Lilac is an independent cafe in Kentish Town. Creative food, genuine personality, a loyal neighbourhood following. The kind of place where people come back because they want to, not because they’ve been retargeted.

But outside the four walls, Lilac had no way of speaking to any of them.

No website. No email database. No CRM. No mailing list. When something new launched or an event needed filling, the only option was to post on Instagram and hope the right people saw it. For an independent cafe without a marketing budget, that’s not a strategy. It’s a coin toss.

The owner wanted to build something that actually connected the cafe with the people who already cared about it. Not followers. Customers. The ones who come in every week, order the specials, and tell their mates.

We built a community WhatsApp group as Lilac’s first direct-to-customer channel. A simple, low-friction way to give regulars something they couldn’t get anywhere else: early access, exclusive launches, and a genuine sense of being part of something.

Within the first month, the group had 53 members. Not bought, not incentivised. Just people who wanted to be closer to a cafe they already loved.

The first thing we shared was an exclusive first look at a new cookie before it went on the public menu. Ten redemptions from the group alone.

Then came the real test. A supper club: five courses, £50 a head, 20 covers. We posted it to the community group first. Sixteen tickets sold before it even went to wider social media. The remaining four were picked up in store. It never needed promoting anywhere else.

That’s £800 in revenue from a channel that didn’t exist five weeks earlier. No ad spend. No boosted posts. Just a direct line to the right people.

Alongside the community build, we took over Lilac’s Instagram. In the three months before GoodFolks, the account was averaging around 5,000 views a month. In our first month, that jumped to 17,000. In month two, over 20,000. A single post featuring Lilac’s ube cheesecake hit 23,700 in reach, with 536 likes and 299 saves.

But the Instagram growth isn’t the headline. It’s what happened when we gave Lilac a way to speak directly to the people who already loved them. That’s the bit that drove real revenue.