Why We Want You to Experience Secret Basement at Secret Basement

There is a reason we called ourselves Secret Basement Gelato.

We want you to come to the Basement.

We want you to walk in, see the flavours, ask us what we recommend, try something new, and experience the gelato the way we intended it to be experienced.

That might sound simple, but it is actually at the heart of a decision we are making as a business.

We are choosing to become less dependent on some third-party discount and delivery platforms and to put more of our energy, money and attention into Secret Basement itself.

And we wanted to explain why.

Our philosophy is simple: the price should be right for the product

From the beginning, we have believed that the price of a product should reflect what goes into making it.

We make our own gelato.

We spend a lot of time developing our recipes, selecting ingredients, testing flavours and working on texture and consistency. We are constantly experimenting, improving and trying to make every batch better.

We know what goes into our product, and we know what it costs us to make it properly.

So our philosophy has always been:

The price needs to be right for the product quality.

We want our customers to feel that they have received good value.

But we don't want to build Secret Basement around being the cheapest option.

We are not a discount company

We love making people happy.

If we can give a customer something extra, we are happy to do it.

If we want to launch a promotion, we will.

If we want to reward our regular customers, we will.

But there is a difference between giving customers a great offer and building a business around discounts.

We don't want someone to visit Secret Basement only because an app has given them a 30% or 50% discount.

We want them to come because they genuinely believe that what we make is worth paying for.

We are not interested in constantly competing on who can offer the biggest discount.

We are a gelato company, not a discount company.

Our product doesn't fit every discount structure

When you look at food platforms, you see many different businesses, products and price points sitting next to each other.

That's completely normal.

Every business has its own cost structure and pricing strategy.

Secret Basement makes its own gelato. We have our own recipes, ingredients, production process and costs involved in making the product.

So when a platform creates a broad discount programme across many different businesses, the economics don't necessarily work equally well for everyone.

We cannot simply reduce the price of our product by a huge amount and expect the business to remain sustainable.

We believe the price should reflect what we make.

And we believe customers should be able to understand the value behind that price.

Why we are rethinking Grab Dine Out

Since setting up our basement store, we have been looking carefully at how Grab Dine Out fits into our business and, more importantly, whether the programme is creating enough value for Secret Basement.

We appreciate every customer who has discovered us through the platform.

But we also have to be honest with ourselves as a business.

When we look at the discounts and overall economics of the programme compared with the value it creates for us, we don't believe it makes enough sense for Secret Basement to continue participating in the same way.

Some platform programmes also require businesses to participate in structures and promotional programmes that may make sense for the platform's long-term ecosystem, but don't necessarily provide the same value to a small independent business like ours.

We would rather take that money and invest it ourselves.

Into Secret Basement.

Into our customers.

Into our marketing.

Into our product.

If we are going to spend money to attract customers, we want to have more control over how that money is used and what we build from it over the long term.

Food delivery is a different challenge

Foodpanda has also made us think carefully about how we want to grow.

In our case, the platform commission is around 30% of the order value.

For a small F&B business, that is significant.

And then there are discounts and coupon programmes.

A customer might purchase our gelato using a 50% coupon, while we are still carrying the cost of producing the product, packaging it and fulfilling the order.

There are situations where, after all of that, the economics of the transaction simply don't make sense for us.

But the money isn't even the only issue.

It is the experience.

Gelato is meant to be experienced

We can control how we make our gelato.

We can control the ingredients.

We can control the recipe.

We can control how it is stored and served when you are standing in front of our counter.

But once it leaves our store through a delivery platform, there are things we cannot control.

The delivery time.

The handling.

The temperature.

The journey.

And ultimately, the customer's experience when the product arrives.

We have had situations where a customer purchased our gelato using a large discount and subsequently rejected the product upon delivery.

For a small business, that is difficult to absorb.

We have made the product. We have prepared it. We have packed it. We have fulfilled the order.

Yet the final experience can still become associated with Secret Basement Gelato, even when parts of that experience are outside our control.

That's something we have to think about.

Sometimes we have limited supply

We are also a small operation.

Sometimes a flavour sells faster than expected.

Sometimes we have only a limited quantity of a particular batch.

When that happens, we have to decide where that product should go.

And increasingly, our preference is simple:

We want to serve the people who have come to Secret Basement.

If you have taken the time to find our store, walk into the Basement and choose your flavour, we want to make sure we can serve you.

You are not just placing an order.

You are experiencing the place we have worked so hard to create.

So there may be times when our supply is limited and we choose to prioritise our walk-in customers rather than allocate the remaining stock to delivery platforms.

It isn't about saying one customer is more important than another.

It is about protecting the experience we are trying to build.

We would rather give the value directly to you

This is perhaps the biggest change in our thinking.

If Secret Basement has money to spend on promotions, we would rather spend it directly on our customers.

If we want to offer 10% off, we want to be the ones giving you that 10%.

If we want to create a special offer, we want to create it.

If we want to reward our regular customers, we want to reward them.

If we want to launch a new flavour, we want to tell our customers about it ourselves.

We would rather build our own marketing campaigns than continually put money into third-party programmes.

Because when we invest in our own marketing, we are not just buying an order.

We are building the Secret Basement brand.

We want to build our own customer relationship

This is what matters most to us.

We don't want Secret Basement to exist only as a listing inside an app.

We want you to know our name.

We want you to know our flavours.

We want you to know what we are trying to create.

We want you to bring your friends.

We want you to come back and tell us what you think about the new flavour we just made.

We want someone to say:

“Let's go to Secret Basement.”

Not:

“Let's see what discount is available on the app.”

There is a huge difference between those two relationships.

One is a transaction.

The other is a brand.

We are not against Grab, Foodpanda or other platforms

We want to be fair about this.

Third-party platforms have a place in F&B.

They can provide convenience, visibility and introduce customers to businesses they may never have discovered otherwise.

We are grateful for the customers who have discovered Secret Basement through these channels.

But as a small business, we also have to decide where our resources create the most long-term value.

For us, that increasingly means putting more investment into our own store and our own customers.

A platform should be a channel.

It shouldn't become the brand.

We believe everyone deserves good gelato

At the same time, we don't believe that quality gelato should only be available to people with a large budget.

Everyone deserves to have good gelato.

That's why we have created different ranges within Secret Basement.

Our Regular range starts from $3.50, giving customers an accessible way to enjoy our gelato without compromising on the quality we expect from our products.

For customers looking for something more indulgent, we have our Premium range, and our Super Premium range goes up to $7 per scoop, featuring flavours where the ingredients and cost of production are significantly higher.

This is how we believe pricing should work.

Rather than making one product and constantly discounting it, we would rather create different products and flavour experiences at different price points.

So whether you want a simple scoop after dinner or you want to treat yourself to one of our more indulgent flavours, there should be a place for you at Secret Basement.

Good gelato shouldn't have to be a luxury reserved for a few.

We want everyone to be able to enjoy it.

We want Secret Basement to stand for something

We are still a young business.

We are learning.

We are developing new flavours.

We are improving our recipes.

We are figuring out what our customers love.

We are making mistakes and fixing them.

But one thing we are becoming increasingly clear about is what we want Secret Basement to represent.

Quality.

Craft.

Good ingredients.

Fair pricing.

Great gelato.

And most importantly, an experience that people genuinely enjoy.

We don't want our reputation to be determined by a discount banner, a third-party promotion or an experience that happens after our product has left our hands.

We want people to experience Secret Basement at Secret Basement.

So if you see us changing, that's why

You may see fewer Secret Basement promotions on some third-party platforms.

You may see us putting more effort into our own marketing.

You may see us encouraging customers to come directly to the store.

That's intentional.

We are not moving away from customers.

We are moving closer to them.

We would rather invest our resources into making Secret Basement better, creating better products, building better experiences and rewarding the people who choose to come directly to us.

Because ultimately, we don't want to be known as the gelato shop with the biggest discount.

We don't want you to come because an app told you we were cheap today.

We want you to come because you believe our gelato is worth it.

And when you walk into the Basement, we want you to understand why.

This is Secret Basement Gelato.

Cold. Bold. Unstoppable.