Transcript of interview with Sarah & Joni Fried by Barbara Tabach, March 4, 2016

AN INTERVIEW WITH FREED BAKERY FAMILY JONI FRIED, MAX JACOBSON-FRIED & SARAH FRIED An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers & Editors: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE The website for Freed’s Bakery happily displays the headline: Baking Sweet Memories Since 1959. Today the third generation of Frieds (correct spelling of the family surname) is hard at work creating incredible wedding cakes, cookies, and delightful desserts for the Las Vegas valley. For this oral history interview, Joni Fried, her daughter Sarah Fried, and nephew Max Jacobson-Fried sit to share stories of working in the family business started by Joni’s parents Milton and Esther Fried. Joni has handed the reins over to the third generation who invest their delicious souls into maintaining this Las Vegas tradition. Their tales range from childhood memories of holidays baking and cleaning to their personal favorite desserts. They also explain the impact on their business as early adapters of computer technologies and social media marketing. In October 2017, Freed’s Bakery landed a TV show, Vegas Cakes, on the Food Network. Photo by Aaron Mayes 2016 of Joni Fried (far left) and family. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Freed Bakery Family Joni Fried, Max Jacobson-Fried, and Sarah Fried March 4, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Talk about technology’s impact on bakery business, specifically Freed’s starting I 1991 with advent of the Internet; coop mailing with local chapel of 2000 brochures to California brides-to-be; early adopter of website for selling cakes; loss of that competitive edge came quickly with Food Network; Max joined the family business around 2006 and worked with price lists and using Excel spreadsheets; facing resistance by some of their employees. Discuss building and improving company website with Project A; cost associated with web development; learning about and using Google; Max’s help reducing ad campaign costs……………………………………………..1 – 7 Talk about 2011 move from the Tropicana and Eastern location to current building at 9815 S Eastern Ave.; expansion of floor space to accommodate customers. Story about importance of dishwasher; oven……………………………………………………………………………..8 – 10 Childhood memories of the third generation, Sarah and Max; playing with racks, holidays baking and shrink wrapping; scraping the floors. How Max decided to join family business and relocate from Oregon to Las Vegas permanently; attended UNLV in 2006…………………………11 – 15 Max explains getting involved with marketing and technologies of promoting the business; being earlier users of social media like Facebook; evolution of online ordering and increased business; Joni contrasts this with her parents’ feelings that there was little value in advertising, such as Yellow Pages; cross promotion with Little Church of the West……………………………15 – 19 Describes making bagels in 1970s; rye bread; by 2000 the goal becomes specializing within bakery business and cease to bake bread; still make challah every first Friday of the month. About pies and gingerbread houses at special times; discuss their personal favorite baked items………20 – 22 Sarah talks about her involvement in the business. Rugelach, black-and-white cookies, cannoli, and comfort customers find in bakery goods; popularity of Freed’s cakes. Joni tells a funny story of a cake delivery to Barbary Coast hotel with her young son………………………………23 – 30 1 This is Barbara Tabach. Today is March 4, 2016. I'm sitting in the most fragrant place ever, Freed's Bakery. And I'm sitting with...And I'll let you all introduce yourselves. We'll start with you. SARAH: My name is Sarah Fried and it's spelled S-A-R-A-H, F-R-I-E-D. And with Joni Fried that we've talked to before. And...? MAX: And Max Jacobson-Fried; spelled M-A-X, J-A-C-O-B-S-O-N, hyphen, F-R-I-E-D. BT: So what I'd like to talk about first today is a little bit about technology in business. Obviously, when you first opened—or when your dad, Joni, opened up the first bakery, what was the most technological advancement at that time, would you think? JONI: Probably the mixer. Yes, that was...Everything else was arm strong, everything. Strong bakers. Bakers are always strong. They live long lives and are very, very strong because all the flour used to be hundred-pound bags. So sometimes you'd see them carrying two hundred pounds of flour. BT: So they don't carry bags like that anymore? JONI: No. Fifty pounds. It's OSHA. Nothing more than fifty pounds. BT: So OSHA rules made a difference. JONI: Oh, yes. BT: And how about in marketing? You started to tell me a little while ago the hours you would spend on the computer. What era was that that happened? JONI: That was in 1991, kind of the very beginning of the Internet. I had my first website built in Laguna. This lady down there had a site that had all the counties in California with all the wedding venues. And so I thought, wow, that would be a good place to advertise Freed's Bakery, because we used to get a lot of California brides here. So we used to advertise in all of 2 the counties. If I got an E-mail every couple of weeks, it wasn't such a big deal. I didn't have to check my E-mail at all, hardly at all. Then I started advertising with a chapel and they sent out two thousand of our brochures with their brochures every month, and, of course, I paid them. Then the business just sort of picked up. We went from having like about a four-inch-wide file folder container for our orders to maybe one that was twelve inches and then maybe a two-drawer and then maybe a three-drawer. It just kind of jumped pretty quickly after that. Yes, so I used to get up in the morning and see if there was any E-mail. And I'd reply to one and I'd rely to the next one. Then the first one would have a question and I'd answer that question. And the third one would come in and I'd answer the first question again. Before you knew it, the first one was ordering. And then a fourth E-mail would come in and the second one would reply. It was a pretty easy way to take in sales. But I was very lucky because I didn't have to bake, I didn't have to deliver, I didn't have to decorate because we had enough help just to do those things. So I really just drove the business. It wasn't unusual to get a call...In fact, there was one night we were driving back from L.A. It was about eleven o'clock at night. The phone rings and this guy says, "Hi, I saw your gambling themed cake online and I need to order it, but my friend is going to pick it up the day after tomorrow from Las Vegas and drive it back to L.A." So here it is eleven o'clock at night, we're in Baker somewhere, and I'm taking this guy's order while my friend is driving. At that point it was great, the technology point of it. It just went on from there. We actually had—I would say without a doubt I can say it—that we had probably the nicest website for wedding cakes bar none in the world. Whatever we did, we'd put it on there. Before you know it, this one is doing that; that one is doing it; it's in New York; it's in Paris. I 3 mean people were just copying our work, which was great. It was a great compliment. They were copying our work like crazy. Then, of course, as the Food Network grew and grew and more people learned how to do some of these more complicated cakes, the abilities caught up very quickly, so we weren't unique any longer. But we're still unique for Las Vegas and we still employ a lot of people here and have a lot of people walking through the front door, which is what it takes to stay in business. BT: Absolutely. And it is busy. JONI: I used to say, well, we don't have to be the biggest bakery, the best bakery or anything like that; we just have to be good and consistent and keep our name good and consistent here in Las Vegas and we'll do business. BT: And you have that's for sure. So at what point did you hand off that kind of order taking? How did that change, the computerization and the order taking? JONI: I would say probably, let's see, 2007 or so because I was able to stay home in 2005 and a good deal of 2006 to be with my mom. So Max came into the business and he started by probably taking our price lists and putting our cakes in a spreadsheet and making it easier to raise prices and making it so we didn't have to copy one cake six times, put them in the book, try to keep them in alphabetical order. It was a real big deal to raise prices or to be able to do anything with our books back then. So I would say that's probably the beginning. MAX: Yes, I would say it was right around 2006, 2007 that we kind of tried to start digitizing not just how we were taking orders, but how we were doing business. And that was a big piece of it was we used to have these books. And so you had a book of two hundred, three hundred, four hundred photos in it, and next to every photo it would say, "D plus 25 percent," or, "A plus 15 percent." So what that meant is you'd have to go to a different book where it would 4 have all of this A pricing and it would have it for all different sizes. So you'd look at the A price and then you'd have to add X percent to try to figure out what the price was. So every time somebody said, "Hey, I'd love these six cakes. Can I get pricing on it?" You'd have to go through the book, find the one, A plus, go over here, go to the calculator, figure that one out, do this, go back, send them that price, then go to the next one. You couldn't just say, "Oh, can you just decide two?" BT: It was way, way manual even with a computer. MAX: Exactly. It was a real process. So that was something we decided to do was to switch over to a spreadsheet where we had one EXEL workbook and within the workbook we had a bunch of different spreadsheets that had all the different names. And then within each spreadsheet you had the photo of the cake and then all of the pricing for that cake. So if someone had a question, you just went to that page and you had the pricing right there. BT: Isn't that great? MAX: Yes. That was really wonderful. [Pause in recording] MAX: Back to that point, too, if we're going to talk about technology, we also have to talk about implementation because that was actually the most difficult part of it; it wasn't building a spreadsheet; it was teaching everybody how to use it. One, there was a huge amount of resistance. BT: Who was resisting? MAX: Who would be resistant of something like that? JONI: All of them. One of them said, "If you bring computers in, I'm going to have to leave." She's still here. 5 MAX: I am the teacher—yes. Then there was Mary. I had to teach Mary how to turn on a computer, how to press the power button. First time she had ever been working with a laptop. So you had to teach them from the beginning how to use a computer. Now if you went in there and told them, "We're going to back to books," they would freak out. But, yes, moving over to computers was a big, big deal. BT: Now, did you have special training that you wanted to do this or just because you were younger and that was your way of looking at things? MAX: That was going to be my fingerprint on this was starting to get over to computers. I mean Joni is already—the fact that Joni thought in 1991 it was a good idea to make a website, I mean that's pretty forward thinking. People didn't have websites until 2000s, right? BT: Yes, yes. MAX: Actually it was ten years ahead. So riding that kind of wave and knowing the difference technology can make to a business I think is what pushes us to kind of think about it in those terms, because it really did make a big difference for us. I mean I can't imagine how business would be different if she hadn't done that. JONI: Well, Yvonne (Max’s mother and Joni’s sister) and I were in Ashland (Oregon) one day and we were talking. Ashland is a very progressive community; a lot of retired IBM people and technical people have moved there to retire and stuff. So they have that place... MAX: Project A. JONI: Project A. So they took me there. Project A is a place where they build websites, host them and all. And so I went along with my mom and they gave us this presentation to do this website. I had already built one or two websites at that point. I was going to work on a third one. And then before I did the third one, I was going to talk to them. They wanted like ten 6 thousand dollars. I'm thinking, hmm, ten thousand dollars, a thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars, a thousand dollars? Well, I went with the thousand dollar, which actually ended up costing us probably a hundred and twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in the long run over eight or nine years. Project A would have been just as good and we probably would have done...Max would have been able to easily interpret the stuff that we were doing, but we went with a different developer who wouldn't teach us anything. So every time we needed something, it was money, money, money. BT: Yes. JONI: So anyway, I'm up there at Yvonne's house and she said, "There is this thing. You know about Google?" And I said, "Yeah." My nephew was working for Microsoft and he's talking about Google to my mom and we're all talking about Google. So Yvonne and I went on Google and we decided to do a Google ad words campaign. We started off with putting in words and references, maybe making up one or two. You can give it a limit per day of what you want to spend. So I think that's why our website ended up being the best website in the world. But we spent about ten thousand dollars a month ultimately on Google, advertising with Google. And our website was the number one, no matter what you searched for. If you searched for wedding cakes, children's birthday cakes, Martha Stewart cakes, rose cakes, cakes with flowers, Freed's Bakery was right up there. We did that for many, many years and then Max kind of came in and started trimming and redid the website and making it so we didn't have to spend that much. In fact, actually even before Max or right at that time, we stopped spending quite as much with Google because once you're naturally listed, which we had become—and we were getting a hundred thousand unique 7 visitors a month on our website from all over the world, countries you didn't even...You don't even know that country and you're getting people looking at your website. So anyway, it was good that we were able to kind of cut back and go with different companies. I'll let Max... MAX: That's exactly what happened. It was eventually—yes, the campaigns didn't make sense because you'd be listed number one and then you'd have an ad right about that. It didn't make any sense. But I feel like you guys kind of made—like that was still even a little bit before me was when you guys decided that it was time to— JONI: Cut back. MAX: Yes, take out the ad spending because it just wasn't paying off as much as it had been previous years. JONI: Right. The thing was that was really interesting—then I'll stop—is that every year more and more people were using the Internet. Before, maybe one out of five houses had a computer or whatever. But as the years went on, I mean it...So what ended up happening that I didn't expect to happen was that our local business really started to boom because before, when you wanted to find a cake or whatever, you'd go to the Yellow Pages and you'd look. But because we had this tremendous website and we were out there all over the place, all over the place that the locals, as they learned how to use the Internet, were finding us. That week before, I'd say at least probably 70 percent of our business was wedding cakes and out of that I would say maybe 40 to 45 percent were out-of-state people just coming in to do a quick wedding cake. We never met them. They'd give us their credit card. We'd run it. They'd look on the Internet, give us the order. That's what I was doing during that period. But then as more and more locals started to look at it and then 2008 came around and Las Vegas kind of took a dive for weddings, then the local business really picked up like crazy. So that's kind of how that went. 8 BT: And you moved into this location that we're sitting in what year? JONI: 2011. BT: 2011, okay. So you always had a cake room—we were talking about that earlier, too—you had a cake room at Trop and Eastern? JONI: Well, we only had that I would say in probably maybe the year 2000 or 2001; something like that. We took that second store. But before that we had sixteen hundred square feet to do all of our business. People would come in and I remember sometimes walking in front of the bakery and there would be four or five sets of brides to be waited on. I'd walk up and I'd say, "Okay, I'm going to tell everybody about these cakes over here," and I would start pointing into this little refrigerator that we had. "We'll get you all samples in a minute." Then I had one or two big round tables that were highboy tables with stools. If you were lucky enough to get a seat that's where you sat. I remember I went out of town one time and my mom took the seats and the stools up. "I didn't want people sitting in here eating cake; I don't want them spending so much time looking at books." And yada, yada. It's just different. BT: Different generation of how to operate a business. JONI: Right, different generation of how you do business. Then we took on the second store; we knocked a hole in the wall. We had, I don't know, seven or eight desks in there and we'd have two or three tables. It was so noisy. We could have fifty or sixty people sitting in this little, tiny room, like twice this size, and you're trying to take cake orders on the phone. And doing this building at that time, which was in 2010, designing this, I designed this specifically to do a lot of cake. I mean this was cake decorators' heaven, having all that area over there with all their toys and all their icings and all of that and all their baking separate and the dishwasher back there and a nice ordering department. And we've just so overgrown it. It's just 9 so overgrown that it's great. BT: You mentioned the dishwasher. Tell me about the dishwasher. JONI: Oh, well...My mom used to say, "You're only as good as your dishwasher." Because if your dishwasher called in sick that day, you were the dishwasher. So you always prayed the dishwasher came in. Because washing all those pans...I mean it was literally back-breaking work and it was always at the end of the day. So you've just put in eight or nine or ten hours; now you've got to go back and wash pots and pans and dishes. It was like two or three hours of bending over and washing and running out of hot water and waiting for the hot water. So when we were at the show in 2010—every four years there is a bakery show that comes to town—I saw that dishwasher and I just said, "You know what? I've got to get that dishwasher for the new store." So we did. BT: It's tall as a man. JONI: Oh, it's...I don't know. We couldn't take it out of here. MAX: You could definitely, yes, fit inside there. That's my biggest fear. BT: Yes. You could take a very hot shower. MAX: Yes, very hot shower. JONI: Oh, you mean as far as on the inside? Yes. SARAH: Max's personal nightmare. MAX: Yes. JONI: And there's arms that go every direction. And so, yes, if you were in there, you'd really get knocked off your feet. MAX: It's like a car wash. JONI: Yes, in a smaller area. 10 SARAH: You wouldn't make it out alive. JONI: Right, right. SARAH: It's not that you get knocked over. It's scolding hot. JONI: Yes, it's two hundred and forty degrees. BT: Yes. I don't think anybody can imagine the equipment and the manpower it takes until you're walking back through here. And like that oven, how old is the oven? Was that new when you moved in here originally? JONI: No. We bought it. No. That's another thing. We had our other oven for at least forty-five years. So we got that oven the year after my dad died, so 2007—excuse me—1997. It was like heartbreaking to take the other oven out. But the other oven had absolutely no insulation in it. Like in the summertime, it would send a lot of heat into the bakery and the bakers and everybody would just be soaking wet, shvitzing. It was so horrible. Then getting that oven, you can walk by it and you don't even know it's on, what a pleasure. That's a great oven. We're actually in need of another oven now because we're behind all the time, baking. So that's one of the things that hopefully we'll be able to get is another oven by expanding and moving things around and getting storage upstairs so that we have more floor space and that to bake. Everything kind of expands; it doesn't just expand in baking, your sales area. I mean as far as that goes out front where we sell things, we can always go out front with that. But I think it's fine because we had this—my mom used to say she was always saving money to move the bakery. But she would always say, "People love to be touching shoulders in a busy place. Nothing worse than going into a place that's empty." So the fact that we were at Trop and Eastern and the sales space up front for the floor was probably twenty (feet) by twenty (feet), maybe four hundred square feet, very small and you get forty or fifty people in there. And 11 holidays, people are...But then they go home and go, "Did you see what was going on at Freed's Bakery? Oh, my God, there was a line out the door." So I always tell people, it's not the worst thing in the world to have a line of people. It's not the worst thing in the world when people have to wait for something because they get a chance to see how many people are coming in. It's just a great hub-hub, I think. It just gives people something to talk about. But, anyway. BT: So this is a multigenerational business. We're sitting here with the third generation of participants. What are childhood memories that either of you have about being part of a bakery? SARAH: We used to have these two trailers in the back of the bakery that were like—we had racks of—we had stacks of flour and fun toys and all these little odds and ends that we put in our trailers and that used to be really fun to play in. We used to have this kind of slope in the back of the bakery where if you were lucky you could get somebody to push you in one of the bakery racks and go down this little slope into the back of the bakery. One time one of them flipped over. I just remember opening up the rack and I was upside down. I guess one of my favorite things I think I remember was watching some of the cake decorators. We still have one of the cake decorators here. She's been here for almost forty years now. She used to sit there and show me how to make roses and write on cakes, which I still can't figure out how to do. Learning how to do little things like that was always fun growing up here. I guess the holidays were always really fun, having cousins in town and having them here for a couple of weeks at a time. JONI: Everybody used to come. SARAH: Being in charge of—yes—cutting. We used to have this God-awful machine that would cut cellophane to make capes for all the gingerbread houses. It just took all day and then you 12 had tons of capes. I mean just imagine if you had all of these racks filled with cellophane in here, just on hangers everywhere and it just took over your entire everything. There would just be cellophane everywhere during Christmastime. Shrink-wrapping was always really fun growing up. We had these blow dryers that we would put just cellophane over whatever the product was and then we'd take these really hot guns—I guess they're guns, right?—and be there for hours. It's like child labor; it was eight hours of... MAX: But we would never say that in an interview. SARAH: No. BT: Well, that's part of a family business, right? SARAH: Family. Scraping the floors. JONI: Well, you got the good end of it because before that we used to put them into the oven and let it shrink down. Then we'd bring them out. Then you guys would use the thing to get them to seal. My arms in December would just be red. Basically in December I used to plant myself at the oven and I would make sure that everything went in and everything came out without being burned. Because you can work really hard, but if nobody's watching the oven, you could ruin it all. Max and Yvonne and all their family used to come every Christmas, even Yvonne; she would take off. The whole family would be here and my parents were here. SARAH: They'd bring duffle bags of clothes. JONI: Yes. Everybody used to stay at my house and be on the floor and be in couches. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. BT: So you weren't raised here in Las Vegas, Max? 13 MAX: No, I grew up in Oregon. So we would come down for the holidays and that was the family tradition was to head down to Vegas for Christmas and spend...It feels like we were here for about two weeks. SARAH: Two weeks, yes. MAX: Like Christmas break. Yes, so we would come down and help do everything that she just described. Generally my brother and I would get the really bad jobs. We would have to get these scrappers. They're like these little wood blocks with these little metal scarpers. Go through the entire bakery and just scrape the floors. Just go through and just get everything off the floor. They had these little rivets in the tile. You'd have to go through there with a scrapper and get the dough out. It was really back-breaking labor. And then afterwards you'd do the cookie trays and the gingerbread houses. It was always fun, though. I have fond memories. SARAH: We'd go out to dinner afterwards. MAX: Yes, we would always go out for sushi and good Las Vegas food. Yes, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work, but it didn't feel like work. BT: That's an interesting family tradition. JONI: It was. BT: Then how did you decide to make this your career? MAX: That is a great question. Let's see. How did I? So it was... JONI: Traveling. He used to love to travel. MAX: Traveling, yes. So it was freshman year of college. I did my first year and I said, "This is not as much fun as I thought it was going to be." I said, "I'm going to go travel and do whatever I'm supposed to be doing right now." So I asked Joni and my grandma if I could 14 come down and work for like two months and then I would just go off and travel. So that's exactly what I did. I came down in November and December and just worked for like sixty days straight. I didn't have any friends here. I didn't do anything. I just came to the bakery and I just worked every single day. I lived in her garage. She had like a little room in her garage. JONI: There was a room. MAX: It was a room, yes. There was a room inside the garage. JONI: It had air-conditioning. MAX: Yes. But it was just— SARAH: And heat. It was nice. MAX: Yes, and heat. SARAH: But no window. JONI: No windows. I took one of the garages and made it into a little dance room for Sarah. MAX: Yes, just mirrors everywhere. It was a weird room. I didn't know it was a dance room, but that makes sense now. JONI: It had carpet on the floor. MAX: Yes. A little air mattress. BT: What year was that? MAX: That was 2003—2003, 2004. Wait. I graduated in 2002, 2003—yes, 2003 and four. So it was 2003 that I actually did the work, November and December of 2003. JONI: Yes, yes, yes. MAX: So I spent two months and then I'd go traveling for like four months. Then I went back to Ashland. Then I asked if I could do it again, but I asked this time if I could do it in 15 advance. So I asked them to pay me, I'd go traveling, then come in November and December because that's when they needed me. There wasn't any point of me coming any other time. So I did that. Then I decided to go back to school. So I went back to U of O in Oregon. I decided it still wasn't that much fun. So I went on an exchange program down to Ecuador. While I was down there, I think we were just e-mailing back and forth and she asked if I wanted to come to Vegas and help manage the front of the Trop store. So I said, "Eh…That sounds like fun." So I transferred to UNLV, came to Vegas, and that was like 2006. Then once I was there, they started talking about an expansion. So I started getting a little bit more involved. Then we expanded and then that was it; I was in. JONI: Yes, because you weren't here when Grandma was sick. You're were down in Ecuador. SARAH: Yes. But I came before—I was here when she passed. JONI: Right. SARAH: So that's why I got involved. BT: So you've had impact on the marketing via technology. Can you describe what level you've taken it to, what you're doing? MAX: Sure. Well, let's see. I feel like Joni already took it to where it's at. We didn't just start winning Best of Las Vegas. We're not just now world renowned. It's kind of just making sure that we stay there. BT: Yes. That's the hardest part. MAX: That is the hardest part, right? BT: It's fun getting to that point, but then the hard work sets in. MAX: Yes, there is definitely different challenges. I think that when I look at it...We talk about technology; we talk about marketing. You look at the—not lifespan, but kind of the life 16 of the bakery and you see how it went from making sure there was advertising with chapels and print advertising and then how she decided to do the Internet. She's always been, like I said, on the front end of that wave. So she was on the Internet before everyone else. We saw what was happening with social media before I feel like a lot of people did and we were able to take advantage of that, too. Like I was on Facebook when it was just for university students. So when all the sudden it came out that businesses could be on Facebook, I had already been on there for at least three or four years or maybe—I don't know; now it's all a blur—for at least a number of years. So I said, "Oh, my God, we should be on Facebook." So we created a Facebook page and that became a huge part of the business for a period of time. Social media became that thing where everybody is a social media guru, and for us it just meant that we had been playing with Facebook for a while. JONI: I think we got about eleven thousand viewers the first year. MAX: Yes, within a year or two, we were at eleven thousand fans when nobody had those numbers. I feel like at that time everybody kind of had like two hundred, three hundred people on their Facebook page and everything was going fine. We were just ahead of it. Now, obviously, there are a lot of bakeries who have far more than we do because of their exposure, because of what they do. But when you look locally at other bakeries here, we're still head and shoulders above as far as the number of fans we have in our social media movements. But even that became something that was no longer as important, as things usually do. With Facebook's new algorithms, it felt like now—where we used to put out a post and eight hundred people would like it without any kind of ad spend, now you can throw something out there to a group of sixty thousand people and may