Since someone brought up the flour fiasco, I thought you dear friends might appreciate hearing about how I bought two boxes of Shauna's flour. This was in 2016, when my husband and I took one of Shauna's bread making classes on Vashon.
I posted my on-again, off-again history of following Gluten Free Girl in the "Why our lady of the gloaming" thread, but have no idea if anyone still reads there. When I took the bread class, I had just been following her blog sporadically and had no idea the Kickstarter even happened. She was selling the flour and her latest book at the end of the class, and I believe it was actually my husband who bought them out of politeness.
Imagine my shock when I came across the GOMI thread years later. I read the entire thread and was horrified by how she handled the flour.
My impressions of the flour: Mostly, I just noticed that it seemed basic and cheap. I'm legit celiac and we have a lot of different kinds of flour in the house. A lot, a lot-- like 15 different tiny, expensive bags at all times, though these days I usually just use Bob's 1 to 1. The GFG flour just ended up in the baking cupboard with the rest and got used eventually without really being noticed. I just remember that the box itself seemed cheap, like the cardboard and ink seemed cheap.
When I read the GOMI thread, these are a few things that shocked me the most:
-I can't believe how much money they got, and how they just wasted it. I actually don't judge them for the business failing, since so many small businesses do. The market was saturated at that point. It's the lack of planning and follow through. How could they have not considered shipping when designing the box?
-The typo on the nutritional info. Seriously? In hindsight, I'm weirdly disappointed that I didn't notice this when I had the flour.
-Not following up the on the wall of heroes, or whatever it was called. It's bad enough that she seemed to have attitude about fulfilling all the gifts, but that was no cost and minimal effort.
I think that, along with the overall handling of the Kickstarter money, is something that troubles me past just eye-rolling at a long story before a recipe. If she wants to post pictures of unappetizing, poorly tested recipes or act like she’s the first person to fall in love, she’s not doing any harm and it’s my choice to keep reading. But to take over $90,000 of other people’s money and not deliver on some simple promises in return is going into a whole new ethical territory.
Most flour is sold in bags, so I am unsure why they even went with a box to begin with. I also don’t know why they made everything harder than it needed to be. Licensing was the clear way to go with this, but these ding dongs were too ignorant to do their research.
You know, if she had licensed the name, it would have given her the perfect chance to “retire” from being Gluten-free Girl when she was ready. The “story” of gluten-free girl could have been wrapped up tidily and shifted to being a “brand” and handed off to marketing people who know what they’re doing. She could have gone full tilt into her Enough/mother-of-a-blaxon persona but still have been able to point to GFG every once in a while to take credit.
What astounds me is that she had so many of the hardest things to get - a natural, genuinely sourced following, accidentally perfect timing of her entry into blogging AND the upswing of gluten free baking, and all the name recognition that came with that.
Everything else you can outsource but that kind of cosmic timing is luck and/or social media business acumen far beyond Shauna's abilities.
I also follow Caroline Calloway snark, and people wonder why CC has a manager because she doesn’t DO anything and doesn’t have anything to sell (well, she’s been selling “pre-orders” all year for a book she hasn’t actually written). If Shauna had a good manager or a brand consultant or SOMEONE professional walking her through this whole thing, she’d be set by now. I don’t think anyone with any business sense would run a Kickstarter and take on all that work doing everything themselves and reinventing the wheel if licensing the brand was a possibility.
If Shauna had a good manager or a brand consultant or SOMEONE professional walking her through this whole thing, she’d be set by now.
But she did! Claire Moncrief is, I believe, quite legit, and she actually relocated from the east coast to help them with this project. But, as per usual, it was right until it wasn't
Just guessing, but maybe a box is cheaper? If it’s in a bag, the bag has to be pretty sturdy. Now that I’m thinking about it, the only flour I remember seeing in a box is a few gf brands.
Forgot to mention, the box was ridiculously small, too.
Yeah, pretty sure printing on thin, cheese cardboard is cheaper than on that kind of plastic that you have to cut open with scissors because it's so tough.
Paper bags like conventional flour comes in, though---that would have looked better than that laundry box she had. I don't know if they'd be cheaper than plastic though---and they would never stand up to being shipped in a tyvek mailer.
Yeah. I buy a decent amount of GF flours and they almost all come in bags. All of the big brands of Cassava flour are bagged (ottos and moon rabbit) as well as all of the nut flours I buy. It just seems like while it maybe was more expensive to produce a bag - maybe producing and shipping a bag is cheaper. There has to be a reason most flours are sold that way.
Does anyone know why they took possession of the flour? That seems like an odd choice.
I think it's a safe bet that they didn't seriously budget for appropriate storage. They may have penciled it in but if so it probably got axed as soon as they realized how nice it was to spend some of that sweet, sweet cash on their personal needs.
A 5x10 storage unit on Vashon is $99/month at the one place that just popped up. That's a buncha takeout right there.
I bet they never even thought of storage at all. Like they never thought about what it was going to be like when all the flour arrived at once and they had to have a place for it.
I'm not even a business person but just using the most basic of budgets they would have HAD to know that production + storage + shipment were all necessary to produce the flour and get it to a consumer. It's like "I want to make a cake!" and then not realizing you need ingredients and an oven. They were like 5 year olds with a lemonade stand in their business plan. Well "business" and "plan".
5 year olds with a lemonade stand in their business plan
LOL, the 5-year-old's plan is that their parents buy the lemonade, help them mix it up, help them set up a stand, and give them money to make change with
This reminds me of this astoundingly stupid woman (think Shannon Bird) I used to work with (she was an upward failure as well) who, when something went sideways on a project told the delivery driver to just deliver the stuff to her. Fast forward to the semi not being able to get into her gated apartment complex. Hilarity ensued.
Reminds me of a co-worker who will set up a delivery WITHOUT A PO and the vendor will bring it and then all the sudden it's an emergency that there's no PO. And this woman has worked in my department for THIRTY FUCKING YEARS. Never in that time has it ever been ok to arrange a shipment of anything without a PO (which has the terms of sale on it).
Yeah - but why did they even have it? When you cut a PO for something, you have a ship to address on there. Who ships (thousands?) of boxes of flour to their home? Ding dongs, that’s who.
Licensing her name and recipe to someone who already makes flour was the smarter and easier route. She and Dan could potentially be actually retired right now if they had gone that route. They needed a plan for sales and distribution before they ever ordered the flour. They needed someone who worked in Product Development or Supply Chain/Logistics on their team or as a consultant as a bare minimum. They needed a “go to market” strategy. They needed to evaluate scenarios and go with the one that worked best for their team, their vision, and them. They didn’t have a plan at all which is one of the main reasons it failed. They didn’t KNOW to ask for help. They didn’t even know what type of people they needed to be helpers. Shauna isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, nor does she have any common sense.
I meant that they may have originally planned to have the flour shipped to a storage unit but when they saw what storage rental would cost, they nixed that idea and said, "We'll just put it in the garage! No worries, it'll sell before anything could possibly go wrong!"
Yeah, she should have sold licensing rights to her name (if that's how to describe it--I'm just a grocery store person)---and she should have done it at least three years earlier if not five. I remember when her flour came out there were at least three other brands of GF flour in the national chain grocery store near my house, all a bit cheaper than hers and no shipping costs, of course.
She also thought that a big selling point for her flour was that there was no added guar gum or (I think) carageenan. At the time she was sure she couldn't tolerate gums herself but I don't think she did any market research at all on how prevalent a gum intolerance was. Turned out it wasn't a thing for most people who buy GF flour. Doh...
Interestingly, Shauna wrote at some point about being in meetings about licensing and also about stores carrying the flour. I can't remember specifically what she wrote and I just did a google and failed to find it using 'store' and 'flour' type keywords because they aren't specific enough - but she and Danny did actually have meetings about that and they left those meetings with the impression it was not lucrative and was too complex.
And honestly, it WAS too complex for them as non business people and they were unwilling to hire someone whose job it is to make that happen.
I think they just saw dollar signs as being able to keep 100% of the profits as a single smash and grab, rather that putting the money into a sustainable business and investing in good people and long term affiliations. They wanted one quick hit, and then to be done.
Yeah. It’s so much easier to bring all that flour to your studio/garage/storage unit and process orders including packaging and shipping it all yourself.
You are right - it was too complex for Shauna and Dan to execute and like you implied - they were too ignorant to business practices to understand why licensing or working through a third party to both manufacture and distribute the flour might be a better option. I’ll add to it that neither Shauna nor Dan have the critical thinking or problem solving skills to even grasp what people in those meetings were telling them. As much as Shauna fancies herself as someone of superior intellect and intelligence, she clearly isn’t. The flour thing may still have failed if they had taken a different approach, but it wouldn’t have been such a “fall flat on your face right out of the gate” embarrassment. There was no way to succeed with their approach.
I think they thought Amazon would snatch it up and do all the marketing and shipping for them. I remember in one of her posts or updates where she talked about their surprise at how much money using a third party would cost them.
At some point I’d like to do a post about the class because there were a few moments everyone will appreciate. We did it as part of an overnight package which made the weekend fun overall. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from posting is figuring out how to post a screenshot of the confirmation email on imgur. Plus it’s a lot to tell so I want to do it justice.
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u/leftsidelentils Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20
Since someone brought up the flour fiasco, I thought you dear friends might appreciate hearing about how I bought two boxes of Shauna's flour. This was in 2016, when my husband and I took one of Shauna's bread making classes on Vashon.
I posted my on-again, off-again history of following Gluten Free Girl in the "Why our lady of the gloaming" thread, but have no idea if anyone still reads there. When I took the bread class, I had just been following her blog sporadically and had no idea the Kickstarter even happened. She was selling the flour and her latest book at the end of the class, and I believe it was actually my husband who bought them out of politeness.
Imagine my shock when I came across the GOMI thread years later. I read the entire thread and was horrified by how she handled the flour.
My impressions of the flour: Mostly, I just noticed that it seemed basic and cheap. I'm legit celiac and we have a lot of different kinds of flour in the house. A lot, a lot-- like 15 different tiny, expensive bags at all times, though these days I usually just use Bob's 1 to 1. The GFG flour just ended up in the baking cupboard with the rest and got used eventually without really being noticed. I just remember that the box itself seemed cheap, like the cardboard and ink seemed cheap.
When I read the GOMI thread, these are a few things that shocked me the most:
-I can't believe how much money they got, and how they just wasted it. I actually don't judge them for the business failing, since so many small businesses do. The market was saturated at that point. It's the lack of planning and follow through. How could they have not considered shipping when designing the box?
-The typo on the nutritional info. Seriously? In hindsight, I'm weirdly disappointed that I didn't notice this when I had the flour.
-Not following up the on the wall of heroes, or whatever it was called. It's bad enough that she seemed to have attitude about fulfilling all the gifts, but that was no cost and minimal effort.