Gooseberry Patch was founded in 1984 by Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin, who were neighbors. Before starting their catalog business Martin was a first-grade teacher, and Hutchins was a flight attendant.[1]
Gooseberry Patch encourages customers to submit recipes, some of which are selected for inclusion in Gooseberry Patch recipe books.[2] Since 1992, over 200 cookbooks have been published with nearly 9.0 million sold.[3] Crowd sourcing or peer production, both relatively new terms, have been an integral part of the cookbook production since 1992.
January 1, 2010 new financial partners, who are committed to the brand's growth, joined with the existing creative team. As a first step in this new growth strategy, Gooseberry Patch aggressively engaged in social media during late 2009. Not surprisingly, the loyal Gooseberry Patch fans responded enthusiastically. Consider the following milestones achieved:
Nearly 94,000 actively engaged Facebook fans - ranking in the top 4% of corporate Facebook pages; 221,000 views of their YouTube channel [7] - featuring both product demos & behind-the-scenes videos; over 8,000 followers on Twitter - engaging in lively interaction daily; averaging over 980 daily page views on their blog - publishing new stories 5 to 7 times weekly; nearly 374,000 reads on their Scribd page [8], and nearly 390,000 current email subscribers - communicating weekly. Their first Apple App [4] was made available in early 2011 to allow users to stay connected.
To satisfy the growing customer demand, Gooseberry Patch is expanding the availability of their cookbooks through multiple channel partners. A few of these partners include National Book Network,[5] Notions Marketing Corporation[6] and Chain Sales Marketing.[7] In order to focus on cookbook publishing and reduce any potential channel conflict with retail partners, the Gooseberry Patch mail-order catalog has been discontinued.
Gooseberry Patch has been recognized as a national best-selling publisher by Nielsen BookScan, who compiles their list based on raw numbers of books sold nationally. Of the over 240 titles in this series, three were singled out by Nielsen BookScan [8] in Summer '10: Super-Fast Slow Cooking[9] (ISBN 978-1-933494-55-5), Summer in the Country (ISBN 978-1-933494-68-5) and Farmhouse Kitchen (ISBN 978-1-933494-82-1).
Gooseberry Patch launched their first eBook titles in the Fall of 2010 now having nearly 60 titles on Amazon.com [10], B&N.com[11], Sony's Reader Store [12], Apple iBook Store, and Borders.com. There have been approximately 1.8 million eBook downloads in the first 14 months.
Following the changes to the business, 25 full-time people are employed in the areas of Wholesale Sales, Creative, Information Technology and Administration. Offices are located in Columbus, Ohio.[13]