From surviving on instant noodles and saving every cent, to now running a 8-figure dollar donut empire with no baking experience, Geoff Bannister and his wife Kristy are the epitome of modern entrepreneurs.

News travelled fast when Dr Dough Donuts started sharing their fried dough creations from a ghost kitchen in Potts Point, Sydney.

Despite being born in a saturated market (among the likes of Doughnut Time, Donut King and Krispy Kreme), the donut aficionados defied the odds with their ‘online gifting’ and same day delivery point of difference.

Geoff and the team pride themselves on delivering a best in class customer experience every time. A particular non-negotiable is the experience and attention to detail they provide with the gift cards.

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- “Orders with a physical gift card are all proofread by a member of the team. We check each of them carefully, ensure the spelling is right, fix grammar issues, and will go back to the customer if we think they’ve made a mistake,”

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Geoff Bannister - Dr Dough Donuts Co-Founder

However, the nature of this set-up did leave room for mistakes. Or simply change of mind on the customer’s part. Despite this, Geoff said they always want to do right by their customers.

“People are sensitive around the message they are sending. They might want to make changes last minute, so we need to go and find that card and make the change. If the card has already left with the driver, we’ve had to chase the driver down in Sydney or hand-deliver a card to a customer in an envelope,”

Built for the digital world, Dr Dough Donuts experienced tremendous growth during COVID-19 lockdowns. However this was complemented by a spike in COVID cases resulting in staff absence.

Fortunately, Geoff discovered Giftnote — a digital card solution to integrate with his online store.

“We had everything up and running by the first week of December 2021. Before Giftnote, our customer service team members would spend 20% of their day changing messages, changing cards, and fixing any cards that were wrongly attached to a box,”

Giftnote has eliminated the chances of human error, while streamlining their operations.

- “Now we only need one person in each state to replicate this process. We save 15 hours a day in order processing,” Geoff said.

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“Even once the gift is already onboard with the driver, customers are able to make changes to the message. We can’t always control the last mile, but having a digital version of the card is one less opportunity for any mistake,” he said.

Although people do like physical gift cards, Geoff said if they could go 100% digital with Giftnote, it would streamline their business even more.

“We take orders all the way through till midnight on our full range, so we have people processing till late at night, or first thing in the morning so we can get orders out by 7am,” he said.

For now, they are still offering a physical card for a nominal fee of $2.95. In doing so, Dr Dough Donuts has been able to generate up to $5K in additional monthly revenue — even with 60% of their customers now using Giftnote.

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"We see Giftnote being an integral part of our business and website. We love that we have this free option available. It was something we knew we wanted, but didn’t know how to do it,” Geoff said.

In addition to monetising the physical gift cards, they’ve been able to create an additional acquisition channel of giftee sign-ups.

“A lot of customers use us continually as a gifting service. They haven’t actually received a box themselves. By providing a digital version with Giftnote, we can integrate a digital signup form with a discount on next purchase,” Geoff said.

“We used to put a physical promotional card in each box. There wasn’t a lot of take-up and likely ended up with the rest of the packaging in the bin.”

Geoff said Giftnote makes it easy to track the customers that are receiving a box and coming back to their site.

- “The data we can collect using Giftnote is my favourite feature. We have never known how many of these new customers become long term customers. This gives us that option to be able to track if they do become a customer, and know when they become a return customer. It’s what we gain from the data and actually use it to grow the business.”

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Dr Dough Donuts has already increased their footprint across to Melbourne and plan to expand further across Australia and internationally. Geoff said it’s nice knowing that Giftnote will be an option that easily scales with expansions like these — taking the pressure off hiring more resources to fulfill physical gift card tasks.