Chanced upon a ST feature on Friday about the customized cake scene in Singapore. The report featured 4 cake designers, each having diverse backgrounds and their own customized cake specialties. We are really glad to see that the custom-design cake scene is becoming more vibrant, as the demand for such have been growing steadily. Customers these days are not fazed by paying hundreds (even thousands) of $$ for their ideal celebration cake. And unlike the old days, their requirements are also getting increasingly sophisticated.
We also do customized cakes. While demand for us has also been steadily increasing over the years (maybe tapered a tad with the Covid-19 pandemic), customized cakes are not really our staple. But we are blessed with a decor team that can churn out intricate designs that never fail to please (thus far, touch wood). So we do have a constant pool of customers for custom-designed cakes, many of whom are long-standing or repeated customers, despite the fact that our customized cake are priced at the higher end compared to some of our peers.
Two things stood out while we were reading the news feature:
1. We were very fascinated to read about a certain cake shop who gets like 120 orders per day. And even more fascinated by the fact that 2/3 of their daily orders are custom-designed cakes. We do between 70 - 100 cakes a day, with most being cakes from our monthly standard menu (i.e. non-customized). And with about the same number of staff, we are already hitting our production capacity. So we cannot imagine being able to increase productivity to hit the kind of numbers as the mentioned cake shop. And with 2/3 of the cakes being customized even. So despite being in business for 21 years, there are still a lot that we can learn from our peers.
2. The freedom these days to replicate copyrighted characters on custom-designed cakes for commercial sale. For those who are familiar with our shop, they will probably know that we always stay far away from copyrighted designs. Even if it is within the grey area of being copyrighted, we will choose not to accept the order. This is because we learned a hard lesson on this. Many years ago, someone called the shop to request for cake with an animated character from a popular movie franchise. And being naive as we were then, we took the order and replicated a beautiful cake for the said customer. The next thing we knew, we received a lawyers' letter from the Animation Studio accusing us of copyright infringement. They have all the evidence of correspondence between the customer and us, as well as photos and even the invoice for the cake. This was when we realized that we were being entrapped. The Animation Studio demanded an initial copyright infringement compensation of $50K, which our lawyers eventually pleaded down to $10K+. But it was still a painful 10 thousand dollars lesson for us. So we were rather surprised to learn that cake shops these days are able/willing to take on such orders without securing the necessary rights. And mentioning/showing these off on national publications even. Maybe the rules are now relaxed with the likes of Disney & Co. But we will continue to maintain our distance.
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