Q. What do Vanna White, Dr. J, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Zubin Mehta, Dom Deluise and Nolan Ryan have in common?
A. A taste for fruitcake.
But not just any fruitcake. Not that thing resembling a boat anchor sent along every year by your great-aunt Millie in Poughkeepsie. We're talking the world-renowned Original DeLuxe Fruitcake from the Collin Street Bakery in Texas.
This is a family-owned business that dates from 1896. Located 50 miles south of Dallas in Corsicana, Texas, the Collin Street Bakery was founded by master baker Gus Wiedmann, who emigrated from Wiesbaden, Germany before the turn of the previous century.
Gus and his business partner, Tom McElwee, established the operation complete with an elegant hotel on the top floor. Gus was the baker and McElwee was a master salesman who would no doubt have loved the concept of e-commerce.
In fact, e-commerce seemed like a natural for Collin Street Bakery, because the roots of its success over the years have been handling orders from afar. The bakery was thrust into the mail order business when John Ringling's circus troupe came to town in the company's early days, and upon tasting the DeLuxe fruitcake, asked to have them sent to family and friends throughout Europe.
"This is our 106th year," said Bob McNutt, president of the company. He told me that his grandfather and great uncle bought Collin Street Bakery in 1946 from the widow of one of the two founders.
Of course, there is more than just fruitcake. How about double deep fudge pecan pie, pecan coffee cake, rum cake, apple cinnamon pecan cake and an assortment of cheesecakes?
But this fruitcake is special. Check the ingredients: 27 percent pecans by weight, golden sweet pineapple and papaya, ripe, red cherries, pure clover honey, plump golden raisins ... and just enough honey-rich batter to hold the nuts and fruit together.
So, what we have here is a relatively small business, with a traditional (and sometimes under-appreciated) product, marketing in about the newest fashion possible.
"We are quite unique in our evolution regarding the way we have communicated with our customers," McNutt said. "Originally only by mail. Followed by phone
-- one of my partners still has a thermometer advertising our phone number as
332. This was followed by the telex, which came and went when the fax came along. For e-commerce, we started with e-mail in about 1994, and our first version of a Web site was in 1994 or 1995. We have had a fully secure Web site for four years now."
The bakery has free samples and 10-cent coffee if you're ever in the neighborhood, but the local folks just couldn't support a business with 85 employees year-round, and for a 10-week season from October through December, up to about 700 employees for the holiday rush.
So, what has e-commerce done for the company that registered www.fruitcake.com? McNutt said that "in a rather flat year, our Web sales were up 85 percent. Last-minute customers who had trouble getting through on the phone, could still get to the Web page to order."
He said that currently about 90 percent of the company's out-of-town business is from traditional mail order, but he expects the e-commerce component to grow.
"We have simply seen e-commerce as the next stage in the evolution which began with automatic tellers and pay at the pump," McNutt said. "People know what they want, and if done properly, e-commerce can be the most efficient means possible for them to place their order or find information."
The Web site itself was put together by a combination of people and companies," McNutt said, including in-house staff and an outfit called Loudthot in Dallas that did quite a bit of the design along with the coding to tie into a mainframe. The site employs Lotus Domino.
As for promotion, it's mostly word-of-mouth. Or maybe word-of-mouthwatering. McNutt said the company has done some banner advertising, but it "did not work well for us."
His advice if you're just getting started in e-commerce? "It will only get bigger. If you do the e-commerce thing, make sure you do it right the first time."
And my advice is, go for item No. 103, the large-size DeLuxe fruitcake.
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