What if you could sell your baked goods through a third-party marketplace, but one that is focused solely on independent retail bakeries and smaller foodservice establishments? That was the goal of butterbottoms, a recently established website that gives customers the opportunity to order delicious food from bakeries/restaurants anywhere and have it shipped directly to them.

Jenna Lee, the founder of butterbottoms, has multiple master’s degrees and recently completed an analytics program at Harvard. She had inspiration during one of her classes, learning about network effects. Essentially, a network effect is the idea that the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products.

Applying that to a potential business venture, Lee realized that the more vendors on a website, the more people that will want to visit, and vice versa. Since thinking of butterbottoms, she has gathered some of the strongest and most influential minds out there in the restaurant and baking world and plans to persistently and aggressively grow butterbottoms domestically and internationally.

 

Focusing mostly on baked goods, sandwiches and pizza, butterbottoms takes the concept that has made other marketplaces successful and applied it on a more niche basis. Up-and-running for just over four months, the website has twenty businesses on board with more coming soon. Not only does the website provide retailers with the opportunity to sell to more customers, but also get their name out there.

In her free time during school, Lee watched a lot of baking shows and was inspired by that as well. That’s how she came up with butterwars, another aspect of the website. Bakers are encouraged to create their best version of a specific product and then show what they have. They’re judged by the crowd based on professional appearance, creativity and design; the ‘Crowd Favorites’ are then taste tested for an ultimate winner of the butterwar.