Lori McDonald is a pioneering B2B e-commerce developer who founded agency Brilliance Business Solutions in 1998. In February, it acquired direct-to-consumer food manufacturer Norsland Lefse.
She is now revitalizing Northland with new tools and strategies, and agreed to share her journey with us. She debated She shares her reasons and goals for purchasing the business, and in this conversation we discuss customer feedback, preparing for holiday sales, and more.
The full audio of the conversation can be found below. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Practical e-commerce: You acquired a D2C food manufacturer in February. Can you give us an overview of the first seven months?
Lori McDonald: Yes, we acquired Norsland Lefse in Rushford, Minnesota. The company makes lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread similar to a potato-based tortilla, and sells other Scandinavian foods and gifts. It’s been an exciting year and I’ve learned a lot.
Migrated Big Commerce I bought from Wix and the process worked well. I no longer sell certain products on Amazon or on my own site because I wasn’t making enough money. I learned that it’s very important to have a system in place that allows you to track the profitability of all your products.
Sales on its own site in August were more than double what they were last year, and the main objective of the acquisition is to increase direct revenue because the profit margins on its own site are higher.
Our advertisements are Increasingly efficientWe advertise on Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and we’ve seen particularly strong response to our Meta campaigns.
Our Email Campaigns Our partnership with Klaviyo has been great. In addition to promotions, we also run email campaigns to encourage customers to revisit and review our products. This has helped us get great reviews on our products and feedback on how we can improve them. For example, we had a review that said our lefse flatbreads would stick together, so we started packaging them with wax paper between the lefse.
Peck: Do you manage your advertising campaigns in-house?
McDonald’s: We worked with a creative agency, OX Optimal, who designed and tested ads, and the one that worked best was an ad that featured a photo of the lefse itself, like it was coming off the manufacturing floor, showing how thin it is and what it looks like.
Early on, we hired a photographer to provide us with amazing images that we used on our website and in our advertising creative.
Peck: How do you manage your inventory and profitability on Amazon?
McDonald’s: We don’t have an Amazon integration with our BigCommerce backend. We track inventory and profitability in Excel and update item quantities in BigCommerce and Amazon. This is a manual process. We are looking into an automated solution such as Feedonomics, which is owned by BigCommerce.
There are many different ways to manage multi-channel selling, and we’re exploring which options best suit our situation. But our priority right now for September is preparing for our holiday sales.
Peck: This will be our first busy season!
McDonald’s: Yes. It is important to make enough lefse to last for that period. We start production in early September. It can be frozen for up to a year.
Our sales in November and December so far have been 10 times higher than the rest of the year, so we expect it to be very busy. We’re working to make sure we have enough staff to make enough lefse and keep the process efficient.
We’re improving our product descriptions to help customers understand why they should buy our lefse. We’re working on improvements to our BigCommerce site, including adding categories to site search, moving out-of-stock products to the bottom of the page, and implementing better analytics features.
We started running exit surveys with Hotjar to get feedback on user experience and help us understand why visitors leave the site, which has provided useful information.
Listening to our customers is very important to us. A common piece of feedback is that our shipping fees are too high. We are currently looking into better communication. Shipping fresh produce is expensive. We are also reviewing the accuracy of our shipping fees. Free Shipping For purchases over $200. We ship with FedEx 2Day. We recently implemented ShipperHQ to make everything easier to manage. We use local carriers for nearby orders and XPS Ship for printing all labels. We integrate with BigCommerce and Amazon.
We may not achieve everything we dream of by this holiday season, our goal is to do what we can, learn from it, and improve next year.
Peck: You’re also the founder of Brilliance Business Solutions, a busy B2B e-commerce agency – how has the acquisition of lefse impacted the company?
McDonald’s: It’s mostly positive. We’ve all learned a lot and are incorporating that insight into how we support our development customers. For example, based on our experience with lefse, we can develop special themes and features to help those customers. The analytics features we built for Norsland Lefse could also be useful to them.
Norsland Lefse has helped me become more focused while creating opportunities for the amazing team members at Brilliance, many of whom are now doing some of the work I once did.
Peck: How can I get in touch?
McDonald’s: Brilliance Business Solutions Brilliance WebNorthland is Northland Lefse.
