Weekend Greenwich

An F&B brand whose renewal and department-store expansion I am leading as a freelance brand director

Role: Brand Director (Freelance)
Duration: Mar 2026 – present
Commitment: 3 days a week
Scope: Menu, packaging, pricing

200–300%

Dessert category revenue growth

It opened in 2023 as a New York–style café and found its footing, but after passing through several hands its signature menu and brand identity had blurred. I joined to reassemble the brand through data and menu structure.

PHOTO

What I Built

PHOTO

The signature New York cream pudding — the line reorganized through repackaging and flavor extensions (lemon, blueberry Oreo)

PHOTO

Before repackaging

PHOTO

After repackaging

PHOTO

Department store pop-ups — 3 locations plus 1, across 2 runs

PHOTO

A brunch line introduced in response to spoken requests shaped by the location

Cases

Reassembled on data, not instinct

Data first: The first thing I did after joining was bring in the Toss POS and start recording revenue and menu data, with a data review every month. It changed the basis for decisions from “a feeling” to “a record.”
Menu structure: I fixed the standing menu after checking the full inventory, then turned leftover ingredients into guerrilla event items announced on Instagram. Stock gets used up, and customers get a reason to come in.
Drinks rework: Once I had POS revenue data over three months and one month, I pulled any drink selling fewer than 10 times a week. As the menu got simpler, ordering got simpler with it.
Brunch: Given the location and the size of the shop, brunch requests kept coming in. It wasn’t a quantitative metric, but the frequency of spoken requests confirmed the need, so I designed the menu within what the current kitchen could actually produce and made the menu sheet itself. Extending the opening hours and rearranging staffing brought in a new morning crowd.
Result: Dessert category revenue grew 200–300% · a new morning customer base

The butter-tteok pop-up — between a hit and a failure

Learning the channel: Running 2 pop-ups across 3 department stores plus 1, I learned the distribution structure from scratch — pitching for a spot and submitting the proposal, and the vendor companies that sit between a department store and a shop (typically ~6% vendor fee, ~15% department store).
Situation: The biggest lesson came from a failure. In the middle of the viral dessert wave at the time, and at the department store’s strong request, we went in with a single-item butter-tteok pop-up.
Week 1: People lined up to buy it, and we ran short on quantity every day.
Scaling up: In week 2 we signed to expand the pop-up to 3 locations, and since our own output couldn’t cover it we switched to factory production — a contract signed after checking the samples.
Collapse: The factory’s mass-produced goods were clearly lower in quality than the samples, and in the meantime the viral moment cooled before it lasted two weeks. After ending the contract early, I rented a workspace and produced through the night myself to hold the department store delivery schedule. Labor, logistics, equipment costs and leftover stock on top — a painful loss.
Anatomy of the failure: ① Raw material variance — flour is uniform, but glutinous rice flour differs in particle size and moisture by manufacturer, which made quality hard to predict. ② Production bottleneck — 30 minutes to bake; the ingredient cost was low but the time cost was high. ③ Irreversible pricing — the consumer price was locked to the low starting price of the viral phase, so the margin structure couldn’t be walked back. ④ Demand has a shelf life — viral demand cooled faster than a supply chain could be built.
In one sentence: I learned through a loss that what decides a business is not how appealing the product is, but the structure of production, price, and demand.

What transferred, and what didn’t

Transferred: From Bakeshop, I connected the supplier network (ingredients, packaging) directly, which cut setup costs, and reused the process of costing out and then deriving the right price. The standard for composing a menu is the same too — it has to keep, cost little, and be producible on a fixed schedule.
Didn’t transfer: Bakeshop’s formula for regulars doesn’t work here. A director rather than an owner has different latitude in service, three days a week means a different density of rapport, and a trade area built around customers arriving by car has a different repeat-visit structure than a neighborhood one. The same know-how has to be redesigned when the context changes — the most design-like lesson I took from operations.
Still open: In a non-resident director setup, ordering authority and execution sit apart, so inventory loss keeps recurring. It remains a question of authority structure — one a system rework alone doesn’t solve.

Takeaway

Three days a week, I am still running this brand and working through the open questions above. Producing results inside someone else’s business, with limited authority and limited time — that is what this project is teaching me.

The brand where the operating instinct started — Wizzy Bakeshop →