How Mrs. Beasley’s Made a Hollywood-style Turnaround

“A couple of years ago,” recalled Ken Harris, CEO of Carson, Calif.-based food gifts cataloger Mrs. Beasley’s, “Mrs. Beasley’s was in the toilet.” But like a rundown West Hollywood apartment overhauled to become a posh and highly sought-after condo, the $17 million Mrs. Beasley’s has undergone a dramatic overhaul over the past couple of years and has turned an 8 percent sales decline into a 25 percent increase. In a session at last week’s ACCM conference in Boston, Harris and two consultants he worked with explained how.

The 29-year-old company, which has historically served many Hollywood celebrities and studios (its first-ever customer was Barbra Streisand, Harris pointed out), gave its catalog a drastic overhaul, brought out a number of new products while expanding existing lines that focus groups said they loved.

“We wanted to build on the fact that we’re a premier marketer of fresh-baked gift baskets,” Harris said during his presentation. “We’re expensive, but we’re good, very much like a Godiva Chocolatier.” Doing so wasn’t so simple, as Mrs. Beasley’s caters to a largely B-to-B clientele.

So Harris’ company focused on the following key points:

* take ownership of the fresh-basked gifting category

* focus on its brand

* resist the temptation to become a food ‘Gifts ’r’ Us’, which, Harris noted, Mrs. Fields and Cheryl & Co. have become

* consistent execution across channels — catalog, Web and retail — with product development and merchandising

* emphasize its emerging popular line of cupcakes.

Harris turned to four key industry veterans for help: public relations veteran David Beckwith, catalog consultant Coy Clement and the catalog creative consulting team of Sarah Fletcher and Jeff Ryan. In examining Mrs. Beasley’s financials, Clement said during the same presentation, “I tried to understand what was selling, trying to see the longtime value of customers, looking for those high-leveraging places. The first thing was to figure out what was driving the business, how to set priorities,” he said. “And for me, that was developing more product. You have to stand for something and Mrs. Beasley’s stands for baked goods and a premium feeling.”

Over the next couple of years, Mrs. Beasley’s introduced 232 new products. Last year, new products accounted for 45 percent of the company’s sales.

Clement also recommended a drastic overhaul of the catalog and Web site. Fletcher and Ryan came in and changed what was then a slim jim format to a standard size to give the catalog a chance to better show the luscious nature of the sweets the company sold.

What’s more, Fletcher discussed some key design and copy changes she installed in the new-look catalog.

The slim jim format “didn’t show the gift baskets well,” Fletcher explained during the ACCM presentation. “There were unusual dot-whacks and taglines on the cover, which wasn’t very product-specific.” Fletcher also recommended that Mrs. Beasley’s back off a “reduced” shipping offer also shown on the old cover, because “it reminds customers you have shipping charges and tells them that they’re still high on some products.”

Fletcher noted that she found a lot of issues with headlines, displays and copy. “There were a lot of throw-away headlines,” she said. In essence, the copy and heads weren’t romancing the product.

Fletcher offered 10 creative take-away tips to attendees. Among them,

1. Promote benefits to customers and explain why they should buy it.

2. Make a visual representation of your customer; create customer personas of your core customer types using portraits clipped from ads or magazines.

3. Ease of shopping must trump just about anything else by making product presentations easy to understand.

4. Don’t ignore the tried and true. Dot whacks, cover lines and magic words, such as “free,” “save,” “sale” and “new” all work.

5. Identify three key points and promote them.

6. Develop a punch list of creative ideas.

7. Do your heavy creative lifting up front; develop a well of defined creative strategy and get buy-in from higher-ups early.

8. Maximize headlines and captions.

9. Focus 80 percent of your efforts on the top 20 percent of products.

10. Put your best products in the best spots.

And in working with Beckwith, Harris got the company a much-needed boost of publicity in both the Southern California area as well as around the country, getting Mrs. Beasley’s products mentioned on HBO’s “Entourage,” and being featured on the likes of NBC’s “Today” show. The company was also featured on CNBC and CNN.