Spring & Fall 2025 Sweet As Waffles
Marketing Intern
The Internship
While attending Western Washington University, I had the opportunity to work at a local restaurant, “Sweet As Waffles”, as the marketing intern from March 2025 to December 2025, and was part of the team for about 10 months. Throughout my time as an intern, I gained valuable experience in various marketing channels, including digital marketing, Social Media Management, and traditional marketing strategy and implementation. Check out my Spring 2025 & Fall 2025 internship portfolios!
Sweet As Waffles 2025 Recap Reel
After working as the marketing intern for 10 months from March – December 2025, I was able to showcase my work experience at the waffle shop, where I curated the content from past marketing promotion work and edited the video to be fast-paced, exciting, and fun!
What I Learned
Social Media Management
Sweet As Waffles has a large following of around 33k followers, so social media development was an important part of my internship. Here, I worked with the owner and some staff members to create engaging content at all stages of the marketing funnel to ensure that we captured all kinds of different audiences. Over my time in the internship, I got to work on over 60 different social media posts on both Instagram and TikTok, which resulted in 1.5 million views across multiple platforms. During our process, I worked on writing scripts for video content, shooting the video content, and then editing the video content via Canva video editor. All of this experience has taught me how to create social media strategies and media from start to finish.
Sweet As Waffles Instagram:
Physical & Digital Marketing Graphics
During my internship, I got the opportunity to create marketing graphics for physical and digital applications. I made these graphics using the Canva Business Suite, where I had access to the Sweet As Waffles brand kit. The brand kit is extremely helpful for making “on-brand” content because it houses digital assets like fonts, colors, and brand characters. Some graphics I made for the waffle shop include informational content about new products, shelf indicators for products, Instagram posts promoting limited-time items, and even a billboard for the Sweet As KEI truck.
Digital Marketing
I got hands-on experience doing website development, where I worked on SEO and content marketing to improve our online presence. I was able to apply my web development certification skills to edit and create website copy via the CMS (Content Management System) that Sweet As Waffles uses, Squarespace. After using Google Search Console, I achieved a 15% lift in site visits.
Professional Photography
During my internship, I got to take part in a bunch of photoshoots for various marketing purposes. Whether we were launching a new product or campaign, capturing funny moments, or previewing merchandise, we needed high-quality images. We had a professional photographer (Angie) that we worked with, which was cool to learn how to coordinate and implement our marketing campaign throughout the shoot and into the content. I also got to get behind the camera, where i learned how to operate a professional camera for marketing campaigns!
Merchandise Management
As the Marketing Intern, it was my job to make sure the merch section was stocked with new hats, t-shirts, stickers, pins, prints, and much more. The waffle shop believed in creating merch people actually want to wear. We made it a point to select high-quality blanks online and work with local tailors, embroiderers, and screen printers to ensure we had the best possible product while supporting other local businesses. I helped ideate and create new designs, coordinated with our vendors to ensure a smooth outcome, tagged and priced each product, and created spreadsheets to track and calculate revenue and profits. One important lesson I learned with merchandise and printing is to get a “print proof” before telling the vendor to print your products. Mistakes and mishaps often fall in between the cracks, and getting a test before making an expensive mistake is key.
Traditional Marketing
At Sweet As Waffles, I worked on event projects and community engagement! Some events and engagement campaigns I worked on include Ski to Sea race coordination, Lake Whatcom Triathlon, WWU info fair tabling, WWU first night out tabling, and Mount Baker Ski Area Film festival. At these events, I learned how to promote our brand in person and connect with our local community to drive more traffic into our store. After I promoted our shop at the WWU’s first night out tabling event, where we connected with the new students and handed out coupons and free merchandise, which resulted in our shop having its busiest and most profitable night ever!
