Making a plan for precious cargo
A pharmacist-turned-chocolatier found she needed even more skills when she took her carefully crafted treats online.
While Rebecca Chan was working as a newly graduated pharmacist, her side hustle was making elaborate wedding and birthday cakes, which led to an 18-month French patisserie course at Le Cordon Bleu in Sydney. She ended up becoming a professional French-style chocolatier.
In 2016, Chan started Artisanale Chocolate, sourcing chocolate from Saint-Étienne in France and blending it with Australian nuts and fruit to craft high-end confections. “Chocolate is such a versatile ingredient. I love working with it,” she says.
Running pop-up stalls and faceto-face tastings with customers at shopping centres, office buildings and weekend markets converted into sales. But when the pandemic hit, outlets shut and she realised her online store wasn’t up to scratch.
Chan scrambled to revamp her website – including learning how to take better product photos and make her site load faster – because “even a few seconds to load a page is too long”.
She also needed a way to make noise in the “saturated” chocolate market if she wanted to move the sales needle. So for Father’s Day 2020, she developed a range of chocolate tools. “We called it the Ultimate Toolbox – five different tools in different flavours. It was a big hit.”
Great ideas don’t mean much without slick execution so Chan turned to her local post office in Sydney’s Winston Hills to meet the Father’s Day deluge. “I bought my boxes there and know all the ladies really well so they signed me up to MyPost Business. I could link it to my ecommerce platform and start automating things – previously I was hand-writing address labels. MyPost Business definitely saves a lot of time and makes the process more seamless.”
Plus, as a Band 5 MyPost Business customer, Chan saves 40 per cent on parcels posted to Sydney addresses.1 “Postage is 30 to 40 per cent of our operating costs so that makes a big difference.”
Chan knew all along she could never compromise on quality or the confidence that her handmade products – which she’d always put into her customers’ hands with such care – would reach them smoothly. “We always ship Express Post because we want the product to reach the customer in the best possible condition.”
Meanwhile, the upskilling continues as Chan digs deeper into digital marketing. “You have to be strategic. And there’s so much to learn about analytics. When you advertise online, you look at how you perform and use that to shape your next ad. You have to be smart about how much money you’re putting in and when.”