While going viral for the right reasons can be great for a brand, if you’re a small business and in the process of establishing yourself – it can be a recipe for disaster. Even worse, if you’re not hoping to establish yourself at all and are simply doing a bit of business through a hobby, getting a deluge of comments and interest can be overwhelming.

This was the case for Cupcakes By SJ, a London bakery which had been uploading pictures of its recent cakes to Facebook as usual. Only this time round, the photo of a Lego-inspired wedding cake created for the owner’s cousin soon went viral, with over 140,000 likes and 69,000 shares in a matter of days. The owner was soon inundated with requests and interests – so many so, that they were swamped quite quickly.

A bakery spokesperson returned to the social media site to plead with potential customers to pause to allow them to deal with the influx of orders.

“As an answer to most people’s questions, I am based in SE London and unable to deliver outside of this area,” they wrote. 

“We are a family who love to bake and create cakes for family, friends and friends of friends. We do not have a shop or a website or any other form of pictures other than those on this page, which was created at the requests of friends purely to see what we’d been creating.”

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The bakery added that “while all requests are seriously considered, I had no idea one picture would create the reaction and influx that it has in the last two days, and am sorry that many requests are not possible to fulfil.”

The owner admitted the response was staggering and thanked those interested or simply appreciative “from the bottom of my heart for your kind comments, likes and shares, it is completely mind-blowing and left my parents and I lost for words”.

Admirers came from all across the globe – with some Facebook users bemoaning ITS location – comments included “too bad you are not near me in Los Angeles” and “Come to Australia!”

The success of the cake served as another reminder of Lego’s resurgence. Its popularity was on the wane with a decade-long slump, but the brand has reestablished itself of late – boosted by its surprise hit film The Lego Movie which was a $468m global success. In 2014 it overtook Mattel to become the biggest toy manufacturer in the world. It has even been dubbed “the Apple of toys”.

By Rebecca Smith