Twelve Loaves, Then One On Me

I have started and quietly killed a few things at this bakery over the years. A subscription. A club. Things that made sense on paper and then turned into a support job I was not equipped to do.

The pattern was always the same. I would build something that needed customers to remember a password, or manage a plan, or email me to change an address on a Tuesday. And then people would email me, on a Tuesday, and I would be shaping dough, and I would get back to them Saturday. That is not a good experience. That is me wasting somebody’s time politely.

So when I finally built a rewards program, the whole design started from a single rule: it cannot require anything from you.

How it works

Buy twelve things, get the thirteenth loaf is free. That is it. Baker’s Dozen goes to you.

Anything priced at eleven dollars or more fills one spot, and every item counts separately, so two loaves in one order fills two spots. There is no signup, no account, no app, and no card to lose in your wallet. It runs on the email address you already check out with, which means it works for guest checkout and it works whether you order every week or twice a year.

Your card fills up as you go, and there is a link at the bottom of every order email that opens it. Nothing to log into.

The parts I deliberately left out

No expiry. Once you have earned a loaf, it waits. I am not going to send you an email telling you that your reward expires in seven days, because that is not a thank you, that is a countdown clock with a bow on it.

No tiers. There is no gold level. You are a person who buys bread from me.

No points that mean nothing. Points systems exist mostly so the exchange rate can be adjusted later. One item, one spot, ten spots, one loaf. You can hold the entire thing in your head.

The honest bits

Two things worth saying out loud, because I would rather you hear them from me.

Everyone starts at zero, including people who have been buying bread from me since 2020. I thought hard about backdating it. I decided a clean start was simpler to explain and fairer to whoever is buying their first loaf this Friday. If you have been here since the beginning, thank you, genuinely, and you are going to get there fast.

And the free loaf is one of the everyday breads: rustic sourdough, Coyote, milk bread, cinnamon swirl milk bread or English muffins. Focaccia and the monthly special count toward your card, but they are not on the free list, purely because they sell out first and I did not want to promise you something I had already run out of by Wednesday.

Why bother

If I had started this bakery for the money I would have quit six years ago, and Billy Bread is only five years and eleven months old, so you can do that math yourself.

What I actually got out of it was a neighborhood. Regulars who turned into friends. Kids around here who have decided Friday is a holiday. I wanted to say thank you for that, and there is exactly one currency I have.

The full details are here, and it is already counting, so if you have ordered recently you are further along than you think. The menu is here.