“Baked By Melissa” and the curation dilemma or how an amazing bakery made me really think about art

The company

“Baked by Melissa” (BBM) is a successful cupcake bakery with 13 locations in New York and New Jersey. In keeping with the way most bakeries work, the brick and mortar stores allow customers to choose how many of each flavor they want to purchase.

The bakery choices vs. the web choices

The BBM web presence, however, defines for the user what cupcakes are available through a certain type of curation. The site offers all kinds of delicious cupcakes beautifully decorated and packaged in clear package. But unlike the store experience, many of the online collections are one flavor packed in threes or multiples of 25. There is an opportunity to choose the flavors you want but it is not immediately apparent to the BBM user and not available in the top navigation. In other words, BBM has defined the user experience (UX) at the store very differently than it does the UX of its website.

BBM in-store curation–in other words, the act of directing the customer towards a premade collection–is almost non-existent. The customer is presented with all the flavors and can create any kind of desired collection. The customer’s choice is not preconstructed at the actual bakery. Curation on the BBM website, however, defines itself in two ways: one way is more advantageous for the business and the other allows more leeway for the customer.

Much of the BBM website is devoted to prepackaged collections. Many are singular flavors, a few are multiple flavors, some are geared to celebrations, like weddings and births. This type of curation is good for business because it is preordained and makes it easier to create product.

The other type of curation presents the available flavors and allows the customer to choose how to define the collection of cupcakes. This “custom” option is not as easy to access as the prepackaged collections but it is a sort of curation. Many customers who use this option are just asserting their right to the flavors that they want. But some customers will go the extra mile and create an aesthetic statement by using BBM’s cupcake art option which allows customers to create art from their cupcakes.

Art or cupcakes?

Treating BBM cupcakes as pixels in an image, the customer is able to create images using the different flavors. Anything from logos to impressionistic paintings may be created. All that is required is the customer’s patience and time to assemble the correct flavors and colors. This idea of edible art dovetails very nicely with the concepts under which chefs create cuisine, first as an aesthetic statement to be observed, studied and physically appreciated and only later as an engaging food to be eaten.

In this option, BBM has captured the ultimate in customer involvement: users fulfill their appetites by choosing their favorite flavors and then are able to further fulfill their creative drives by producing art with their cupcakes. And judging by the thousands of examples of art, customers take this option very seriously.

I am actually old enough to remember when “curation” was only used to refer to art exhibitions. The curator was the one who organized and defined the direction of the exhibition. Curated exhibitions came in several flavors but in particular two models stand out: the exhibit that investigated the life work of a certain artist and the exhibit that examined an idea through the work of a number of artists.

True to the idea of cupcakes as art and the bigger idea that humans have a creative drive in everything including the act of choosing their cupcakes, BBM has a huge gallery of all the cupcake art images that customers have created. One can buy them as is or edit the images.

How does all this impact the shopping UX?

Ultimately I think it would be beneficial to harmonize the experiences that occur at the BBM store and the BBM website. If BBM is to fully activate the artistry of it’s customers, if it wants to accentuate its brand and customer involvement, it is important for BBM to make customer creativity and choice a primary activity in both its stores and its website.

This can be done by making customer choice a primary activity on the website and BBM app. The following recommendations will allow for a more efficient and immersive customer experience.

Challenge: Flavors are showcased on the site but are separated from the actual purchase, namely clicking on a flavor brings one to delivery options and collections that don’t have anything to do with the actual flavor.

Solution: describe the flavor and allow purchase directly from that page.

This was a limited experiment into one direction that would allow customers to fully integrate with the BBM brand and allow customers to maximize their fun. The reason this is so important is because, in the final analysis, predefined choices are not as fun as picking what you want, and creating your own art is better than living with someone else’s vision, even if it is just a cupcake.