King Creamery
Building a monthly ice cream club serving the greater Portland area.
Project
I’d been making ice cream for years, and started to bring it to neighborhood and work events. As people continued to ask to purchase some, I decided to create a business around it that didn’t start with the costly overhead of a physical location or food truck. We created a monthly ice cream club that offered three seasonal flavors. Subscribers could personalize their offering by selecting three pints from those flavors, and we’d deliver to the greater Portland area at the end of the month.
Key Results
500+ new subscribers in 12 months
95% retention rate
Our two-person operation grew faster than we anticipated. With minimal marketing spend, the business was profitable and had a loyal following across the Portland market.
Brand position #1
Beloved flavors, unique ice cream.
To us, ice cream is a nostalgic experience and we wanted our flavors to reflect that. So we developed flavors that were familiar but with a unique spin on them, such as turning rocky road into “smokey road” by smoking the chocolate and almonds. We also picked familiar flavors that you might not have had as an ice cream, like “lemon bar dream” that was lemon curd, shortbread cookies and sweet cream base.
Value proposition
Artisan quality, modern convenience.
One of the core value propositions that resonated with our audience is the idea of getting great ice cream delivered to your door without having to find parking at a crowded location and wait in line for 30 minutes for a scoop. This was one of our key selling points that allowed us to expand outside of the Portland core and into areas not typically thought of as being part of the food scene at the time, such as Beaverton and West Linn.
Publications
Crafting a sweet relationship with the press.
We knew that publications are always looking for a new story and that we were offering a unique product in the market. So we delivered ice cream to some of the top publications in the city (Portland Monthly, Eater, Oregonian) as well as the host of the Simple Kitchen radio show. The additional exposure from being in the publications during the holiday season resulted in a 38% increase of subscribers during November and December.
Brand position #2
Always interesting. Never weird.
Another position that we took was to not follow the trend at the time, most notably created by Salt n Straw, to offer flavors that are head-scratchers and weird (i.e. turkey dinner ice cream). We wanted to introduce delightful new flavors to customers without pushing their palettes.
Collaborations
Collaborating with Portland food scene
Being local, we knew the types of establishments popular among our audience and that collaborating with them would give us instant exposure and credibility. So we performed outreach to some of the owners around town. We featured popular products in our flavors (Pip’s doughnuts), created flavors based on iconic Portland dishes (Le Pigeon’s maple cornbread dessert), and made Spanish-flavors for the restaurant Ataula.
Events
Connecting with the community
There are certain events where the Portland community comes together for entertainment and food , such as street fairs, art walk, Sunday parkways. We found these events to be great places to bring our ice cream bike to sell ice cream and sign up new subscribers. We could attribute 20% of our subscribers to these events with negligible cost.