.tel Story of Steven Riley

My name is Steven Riley and I'm the owner of a company called Cake in a Box. We're based in Glasgow in Scotland and we specialize in wedding cakes, birthday cakes and all types of celebration cakes.

Our company has been running since February 2009. We moved here from a previous, smaller bakery. This is a family business and we have four professional staff consisting of myself, my sister and my mother and father.

Day-to-day working at Cake in a Box is very dynamic and challenging. Obviously it depends on cake orders that are coming in from Monday to Saturday. It can range from any type of order, but every day is slightly different.

The process of making a cake is not easy. It's very time-consuming, and it can take a number of processes which could take from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

Since we began operating as a business we've had a number of strange requests for cakes to be made. Possibly the strangest one to date has been a spinal cord, on a cake for a Doctor! It's very unique � very different � very nice, but very odd!

Being discoverable on the internet is very important to us. We've invested quite a lot in our online store, where customers from all over the country can click on to the website, order and then they don't have to come and visit. They can just order online, the order's placed and then they can come and collect their cake.
Since the website began, yes, business has increased dramatically. The geographical area that we cover has increased dramatically. From being a local, centralized business in Glasgow, we now cater for people all over Scotland and even Northern England as well.

The growth in our business has led us to thinking about moving premises, yes. It's been quite a dramatic increase in workload; we do require extra room for extra staff. Our busiest time of the year is during the Summer obviously, with Wedding cakes, but during the Winter months, we're obviously looking for other seasonal cakes.

We're currently looking at moving business location. The main problems we face are obviously premises at the right price and obviously being able to tell our customer base that we have at the moment about where we're moving to. I believe that our website and our .tel domain will help us achieve that.

I first heard about .tel browsing the internet by chance. I clicked on to an online newspaper and read an article and found it very interesting. Having spoken to one of my colleagues, I ran the idea of purchasing perhaps one or two of the .tel domains that would be beneficial to our business, and the feedback that I got from the IT person was quite good. So we decided to purchase after the general release of the .tel name.

The way in which I would describe .tel is that it's an online communications portal where you can instantly use keywords � specifically for products � that you can then click into the search engine and then, either regionally or locally, be able to find the products that they're looking for. That's actually quite beneficial for us as a business because there are numerous cake-makers out there.

From a business perspective, I'm hoping that .tel will help me increase sales but also decrease the cost of marketing my company. Currently we do advertise with Yellow Pages and their online portal, Yell.com. We only have a local listing and it is quite expensive � I think it's just over �300 just for the postcode region. If we were looking for a city-wide listing it would probably be around about �1000 and if we were looking for Scotland as a whole it would be very expensive. So I see .tel as a cost-efficient way of promoting your company.

When we finally do move premises which we hope to do in quite the near future, the first thing we'll do is change our business cards. We currently have business cards with our current address and contact details on it, which will become obsolete. Once we move, we'll be able to use just our .tel on the business cards and that means that we can instantly update our contact details, email address and so on and it won't cost us anything � it will be quite cost-efficient.

We started as a company in a recession and we thought it was going to be difficult, but we've actually done quite a lot better than we expected. Even throughout the recession we've found that people will still go that little bit further for a celebration cake. If you were to own a business and have a shop say Monday to Saturday, your open hours would say eight to five or eight to six. We find that most of our orders sales come between eight o'clock and one o'clock in the morning, when people are at home, obviously with their family, when they can look online.

If they're working until six o'clock they don't have time to come to your shop. So the fact that we can have a shop that's open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week is very beneficial.