Steele (08:24)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, so you can attribute some of that early success to those collaborations and working with people and partnering. So for someone who's maybe in the early stages and thinking about getting their, I think in this instance, product is a great, service is a little bit different, but they're product out into the world, what advice would you give them around collaborations and how to get that rolling?
Emily Harpel (09:06)
Collaborations are still what fuels the business to this day and they look a little bit different now than they did back then, but it's so, so important and it can start small and grow into something bigger. We just firmly believe in shooting your shot here and it can come from an Instagram DM, it can walk up to somebody at an event. I'm a pretty naturally introverted person, which I think shocks people. I think people assume founders and CEOs are very extroverted and are very you know, putting themselves out there. That does not come naturally to me. I have since learned to do to do that. But we send pitch emails left, right and center 100 % if you have an idea for a collaboration, just reach out to that person and propose it to them. And I think you'll be shocked at who responds to you.
Emily Steele (09:40)
Yeah. Shoot your shot. It's essentially like, if you never ask, you'll never know. It's always been my motto is like, if you never try something, you also never know. So like put yourself out there, you're going to get rejected. You're going to get no's you're going to get ignored. But a few people might be really excited. And those are the wins like worth shooting your shot for, I would say, right?
Emily Harpel (10:14)
Absolutely.
Emily Steele (10:15)
Yeah, okay, so you get to the point where you're doing these events for four years, but something obviously you say four years, but I'm doing the math. I'm like, that's not too today. So what happens, like what happens four years in that maybe changes things or like talk about like fast forward a little bit from the beginning.
Emily Harpel (10:24)
Yeah, so COVID happened. It was, I will never forget this because it was literally my wedding anniversary, which is in March. And all this revolves around March for me for whatever reason. It's like a very powerful month. And this in my story for sure. But yeah, the world shut down and cotton candy is not essential. Shocker to everybody. So I went from doing events seven days a week, sometimes two or three events in one day to not being allowed to operate my business, obviously, and being at home. And for the first couple of weeks, none of us knew what was going on or what was going to happen. And it was scary. And if I'm being totally honest, and I share this because I think it's important from a small business standpoint to know that burnout is really normal. And I understand that it's really privileged to feel this way, but it felt a little bit like a deep sigh that I could kind of slow down for a second because I was running myself in to the ground doing these events myself 24 seven and then it very quickly became a oh yeah this isn't just like a two week shutdown to make sure we don't get sick this is going to be a month two months three months six months whatever that looks like however long and so I had this light bulb moment that I had this really cool concept and it would be really sad to let it go and also what am I gonna put on my resume if I go and get a quote unquote real job? I've been spinning cotton candy for the past four years. What do I do? And I decided to pivot the brand into packaging. So open up an e-commerce store and simultaneously I started posting on TikTok, which really, really helped that process.
Emily Steele (12:05)
Mm -hmm. Okay, so what that was around COVID time, like you're figuring out packaging and that had to be like a whole new process, right? To figure out like what you wanted, how does cotton candy stay, like it stays, you know, fresh for a long time or do you have to change your recipe?
Emily Harpel (12:21)
Yep, those are all the questions that I had to figure out. And it took me about a year. So what's interesting, specifically about cotton candy, is that it's incredibly delicate. I'm sure you have any experience eating it, and obviously melting your mouth. So if it has any type of moisture introduced to it, it starts to disintegrate. So it was a lot of trial and error of packaging. I had to hire a design team who was going to make this. what are the FDA rules around all of this? I had to look into a different licensure. I had to build a team to help me spin this cotton candy and I had to build demand for it because it was outside of just my little Cleveland, Ohio bubble.
Emily Steele (12:58)
Did you find that your Cleveland customers and community was instrumental in getting the word out as you went from kind of local to e -comm or was it a totally different audience that was engaging from the online presence?
Emily Harpel (13:25)
It was a little bit of both, but I would say for the most part, it was a totally different audience. So if you pull up our TikTok demographic today, it's like Cleveland doesn't even make the list as far as like who follows us the most, which is super interesting. And we were doing basically pickups at the time. So I would spin our cotton candy, put it in these clear deli containers and people would drive from all over across state lines, all over to stay in their car like mask up and have me hand deliver them cotton candy in these tubs because they saw us on TikTok. So that's really what started to grow the brand.
Emily Steele (13:59)
wild. Yeah, yeah. Do you, did you have any moment as you were opening like kind of the e -comm side that you're like, oh my gosh, where like this could really, really work? Was it as soon as you kind of got TikTok going, you had that confidence or any other moments that felt like an indicator?
Emily Harpel (14:20)
It really had about say maybe halfway through the transition. I realized, oh, okay, like there is, there is something here. My original goal when I started this was before I had the TikTok following and it was still just Instagram and I was posting on TikTok, but it was honestly more something for fun at that point than it was, you know, something huge for the business. And it quickly did change something huge for the business, but my goal was to do half events and half packaging. And it was really just kind of a way to get me through and maybe expand it in something else. And then it very quickly did I realize like, oh yeah, we're not going to be doing events at all anymore. We have completely transitioned the brand, which I think made it difficult for our local community to fully understand because at that time I was posting constantly was transitioning the brand. I probably wasn't communicating the way that I should have been as far as keeping people up to date on Instagram if they weren't following us on TikTok. So even to this day, people that I worked with years ago in the event space will still email and say like, hey, can we book you for this event? And I'll have to explain or the team will have to explain. Actually, we don't do events anymore. So I think it was actually kind of a hard transition for people local to us to understand that it's not really the same business anymore.
Emily Steele (15:10)
Yeah, yeah, do you have any desire to do it again as you grow or you like that chapter is closed tight? Yeah.
Emily Harpel (15:40)
For me personally, that chapter is closed tight. I will not be the one with the cart going out and spinning out events, but I do in my heart of hearts really believe that there is an opportunity there that as we continue to grow to open up an events leg or if it's the franchise or I don't really know what that looks like, but there's something so magical about being able to have that experience in person that I do think it would be sad to let it go entirely.
Emily Steele (15:57)
Is there any advice you could give to someone who's thinking about, you know, going from, let's say like the weekly farmers market to pop -ups to events to going more to the e -commerce side, like making that switch? Are there any critical like, oh, I'm so glad I did it this way or I would never do this again.
Emily Harpel (16:27)
Yeah, if you're thinking about making the switch, my biggest piece of advice is to really build your business backwards. And what I mean by that is that I had almost a year of creating hype around this product that people couldn't buy yet. And I don't mean that it has to be a year long process, but it really made the transition successful and smooth because I brought people along on the journey. I said, Hey, this is what I used to do. This is what I'm thinking about doing. Do you like this packaging A or B? Do you like this flavor one or two? And really brought people into the community. And you don't have to have a million followers like I do on TikTok to do that. You can have five followers to do that. People love to give their advice and their opinion. And you can, you know, take it for what it's worth. Take it with a grain of salt, but really have that involvement and then when you are able to transition into e -commerce, you already have a built -in buyer, essentially.
Emily Steele (17:27)
Yeah, yeah, so build hype left and right wherever you can. Yeah, get people. I think that's such a fun part of my journey too is just like getting people excited about something, you know, and like it could be the smallest thing and like just go with it. People need something interesting on social media to engage with. So why not be you, you know? I love it. So essentially, do you have your entire team then based in Cleveland or are you remote distributed?
Emily Harpel (17:30)
So we do all of our own production. I'm literally sitting in our production facility now. So my team for the most part is in Cleveland. However, my design team who we work with very closely, they're not employees of Art of Sucre, but they are. Like we're very close. They're in Denver. So there are definite places, you know, that we are able to work with people across the country. And then our photographer is based in Ohio, but in Columbus, which that works out really well.
Emily Steele (17:59)
Yeah, cool. I love it. Okay, so here you are today. It's April. No, it's May. It's May 1 today as we record this. Yay, I love May. I don't know why. And you are here. Where do you see yourself in the next couple years?
Emily Harpel (18:25)
Yeah, so we've experienced just so much growth over the past couple of years, which has been super exciting. And I feel like we really have our feet underneath us now. We've figured out the packaging, we figured out the recipes, we figured out the shipping. And really from now and moving forward, I see more and more collaborations in front of us and also potentially moving into the wholesale retail space, which is super exciting. But just taking what we've really honed and now it feels like it's to a level of that we can scale it above just being a direct -to -consumer online store.
Emily Steele (19:13)
Yeah, that's exciting. Are you gonna be able to continue bootstrapping? Are you gonna have to raise capital or maybe the question? Yeah.
Emily Harpel (19:23)
So that is the ongoing question. I think for me, if you would have asked me four years ago, I would have said absolutely not. I'm not raising capital in any way. And oh, how naive Emily was four years ago at this point I feel like I've been very lucky to have continued to bootstrap the brand and that is not an easy thing and a lot of that has come down to strategy a lot of it's come down to luck a lot of it's you know come down to just circumstances so never say never at this moment in time we're not currently looking for funding but if the right opportunity presents itself I'm not opposed to it at all.
Emily Steele (19:43)
Yeah, cool, cool. Well, I'm so excited. Anything else you want to share with listeners about your journey or the brand or yourself?
Emily Harpel (20:07)
Oh my goodness. I think the most important thing that I hear from a lot of other founders I do, like a lot of consulting on the side for social media strategy and just kind of in general, is the comparison game. I feel like especially within social media is so so strong and one of the things that we had kind of touched on previously is people see a brand like ours that has a lot of followers and we go viral pretty often. It's not always what it seems on the internet and I know that's a very heavy topic that's discussed around but you don't see a lot of founders breaking down the actual numbers of this video had this many views, here's what actually happened, here's the numbers behind it, here's the followers we gained, here's how much we had in sales. So just be cautious of the comparison game because somebody that has zero Instagram followers could be crushing it and somebody that has a million could not be doing nearly as well as you assume that they're doing. So just hopefully that gives you a little bit of hope in your journey as well.
Emily Steele (21:00)
Yeah, I remember a founder at one point was sharing about her product and how like Kim Kardashian and Khloe were talking about it and like it was so incredible from like a PR standpoint like right you get someone with that big of an audience and she said it drove no sales and so it's it's fascinating right because you're like how did that like wow that's so amazing like star eyes but you're like okay but what did that translate to and like it's okay like if you don't always knock it out of the park with things like that but I think there's always more to the story and be curious about those things for sure so I'm glad you shared that. Yes okay so people need to go try your product obviously how do they how do they do that where should they go next?
Emily Harpel (21:38)
We kept it very simple for you. So everything is just art of sucre @artofsucre, artofsucre.com. You can find us there. And then everything personally is just Emily Harpel
Emily Steele (21:53)
Love it. Wow. Love that you secured all those like lucky in that sense, right to have it all. Nice work. Amazing. Well, thanks again for being on the podcast today, Emily.
Emily Harpel (22:01)
I genuinely, yes.
Awesome. Thanks, Emily.
