Famous but fail?

In western countries, breads and cakes as their daily food, are very important, especially in France, they pay much attention to gastronomy, so we can find various bakeries and pastries in the heart of France: Paris.

According to our investigation, the main business patterns of bakery and pastry market can be concluded like this:

1.making breads and cakes within boutiques;

2.owning a workshop in suburb areas of Paris, producing breads and cakes there and delivering to each boutique every morning. Mostly, bakery and pastry who uses this model just has several branches.

3.industrialization and standardization manufacturing, and also daily delivery. This kind of bakeries always has plenty of branches, for instance,Paul, so they have to make sure the high efficiency with this approach.

Actually, in theses days, we have been to a lot of bakeries and pastries, but sometimes, we failed to find some stores that are written in books or recorded in Google Maps. Let’s take Les Fees Patissieres as an example.

Les Fees Patissieres is located in Rue Rambuteau, which is near Pompidou artistic center. There is no doubt that Rambuteau street is a good destination because it is a crowded district for the convenient transportation and being full of restaurants, shopping stores and bakeries so we are totally shocked by Les Fees Patissieres’s closing, which drives us to start finding the reason.

When we walked around, we are surprised to figure out there are a lot of bakery and pastry stores along Rambuteau street. Boutique Pralus Paris Rambuteau, Pâtisserie Chocolaterie PRALUS, Berko are just next to it, in addition, Hure and Pain de Sucre are on the opposite side of the road. Therefore, when customers want to buy cakes or breads, they have many options, exposing Les Fees Patissieres to great competiting pressure.

On the other hand, their cupcakes are sold at 3.8€ as a super tiny size, just as big as a Ferrero chocolate. They claim that they try to use special materials to make sure the taste, like vanilla in Madagascar, India or Haiti, and in order to make the cupcakes look luxurious, they make efforts for nice packages, so the cost of their cakes are very high while their profit space is also small although they sell the cupcakes at a higher price. However, we think people are not willing to pay 3.8€ for a small piece of cake which can be finished by one bite. So customers will just buy one for tasting and then go to other stores nearby for their real demands.

The other thing is that when we learn about the DNA of Les Fees Patissieres, it is related to les Petites Fees, which means committing to build a fairy tale world. At last, they attract a number of youngsters, who certainly can’t afford these high-price cakes for many times. So their positioning to luxury market can’t realize successfully.
In a word, the business strategy of Les Fees Patissieres is not fitting the French market very well, which leads to its failure.