Stories: How Jeff Escalante turned a neighborhood need for bagels into a profitable side hustle.
We're interviewing Bottle customers to learn how they started their business and built successful communities by telling their brand story. Conversations have been lightly edited.
We invited Jeff Escalante, the man behind Serenity Bagel, to offer insights as a full time programmer, bagel slinger and dad of 2 who says Bottle is a key part of his Bagel business in Atlanta, GA. Jeff shares how making great bagels, serving his local community and setting up a weekly bagel drop has developed into a fulfilling side hustle.
What is your business about in one sentence?
I run a bagel delivery business in a small town an hour south of Atlanta.
What led you to start Serenity bagel?
I stumbled into the bagel business entirely by accident. I had recently moved from Philly to a small town and I couldn't find any bagels. If I wanted good bagels I had to drive an hour, which is a hike just to get bagels. So I thought, maybe if I can figure out how to make a big batch of bagels and then freeze them I can have an on demand supply of bagels. Soon, friends and neighbors wanted my bagels. At first, I just made batches and gave them away. It got to the point where I realized I wasn’t going to have any left for myself, so I decided to test the viability of starting a bagel business.
How did you know it was time to go from hobby to business?
After giving away bagels to friends and neighbors, I figured I might have a cottage business that I could do on the side. So, I went to a local farmers market to test demand. We made 50 bagels all by hand without any commercial equipment, which took hours upon hours. We sold out in an hour - there was a huge line and people were getting mad. I thought, jeez, this was way more demand than I anticipated so I decided to start scaling up.
What did the scaling up process look like?
So I took a month off or so, put a bunch of time into researching commercial equipment for bagel making, and ended up buying some used equipment. I set the equipment up in a spare bedroom. As we’ve grown, I’ve brought some people on to help me out.
How does your model work?
We make one batch a week of bagels for pickup and delivery on the weekend only. Our menu is fairly straightforward - we sell 6 different types of bagels and cream cheese. We still sell out regularly and there's demand for more than bagels. We drop our menu by text every Thursday and people can place orders until a day ahead of our pickup / delivery times.
Why did you choose Bottle over Shopify?
I have a full time job and two little kids, so the only way the business would work was with a pre-ordering model and one production day. I knew I wanted some sort of online ordering system. I am a web developer by trade and so I knew I could get something together without too much of an issue. I started poking into Shopify initially. I made an account, I started setting it up, but it was not a great experience. It was hard to figure out how to use and had all these extra features. Eventually, I decided Shopify was not for me. Then I thought about building it myself, but knew that would be a decent amount of work.
Andy and I are friends so when he told me about Bottle, of course I gave it a try. The software seemed right up the alley. All the features I needed were available: subscriptions, weekly ordering, pre-orders, geofencing, community driven and texting / marketing.
What surprised you about selling on Bottle?
The two way texting has been the most valuable and surprising element of the software. People respond to the reminder messages a lot and it’s great to have an easy way to chat with them. The ordering is really simple for the customer. Bottle handles all this custom logic out of the box - things like fulfillment slots, pre-ordering and subscriptions, which have been great. The reports are super helpful for production and predicting demand. Of course, having the geofencing built in was super important because I can only deliver to a very small radius.
What are your plans for the future of Serenity Bagel?
For now, we’re going to keep doing the weekly deliveries. But we are in early talks about a brick and mortar, which would be a great next step for the business.