It’s hard to believe, but Grey Ghost Bakery has been around for six years! So, we thought it was time to give ourselves a little brand refresh. Earlier this summer, we enlisted Laura Pelzer of In/House to help us redesign our packaging and update our website.
It's funny how things go around in this life. When I was a young mother of three sons (all born in under 4 years), I often relied on babysitters to help out. This gave me precious time so I could do glamorous things like run to the grocery store without the boys. Because loading three sons into the grocery cart would leave precious little room for the actual groceries!
One of our trusted sitters in those years was a business student at USC by the name of Laura Kirkman. After Laura graduated, she moved to New York to work for Ralph Lauren, and we lost touch. I did recall that Laura's senior project was to write a business plan for a bridal boutique.
A few years later, my husband and I were in Charleston wandering around on a beautiful afternoon. Our meandering had a purpose, though! I wanted to see if I could find a house on Hasell Street where my family had lived briefly when I was about 3 or 4 years old. I thought I recalled what the front of the house looked like, but mostly I remembered that there had been a corner grocery store next door. That stuck in my brain because the store had lots of penny candy right at a 3-year old's eye level! I had a sweet tooth even back then.
As we wandered down Hasell Street, I thought I found the house, but the corner grocer now housed Maddison Row, a beautiful bridal boutique. I called my older brother and confirmed that I had indeed found the house, as he recalled the street number.
I didn't think anything more about the bridal shop until the quarterly magazine from the Moore School of Business at USC showed up in the mail. Laura Kirkman was smiling back at me from the cover of the magazine, with a feature about her bridal boutique in Charleston called Maddison Row. It turns out that the original location was that shop next to the house where I lived on Hasell Street!
Fast forward to earlier this year, when I reached out to Laura, and we had a chuckle about what a small world it is! We caught up on what she had been up to since then. Laura sold Maddison Row, got married, and started a family of her own. She also started a consulting company, In/House, to provide strategic branding advice to companies.
In turn, I told Laura that Grey Ghost Bakery’s Molasses Spice cookie won a sofi Award in April, which meant we needed to fast track our 2018 goal to redesign our packaging. We wanted to have our brand refresh and new packaging ready for the Fancy Food Show in New York at the end of June. So, I pressed Laura into service for me once again, but for a different set of babies this time! Laura and her team redesigned the Grey Ghost Bakery look and brand. She carried that through to our package re-design and updated our website, too. I couldn't be happier with the results, and I hope you like it too!
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