Customer story: Artisan Food Club

How the Artisan Food Club Helps Local Businesses with FlippingBook Publisher

The Artisan Food Club is a drop shipping food business. They help small shops and artisan producers find each other and work together as partners. The Artisan Food Club mostly works with small, independent producers and shops, including people who make quality products at home or in family‑run businesses. The company’s role is not only to be a matchmaker at the product level, but also to give both parties advice here and there for all to succeed.

Challenge

Marcus Carter, owner of the Artisan Food Club, was looking for a way to give local businesses the opportunity to easily display their products in his company’s brochures and benefit from the partnership. These were his goals:

• For shops to have the opportunity to display their products in the brochures without any costs to the producers, whether entry, printing, or advertising.
• For the Artisan Food Club to be able to update the brochures – add products or change prices right away, so that Marcus could talk to a producer about a new product on Monday, have it in the catalog on Tuesday, and on the shelves of a shop by Friday. He also wanted to create a What’s New catalog with updates from the latest full catalog.
• For the Artisan Food Club to quickly make custom catalogs for shops, only with the information they needed.

Search for Solution

Before the Artisan Food Club came across FlippingBook, they used Pinterest – each producer had their own board, with pictures and prices. That approach was cumbersome, and setting up and maintaining the boards for all 50 clients of the company took a lot of work.

We looked at a few competitors before buying FlippingBook. One of the big differences is that when I work with FlippingBook, I can do it all my way, whereas all other companies forced me into a particular way of working. I felt really restricted in what I could do.

Solution

FlippingBook is the solution the Artisan Food Club was looking for. They can now transfer all their catalogs and brochures from print to digital. The Artisan Food Club can also update the information in their brochures whenever they want, add a new producer in minutes, or quickly create a custom catalog for a shop simply by deleting irrelevant pages.

The shops love this service. They now have their own custom catalogs with the products they are interested in, so they don’t have to spend hours locating them in a 900‑page catalog to find out who made them and where to order.

For the Artisan Food Club, the variety of functions that FlippingBook provides is also essential. They value the ability to embed videos or pop‑up images, upload catalogs that go up to 2,000 pages, or have their own domain for hosting the brochures.

The Artisan Food Club brochures look professional and are easy to use. They have a table of contents for comfortable navigation – a feature that their clients need most. Every catalog also includes key product information that shop owners can quickly search through. It's important, because clients often ask what a product looks like and how much it costs. Knowing the answers helps them figure out if a product will sell, much like looking at a product for the first time helps a consumer decide if they want it.

Also, Marcus has come up with an unconventional way to always keep his clients up‑to‑date: he has created two new contacts in his phone that include links to two main documents. So to share a document, he sends a contact to his clients over the phone. They just have to open the contact details, click on the link, and start shopping.

Results

FlippingBook helps the Artisan Food Club do mass customization for shops without any costs to producers: the company can now work on commission from when they actually sell something.

The Artisan Food Club now works with over 250 independent producers and has more than 4,000 items available in the brochures. FlippingBook has changed the way the company works with their customers.

FlippingBook is very powerful. It improves business for the shops, for the producers, and for me, so we all benefit.

An added bonus is the customer support team at FlippingBook. Marcus has seen a lot of good products without the service to back them up, but fortunately FlippingBook isn’t one of them.

My account manager has been amazing, always helpful and on top of things. She’s always there when I need her. A couple of times I set up something wrong, but FlippingBook tech support solved everything fairly quickly.