Enterprise: Brooki Bakehouse
Social media impact: Sharing its content across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube has led to the Brooki Bakehouse garnering more than 3.5 million followers.
Before embarking on life as an entrepreneur, Brooke Bellamy roamed the world as a travel writer. In her decade-long career, she visited over 70 countries, where she would write stories and capture images of her travels for her blog and various magazines and newspapers.
While on the road, the idea of being a business owner began to take form. “I got to see and experience a lot of great businesses around the world,” Brooke explains. “I always had a desire to own and operate my own business.” Brooke has loved baking since she was young and had dreams of having a bakery. So, in May 2022, she opened Brooki Bakehouse, the business that brought together her love for baking and her rich travel experiences.
Brooke describes her business as “Paris meets New York”, set in a tiny but elegant spot in Brisbane. “I wanted the bakery to be inspired by places I had visited, but not reminiscent of any one place in particular,” she explains. “It was important to me that the bakery had its own unique personality, which was evident from the moment you stepped inside.”
Brooke put all her savings into the business, leaving few resources at her disposal to promote it. She turned to social media, as it has a proven record as an effective marketing tool, providing greater reach with little-to-no risk. Initially, Brooke shared Brooki Bakehouse’s daily menu in her Instagram stories. But things began to take off when she joined TikTok eight months later and began posting ‘a day in the life’-type videos on the platform. These videos would achieve viral popularity overnight, which translated into a growing customer base. “We had a slow trickle of customers coming into the bakery after discovering it online, and within weeks we were noticeably busier, which encouraged me to continue posting almost daily,” she shares.
While Brooki Bakehouse achieved phenomenal success through TikTok, Brooke was deliberate in not concentrating her marketing efforts on that platform alone. Instead, she sought to bolster her marketing on Instagram while also setting up a YouTube channel.
The decision to get into YouTube was a strategic one. “Typically, TikTok is a platform more popular with a younger audience, whereas YouTube has a much wider audience, in terms of age but also geographic location and interests,” Brooke explains. “It made sense to share the content across a few platforms to tap into new audiences, which led to us growing to more than 3.5 million followers across these platforms. All three of these platforms have proved successful in their own right, but it is certainly video content that has outshone any other type of content.”
The use of these social media channels has enabled Brooki Bakehouse to reach a customer base far beyond Australia. The support from the brand’s international audience encouraged Brooki Bakehouse to offer international shipping to places such as New Zealand, the US, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. This international interest also inspired Brooke to create online classes, which helped increase the brand’s engagement with its followers.
Brooke is also set to publish her debut cookbook, something she never would have dreamt possible without the community she was able to build and grow through social media. “This would have taken much longer to achieve had I not focused on growing an online community of people who love baking just as much as I do,” she adds.
This article first appeared in issue 45 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
