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How to Stand Out When Another Baker Opens Down the Road | Episode 53

  • Jan 19, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


A new baker posts in the local Facebook group that she is taking sourdough orders, and your stomach drops. She lives four streets over. Her loaves look a lot like your loaves, her packaging looks a lot like your packaging, and she is charging a few dollars less.


I hear this one all the time, and underneath it there is always the same math problem: if there is only so much bread money in this town, then every loaf she sells is a loaf I did not.


I asked my friend Christine Brinkman to come on the show and talk this through with me, because she has built her entire business on the opposite idea. Christine is the founder of Babes Support Babes here in San Antonio, and I have been part of what she built since it was a market back in 2018. Her message is community over competition, and she has years of proof behind it.


Here is what she taught me about standing out in a crowded market, and about building the kind of business friendships that actually hold you up when the week is hard.


You cannot bake for the whole town

Start with your capacity, because that is the part scarcity thinking skips right over.


You have one oven, one set of hands, and a set number of hours between Thursday night and Saturday morning. Even on your very best week, you are baking for a small slice of the households within ten miles of your kitchen. The new baker four streets over is not taking your customers. She is feeding people you never had the capacity to feed in the first place.


Christine said it plainly: there is room for everyone, and you cannot bake for the whole town or city that you are in.


Share what you know, because the execution is what sets you apart

Christine's business coach gave her a line she repeats often. You can have all the ideas. When you share them, the person who actually executes them is the differentiator.


If another local baker asks how you run your pre-order weeks, or which pans you buy, or how you handle cottage food labels, telling her costs you nothing. The systems in your bakery took a year of Saturdays to build, and nobody walks away with them after a fifteen minute video call. What she walks away with is the sense that you are generous, and generous bakers get talked about.


Gatekeeping has a real price. You end up with no one to ask when your dough behaves strangely in a cold snap, and no one to call when a wholesale account asks for more than you can produce.


People buy people, so make your specific thing obvious

Christine put it this way: people buy people, they do not buy products. When she buys a loaf of cinnamon raisin from me, she is thinking about my husband Scott, my kids and my dog. She is buying the person as much as the bread.


So sit down and write out what actually makes your bakery different, in specifics.

  • The reason you started, in your own words, in two sentences.

  • The one product you make better than anyone within thirty miles.

  • The way you package and hand off an order, including the small touches.

  • The things you love that have nothing to do with bread and everything to do with why people like you.

Christine gave a fun example on the show. If you are a Taylor Swift fan, be the Swiftie of sourdough. Put a lyric on the back of the tag. Tell people what is playing while you mix. It sounds small, and it is exactly the kind of small that makes someone choose you over a stranger with a nicer crumb shot.


In business terms this is your positioning, and it is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.


Not every customer is your customer

I do not deliver. That is a decision I made about my time and my week, and when somebody needs delivery, that is a customer who belongs with a different baker.


Christine's advice here is the practical version of community over competition. Know two or three other bakers well enough to send those people somewhere good.

  • The baker who delivers, when you do not.

  • The baker who does gluten free or nut free, when your kitchen cannot promise it.

  • The baker who takes big event orders, when your oven caps out at what it caps out at.

Every one of those referrals comes back to you. The customer remembers that you helped instead of shrugging, and the baker you sent them to starts sending people your way. This is a referral network, and most microbakeries have exactly zero of it.


How to find your people when you do not have any yet

If you do not have a community, Christine's advice is to go looking on purpose.

  • Search Instagram, Facebook groups and Eventbrite for your town plus sourdough, or your town plus women in business.

  • On Eventbrite, look at who is hosting the event, not just the event. The host is usually the connector you actually want to know.

  • Send the cold DM. Say you found her, you are excited about her next event, and you would love fifteen minutes on a video call sometime.

That fifteen minute virtual coffee is the whole trick. Christine says almost nobody turns it down, because everyone has fifteen minutes. A full coffee date across town is an hour of driving and a babysitter, and you are all far too busy for that.


Then go to the thing. Go two or three times even when the first one feels clunky and awkward, because it will. Before you walk in, give yourself one goal: two real conversations. Not a stack of business cards handed out. Two people you follow up with the next morning.


Small and consistent beats big and impressive

If nothing near you fits, start the smallest possible version of what you wish existed. A group text with three bakers. A Zoom call twice a month. That is a real community.


Christine's Babes and Coffee event started on her back porch with drip coffee and a handful of women, once a month, back in 2019. It is still going.


Consistency is what turns a contact into a friend. When you show up over and over, you skip the catching up and get to the real conversation, and people learn your business well enough to refer you correctly. Christine made a point I keep thinking about: when she loses touch with someone, she ends up sending her an opportunity that fit that person's business six months ago and does not fit it now.


There have been months where I made every event, and months where I was lucky to make one. Five of us keep a Marco Polo group going and cheer each other on several times a week, because we put in the time before life got full.


If you are a year or three in, audit your connections

For those of you with real revenue and a full pre-order list, this is worth a proper audit. Give it twenty minutes with a notebook.

  • Name the bakers you would confidently send an overflow customer to. If the list is empty, that is your project this month.

  • Ask whether the people who talk about you know what you are actually selling right now, or the menu you had last spring.

  • Write down one person you have been admiring from a distance and keep meaning to message. Send that message today.

Christine is partnering with another large women's organization in San Antonio for exactly this reason. What she told them is the right instinct for our whole industry: we are better together, and keeping ourselves separate helps nobody.


Final thoughts

Being the friend who goes first does not come naturally to me. I am the one who assumes she is too busy, that I am bothering her, that I should wait until I have a reason. The turning point for me was when I stopped looking at other business owners as leads and started looking at them as people I get to learn from.


Your sourdough cannot be your best friend. Send the message, ask for the fifteen minutes, and cheer loudly the next time the baker down the road has a sold out week. Her win really is your win!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


You can find Christine on Instagram at @bsbsatx. She loves a DM and she will send you a voice message back.


Keep going

If this one landed, these three episodes go deeper on community, teaching and building relationships around your bread.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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