Some clients change how you work. Erika’s Bakery was one of them, and it named something we hadn’t quite noticed before.
Erika’s Bakery has been baking German-inspired cookies from family recipes since 1979, sold out of a tin at the Sunday market and passed between generations as gifts. The kind of offline reputation that most businesses spend decades trying to build. The brand already existed. What it needed was a translator, someone to carry it onto a phone screen it had never lived on before.
That distinction shaped everything.
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What we found
The brand’s warmth was everywhere offline: in the cookies themselves, in the tin they came in, in the way regulars talked about them at the Sunday market stand. Mention Erika’s cookies to someone who grew up nearby and the word that comes up is “home.”
Online, none of that showed up. Posts went up, products got photographed, and the content could have belonged to any bakery in the country.
We’ve written elsewhere about the full diagnosis, but the short version holds up on its own: the bakery already had everything it needed, except the words for it.
What the work revealed about heritage brands
Working with Erika’s Bakery put words to something we’d noticed in other projects but never quite said out loud: the longer a brand exists offline, the more of its own identity becomes invisible to the people inside it, because it feels too obvious to mention. So much gets absorbed into the operation over the years that no one thinks to say it anymore.
A 45-year-old bakery doesn’t explain why its cookies taste different from industrial ones. The people who’ve been buying for decades already know. The processes, the sourcing decisions, the cookies that only come out at Christmas: all of it lives in the muscle memory of the business, not in the content calendar.
The digital channel requires translation that the physical one doesn’t. Walking into a space communicates. Smelling the product communicates. A 15-second scroll past an Instagram post communicates only what the post deliberately says.
For heritage brands specifically, the content strategy question shifts. Instead of “what should we post?”, the more useful question is “what is already true about this brand that has never been put into words?” That requires listening before planning.
Nobody changed how often Erika’s Bakery posted, or how the photos looked. What changed was realizing every product already carried a story nobody had been invited into yet. Once that landed, customers started responding differently. “This brand feels like home.” “Takes me back to Christmas at my grandmother’s house.” “Part of our family’s history.”
That reads less like a reaction to better content and more like recognition, the feeling of finally seeing something online that matched what they’d always known.
What any bakery can take from this
Age isn’t really what matters here. What matters is how much true material about a business has piled up without ever being put into words, and that pile starts forming on day one, not at year twenty.
A bakery that opened eighteen months ago already has stories that have never made it online: why a specific flour gets sourced from a mill two counties over, what the ovens smell like an hour before closing on a slow Tuesday, the joke regulars make about the sign that’s been crooked since opening week. All it takes is someone noticing and saying it out loud.
The bakery that exists in daily conversation between an owner and their regulars almost never shows up in the feed, at any age. For someone who hasn’t visited yet, digital content may be the only real chance to hear any of it.
Every bakery probably has more worth saying than its Instagram is currently saying.
The bakeries that translate what already exists in them, whether that’s four decades of material or four months of it, stop being interchangeable with every other option on the block. Heritage brands just have more of it piled up. The job is the same either way.
Strategy for Bakeries helps independent bakeries uncover what already makes them worth choosing, and turn those details into a digital presence people can recognize, remember, and return to. If you’re wondering what your bakery is communicating online, and what it’s leaving unsaid, send us an email.
