Lori McDonald is a pioneering B2B ecommerce developer, having founded Brilliance Business Solutions, an agency, in 1998. In February she acquired Norsland Lefse, a direct-to-consumer food manufacturer.
Now revving up Norsland with new tools and strategies, she has agreed to share the journey with us. In July, she discussed her rationale and goals for purchasing the business. In this conversation, she addressed customer feedback, holiday sales preparation, and more.
The entire audio of our conversation is below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Practical Ecommerce: In February, you acquired a D2C food manufacturer. Give us a rundown of the first seven months.
Lori McDonald: Yes, we acquired Norsland Lefse in Rushford, Minnesota. The company manufactures 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 so much.
We’ve migrated to BigCommerce from Wix, and that process has gone well. We no longer sell certain products on Amazon or our own site because they weren’t making enough money. I’ve learned it’s crucial to have systems in place to track profitability on every item.
Sales in August from our own site were more than double last year. A top goal of the acquisition is to grow direct revenue because we have higher margins there.
Our advertising is increasingly efficient. We advertise on Google and Meta (for Facebook and Instagram). We’re seeing great responses to Meta campaigns especially.
Our email campaigns with Klaviyo are going well too. In addition to sales promotions, we have email campaigns that invite customers to return and review products. It has helped us to collect some great reviews on our products and provide feedback for improvements. For example, some reviewers had experienced our lefse flatbread sticking together. So we started packaging the lefse with wax paper sheets between them.
PEC: Do you manage ad campaigns in-house?
McDonald: We’re working with OX Optimal, a creative agency. They’ve designed and tested ads. The best performers include photos of the lefse itself, like when coming off our manufacturing floor, to see how thin it is and what it looks like.
Early on we brought in a photographer who provided some terrific images that we’ve used for ad creative on and on our website.
PEC: How do you manage inventory and profitability on Amazon?
McDonald: We haven’t integrated Amazon with our BigCommerce backend. We’re tracking our inventory and profitability in Excel and updating the item quantities on BigCommerce and Amazon. It’s a manual process. We’re looking at automated solutions, such as Feedonomics, owned by BigCommerce.
There are different ways to manage multichannel selling. We’re looking at the best options for our situation. But our priority now, in September, is ensuring we’re ready for holiday sales.
PEC: It will be your first busy season!
McDonald: Yes. It’s critical we we make enough lefse for that period. We will start producing it in early September. We can freeze and store it for up to a year.
Sales in November and December have historically been 10 times higher than the rest of the year. So I anticipate being really busy. We’re just trying to ensure that we have the staff in place to make enough lefse and that we’re efficient in our process.
We’re improving our product descriptions so folks can understand why they should buy our lefse. We’re making improvements on our BigCommerce site, such as including categories in site search, moving out-of-stock items to the bottom of the page, and implementing better analytics.
We launched an exit survey using Hotjar that gives us feedback on the user experience and helps us understand why visitors leave our site. That’s provided us with some good information.
It’s so important to listen to customers. A frequent feedback item is that our shipping costs are too high. We’re now looking at better communication — shipping perishable goods is expensive. We’re also reassessing our shipping charges for accuracy. We offer free shipping for purchases of $200 or more. We ship via FedEx 2Day. We recently implemented ShipperHQ to help manage it all. We use a local carrier for nearby orders and XPS Ship to print all labels. It integrates with BigCommerce and Amazon.
We won’t be able to do everything I dream of by this holiday season. Our goal is to implement what we can, learn from it, and improve next year.
PEC: You’re also the founder of Brilliance Business Solutions, a busy B2B ecommerce agency. How has the lefse acquisition impacted that company?
McDonald: It’s largely positive. We’re all learning a lot and incorporating those insights into how we help our development customers. Based on our lefse experience, we could develop specialty themes and features to help those customers, for example. The analytics capabilities we build for Norsland Lefse could help them too.
Norsland Lefse has helped me become more focused while creating opportunities at Brilliance for our fabulous team members. Many have stepped into doing some of the things I used to do.
PEC: How can folks reach out?
McDonald: Brilliance Business Solutions is at BrillianceWeb.com. Norsland is at NorslandLefse.com.
