Emma HayesLVL 9

@emmahayes · Jul 14

How I rebuilt my bakery's ordering flow in one weekend

The Saturday-morning line was killing walk-ins. Here is the exact funnel, the form that does the heavy lifting, and the numbers three weeks in.

Every Saturday at 7:40 AM, the line at Hayes & Rye hit the door. By 8:15 it was out the door and around the planter boxes, and the people in it weren't happy — half of them were just picking up orders they'd already paid for, stuck behind walk-ins deciding between croissants.

I'd known the fix for a year: separate the pickups from the browsers. What I didn't have was a weekend where I was willing to touch the ordering system during trading hours. Then our July 4th closure gave me one.

The whole build is one landing page, one form, and two automations. The form asks exactly three questions — what, when, who — because every field past three cost us completed orders when I tested it on regulars.

Orders close Friday at 6 PM. That deadline isn't arbitrary — it's when we finalize the bake sheet. The confirmation email tells people their bag will be on the shelf with their name on it, and that one sentence eliminated almost every "is my order ready?" interruption at the register.

Week one we moved 38 orders through the shelf. Week two, 52. Week three, 61 — and here's the part that surprised me: walk-in revenue didn't drop when the line got shorter. It climbed. A short line is its own advertising; people who used to pass the crowd now stop, because the crowd is gone and the smell isn't.

The margin math is simple once labor comes off the counter, but there are two mistakes that nearly sank it in week one, and a bake-sheet template that makes the whole thing run itself. Both are below.