The idea
I started at Sweet Gourmet helping out a neighbor who needed an extra hand. It was a gorgeous little gourmet shop in Tyler, stocked with everything from Le Creuset to local handmade cheese, and hardly anyone outside town knew it existed. They asked me to grow their social media. I looked at the same shop and saw a business that could sell to anyone on the internet, and that's what I built.
The odds
The owners were nervous about change, about selling online, and about shipping anything anywhere. Every single post had to be approved, so the feed crawled and the team was scared to touch it. Their cooking videos were 20-minute episodes with the cooking and the fun split into separate halves, and the shop didn't even have an inventory system built for ecommerce.
The move
I evolved the brand one step at a time, at a pace the owners could live with, starting with a crowded sticker-style logo that I simplified and carried everywhere. I took those 20-minute shows and cut them into short, food-first reels that kept all of the owners' humor, and I shot and produced every one of them myself. I broke the approval bottleneck by teaching the whole team to post their own stories, until social stopped being scary and became the fastest way to tell people what had just come in. Six months in, I launched a Shopify store simple enough for the staff to run, and then I tied every in-store change to email and social, with flash sales and platform-only offers pulling people back and forth between the shop and the screen.
The result
Instagram grew 82% a year without a single paid ad. Facebook passed 10,000 followers, and one of my reels blew past a million views. Before the store, every sale depended on someone walking through the door in Tyler. Two months after launch the shop was selling online, and by the first holiday season it was bringing in nearly $10,000 a month that hadn't existed before, with orders shipping to customers across the U.S. Email opened at better than 50%, and 60% of traffic ran straight to the flash sales. In June 2025 the business sold as a full package, and that online channel was a big part of what made it sellable.
Results at a glance
Gallery
Credits
- Brand Coordinator Karen Russell
Sources
- store and platform reporting