Part Two: How We Kept the Pop-Ups Going Week After Week

Welcome to part two of the bakery pop-up series.

In the first one I talked through all of the pre-planning that had to happen before we even got to the point of selling anything. Packaging, costing, recipe testing, till buttons, photography, team chats, all of the glamorous stuff.

This part is about what happened once the pop-ups actually started.

And my God, keeping the admin of this thing going was absolutely relentless. I can tell you that for free.

After mammoth weeks of plotting the pop-ups, physically executing them, running the restaurant and juggling childcare, by Saturday afternoon I was well and truly fried. Not just tired. Fried. There was this huge decompression after each one, but at the exact same time my brain was already trying to work out what needed to happen for the following week.

I’d be driving to pick my son up from my mum’s thinking about mango deliveries, till buttons, how many cookies we sold, whether we had enough boxes, what needed to go on Instagram, who was prepping what, whether the menu was too big, whether the queue had worked, whether I spoke to someone for long enough, whether I’d ordered enough butter, whether I had in fact completely lost my mind.

It was frantic to say the least.

Maybe younger me would have had more energy for this. Maybe pre-child me or pre-restaurant me would have been a bit more nimble with it all. But new me went in the only way I know how, which is 200% and then some, except this time I had the added pressure of running a business, raising a child and, tiny little detail, being heavily pregnant.

Which, in all honesty, in order to do this thing, I completely disregarded.

This week I’m going to run through what it actually took to keep each pop-up going. The weekly planning, the spreadsheets, the emails, the ordering, the team communication and the general chaos of trying to make it look fun and effortless from the outside while quietly battling the admin beast in the background.

The first thing I’ll say is this: don’t focus on making your admin perfect.