Executive Summary s4

Executive Summary

 Cupcakes have become a food phenomenon. These delicious sugary treats, featured in small screen hit show Sex and the City and reality cooking show Top Chef, are becoming everyone’s favorite indulgence.

 The Company, Lil Miss Cupcake Lady, is launching a fantastic range of delectable cupcakes, available in the unique setting of their classically themed bakery in Richmond, Virginia.

 The bakery provides an engaging experience with customers, which is not offered by any competitors in the area. This fresh approach to service includes fun performance elements, including the reciting of customers’ orders in song.

 In addition to the novel ordering process, customers are assured a moist and flavorsome cupcake, made fresh daily with the best locally sourced and natural ingredients.

 Specifically, for the sweet tooth attack after 5pm, Lil Miss Cupcake Lady is open until 9pm, and it is this competitive advantage that will increase the likelihood of the bakery succeeding.

 The ongoing profitability of the Company is ensured by its strong management, in the form of its owner who contributes a range of important skills including her baking experience, management and beautiful singing voice.

 The market is currently incredibly strong with continued expenditure on the little treats. The recent developments in the creativity and design of cupcakes and the strong marketing alignment with birthdays, weddings and parties, means the market will continue to thrive in the foreseeable future.

 Investors are sought to help fund the promotion of our bakery by the methods included below. An investment of US$10,000 is sought in return for equity in the company. The growing popularity of cupcakes is evidenced by several indicators, and a prediction of a 20 percent rise in sales in the US over the next five years.

The cookbook, Martha Stewart's Cupcakes, spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, while among the more than a dozen cupcake blogs, "Cupcakes Take the Cake" (www.cupcakesstakethecake.com) receives 9,000 visitors each day. The Food Network commissioned a pilot for a Cupcake Wars bake-off competition show, and the Los Angeles- based Sprinkles Cupcakes shops, opening across the US, launched in London and Tokyo.

Though the cupcake craze may have started with the Magnolia Bakery in a Sex and the City television episode, the popularity has continued to grow. Owning a cupcake shop seems to be the newest entrepreneurial dream, with cupcakeries opening all over the United States and the World.

Sales of cupcakes nationwide are expected to rise 20 percent in the next five years

Products

Lil Miss Cupcake provides decadent cupcakes and cakes made from scratch in a variety of flavors which rotate weekly and daily.

Services

Lil Miss Cupcake Lady will provide customized cupcakes and cakes to clients and provide catering to local venues and event planners for weddings, birthday parties, baby showers, graduations, celebrations for every milestone and corporate events.

Once Lil Miss Cupcake Lady expands, the company hopes to host decorating lessons for adults and children and a party room for rentals.

Marketing Plan

- Develop an expansive online presence through the use of pay per click marketing and search engine optimization, social media on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

- Develop promotional giveaways that will draw users to the website via viral marketing methods.

- Establish relationships with advertisers that are targeting a computer savvy younger demographic.

Lil Miss Cupcake Lady intends to use a high impact marketing campaign that will generate a substantial amount of traffic to it’s website.

Facebook: The Company will create a highly engaging and interactive Facebook page for the Bakery and run it through a managed personal account. By linking them it will be much easier to interchange between our personal and business accounts and allow each member of the staff to contribute the ‘organization voice’. This will also allow us to ‘invite’ all of our

2 personal Facebook friends to like the Lil Miss Cupcake Lady page and get a strong number of followers with very little Facebook marketing spend.

We will consistently monitor our Facebook feedback to better our marketing strategy and products.

Twitter:Twitter is another platform which can be an excellent source of potential buyers and we have identified a few ways it could work for Lil Miss Cupcake Lady.

Customer Profile

Our broader target market is defined as females between the ages of 16-45. The segments in more details include:

- The Stylish Student - The Working Professional - The Savvy Mom - The Reminiscent Mature Women (Grandmother)

Competitive Advantage

The main competitive advantage of Lil Miss Cupcake Lady, LLC is in the unique dining experience customers get to enjoy when they visit my Cupcakery.

This unique experience consists of a novel and fun approach to taking customers’ orders and an atmosphere that is fresh and friendly.

At the point of sale, each customer order will be recited in song, and other employees will be encouraged to take this cheerful approach to the rest of the service. This approach fits in well with the premise of cupcakes and we believe it will resonate well with our target audience.

By engaging with the audience from their first visit (and from a young age) we aim to create lifetime brand ambassadors.

Other sources of competitive advantage are the use of fresh ingredients (including a secret ingredient which keeps cupcakes moist and affordable) and the fact the cupcakes are made fresh daily, our plans to open the bakery for late evening hours until at least 9 or 10pm (which no other bakery in the area currently offers) and the retro 50s type interior and feel of the bakery.

Very few others can achieve this balance between novel excitement, and taste, but the Company is confident they can achieve this and will reap the rewards through ongoing profitability and success.

3 Business Plan