The brand
A 50-year-old name with a modern problem
Gardenia is one of Brunei’s most recognisable bakery brands, on shelves since 1972. In early 2026, alongside a product-line rebrand, the team set out to fix something that had quietly held their marketing back for years: they didn’t actually know what was working.
The challenge
The guessing game
Like most in-house teams, Gardenia’s marketing ran on instinct and weekly firefighting. Every week meant another meeting to decide what to post next, with no real read on whether any of it was landing. Traditional research fell flat — one survey push to 5,000 people came back with just 60 responses. And the constant pull to chase whatever was trending risked diluting a brand built over five decades.
Before Mixplate, it was a guessing game. We didn’t know if we were going right or wrong. Now there’s no more guessing.
What changed
A strategy grounded in what actually works
With Mixplate, Gardenia’s team got a strategy grounded in what was actually working in their niche — not hunches. Mixplate analysed competitive and format performance, turned it into a clear content plan, and handled the heavy lifting of ideation and production so the team could ship consistently without rebuilding the plan from scratch each week.
Before, every week we needed a meeting — what’s next, what to put on the calendar. Now our small operations team doesn’t have to think about it. We just focus on operations and sales.
Crucially, this wasn’t about chasing virality for its own sake. It was about reach and engagement that stayed on-brand.
Mixplate helped us understand marketing at a deeper level, so we choose the right strategy — not just “let’s keep trying to go viral.” Going viral doesn’t necessarily translate into sales, and trend-chasing can tank a brand’s reputation. We wanted real reach and engagement that’s on-brand.
The results
From ~200 views to viral hits
The shift showed up fastest on TikTok. Gardenia’s videos had been averaging around 200 views. After re-tooling their content strategy, typical videos began landing in the low thousands — 2,000 to 7,000 views — a 10–20× improvement, with breakout videos reaching 15,000, 20,000, and one as high as 68,000 views (you can see the spread in the grid above).
On Instagram, average engagement per post climbed from roughly 19 to 31 — a 62% lift — and the team’s standout carousel drew nearly 25× the account’s typical post engagement. The owner reported revenue up around 24% over the period, and just as importantly, a new confidence that the strategy was sound.
Our videos went from around 200 views to viral hits, and our followers grew with it. We used to send out 5,000 surveys and get 60 responses — the engagement on our posts now tells us more than that ever did.
The result is a marketing operation that no longer guesses — and a team that spends its energy on the business, not on wondering what to post.