After watching Lord Sugar make his sweetest investment yet, curiosity has got the better of me. Let’s take a look at The Apprentice winner’s brand new website, Oh So Yum.

This is virtually a brand new site, so let’s cut it a little slack! There’s also been a rebrand. Everything from the website, imagery and packaging, everything looks great, it’s obviously been done very well!

From a quick snoop on Founder Harpreet’s insta, I can see she’s enlisted the help of agency, 3 heads – If any of you agency lot end up reading this, feel free to rip me apart. 😉

Onwards….

First Impressions – tasty website!

Pink and purple is a bold, but for a decadent desserts business – it works!

I really like the design. The site feels light, comfortable and speedy. I even like the improvements to the logo. Scrumptious so far.

See the “As seen on the BBC’s Apprentice bit”…. ahem, you were The Apprentice WINNER! Why not grab every bit of differentiation you can?! Very smart move to use that as a point of difference though. 

My worry for this business is the low average order value…

It’s very hard to make an Ecommerce business work when the margins are constantly being squeezed. And therefore a massive fan of the ‘Subscriptions’ and ‘Corporate & Events’ pages on the main navigation – charge those big bucks every chance you can.

From memory (sorry!) the email pop us was pretty intense – it activated on first scroll, and even asked me for my mobile number. Do not cold call me, as I won’t buy from you ever.

I’m not in love with “let your sweet tooth take over”, I think the “love at first bite” would be better placed at that main piece of copy. But that’s an opinion, and you know what they say about opinions… 

Recommendation: Doing everything right here! Keep it up! Special props to the bar that says “we’ve just launched and are selling fast” – injecting scarcity into a purchase to make people act. Ciladini would be proud. 

Product Pages – Need More Sugar

As I say, this is a new site, so I’m cutting it slack, but… 

On most of the products, there’s only one product picture.

It’s a pretty good picture, admittedly, but you want to throw a few more pictures and even some videos in to sell the product for you.

How about a close up of the scrumptious bake? A close up of a fork going through for the first time? A video of a family enjoying the desserts together? Loads and loads of potential uses here… 

The other thing that caught my eye was the sticker pack, a nice little idea for an upsell, and really easy for whoever is packing up the boxes to include in an order. Without more detail on the stickers, I’d never buy though – How many do you get? What do they actually look like? Get more specific! 

Recommendation: More product imagery is a must, these product pages need to work very hard in Ecommerce in 2022.

Social – ready to ramp up!

There’s a couple of insta ads on the go. Nothing special, but the business probably isn’t ready to go with these.

I like that Oh So Yum is continuing to use Harpreet’s personal brand, too. I mean, I’ve watched 12 weeks of The Apprentice, as a viewer I’ve built the relationship in my head with her, not with her business. Personal brand is a huge trend and is here to stay! 

Recommendation: Use a better HOOK

“Exciting times ahead, but first… time to celebrate?”

Hmm, not really. I don’t have anything to celebrate, as much as I’d like to celebrate with you. There are plenty of nearly buyers (like me!) who could easily be turned into buyers with just a little bit of a sweeter deal. How about £5OFF one of your larger boxes with code: APPRENTICEWINNER. Even if it’s just for a few weeks? 

I’m mean if the instagram is anything to go by the orders are flying out, so this is hardly make or break. But if you did need a conversion rate booster, I promise this would do it.

And crucially as a new business, you’ll get more names on that customer list that you’re desperately trying to build. 

The last thing on Social, in my opinion, is that this business SCREAMS TikTok. See how this video has 1 million views? That’s good. Do more of that. 

Search Marketing – good start, but nothing to shout about yet.

It’s probably unfair to analyse Oh So Yum’s search activity, because the site is so new. But they have made a good start. It’s gone from ranking for NOTHING, to ranking for 63 keywords. For anyone building a site, please build it with search in mind!!!

Let’s have a look at a keyword and have a think about it:

Kinder Cookie Pie! Yum! Search volume 480. The homepage is currently the one that’s managed to rank for that keyword, but this page should be getting it eventually, obviously. 

There’s a 20 second screen record below of the keyword, you’ll be able to see a few things that Harpreet should think about: 

Google Shopping Ads 

The product listing ads are the first things that you see, dominated by Ebay and Etsy, which further show the HUGE amount of competitors in this space. The mere presence of these ads shows that it’s probably a good customer acquisition channel, worth exploring in the future. 

Recipes

The organic results are all recipes, and further down the SERP, you get video results for Kinder Cookie Pie Recipes too. There’s definitely a potential content marketing play for Oh So Yum in the future. Could they start a YouTube Series and a blog, describing how to make some of their brilliant treats. Definitely need to remember their Schema Mark Up too.

Yeah, obviously Oh So Yum would rather they bought the treats directly, but there’s SO MUCH competition here, I feel like the smarter move is the longer term branding play, which if done really well could help with a franchisee model, which was discussed on the show. Ooooooh, decisions decisions. 

Recommendations: Go branding. There’s bigger money to be made if you can get people opening up an Oh So Yum restaurant in every town and every city. 

I doubt Lord Sugar is interested in the tight margin business of selling cakes DTC, I’d like to see this go big on the brand and see if teh franchise model can gather steam. 

Harpreet, I promise if you get one going in Newcastle, I’ll be your first customer. 

Wrapping up

There’s more ‘business’ considerations than ‘marketing’ considerations for Oh So Yum. It all depends on where the suits want to take it. For me, this one is about becoming THE DESSERTS BRAND and not necessarily about selling desserts profitably… at the moment. 

I’d get as many cakes in as many customers’ hands as possible, collect reviews and collect user generated content. Share your recipes, and do collaborations with other big dessert influencers. Then stick a franchise in every city up and down the county. 

Easy.