Brief
Beth runs a celebration cake business out of York, birthdays, weddings, custom orders, and the bestselling chocolate loaf she sells from a hot pink horsebox at Christmas markets. By the time she came to me she had outgrown the only sales channel she had: Instagram DMs.
With a fast-growing following, half her potential orders were going unanswered. Bespoke requests took days of back-and-forth in the inbox. Market and event bookings lived in a notebook. The brand looked sharp on Instagram and felt amateur everywhere else. The brief: turn the site into the sales channel, replace the DMs as the entry point, and give Beth her evenings back.
Approach
The site is built around three things Beth's old setup was missing, 24/7 ordering, a bespoke cake builder, and a CRM that does the chasing for her.
The customer side is a six-page mobile-first Next.js build:
- Home, hero, featured cakes, Instagram feed, the headline products front and centre
- About, Beth's personal story, the kind of relatable content that turns followers into customers
- Products, celebration cakes, wedding cakes, cupcakes, brownies, seasonal specials, and corporate orders, browsable by category and occasion
- Bespoke, a multi-step cake builder that takes occasion → size → flavour → decoration → delivery → add-ons, with image upload for inspiration and real-time pricing
- Events, a calendar of upcoming markets, the Beth Horsebox showcase, and a private-event enquiry form
- Contact, FAQs designed to deflect the easy DMs entirely, with a fallback enquiry form
Behind the site is a NestJS + Prisma + PostgreSQL backend with Stripe for checkout and a custom CRM dashboard where Beth manages standard orders, bespoke briefs, and event enquiries from a single queue. Resend handles transactional email: order confirmations, bespoke quote emails, and automated follow-ups when an enquiry goes quiet for 48 hours. The auto follow-up is the single biggest recovery lever for leads that would otherwise go cold.
The signature interaction is the bespoke cake builder. Bespoke orders used to be a five-message back-and-forth in Beth's inbox; now they arrive in the admin queue fully specified, occasion, size, flavour, decoration style, colour theme, delivery method, add-ons (fresh flowers, macarons, toppers), and any inspiration photos the customer wants to share. Beth replies once with a quote and a deposit link instead of negotiating across a week.
Brand integration
The visual system stays anchored in Beth's existing identity, warm chocolate `#6B4226`, blush `#FBDCE2`, and caramel `#C8845C`, with Fraunces for display, DM Sans for body, and Nixie One for the hand-drawn headline accents that match her instagram-grown brand. The blush hero overlay sits at 90% opacity over a flat-lay of cakes, soft but legible, recognisably hers from the first scroll.
Every product gets a studio shot on the same blush background. The catalogue reads as one continuous brand, not a stock-photo grid.
Outcome
The site is now Beth's primary sales channel. Bespoke briefs arrive fully specified instead of as a five-message Instagram thread. Auto follow-ups catch the cold ones. Markets and events live in a single calendar. The DMs are no longer the bottleneck.
The brief was: turn the site into the sales channel. That is what it does.
Beth Bakes Cakes is preparing to migrate from her legacy site at bethbakescakes.co.uk. Live link will be added once the cutover is complete.
