Hello, welcome to the latest episode, the winning Shopify
podcast and me, your host, Nick Truman.
It's so good that you guys are watching this and I'm delighted
to be joined by two amazing founders of a business that I've
tasted myself, which is How I Met these guys.
We use them for our corporate Christmas gifting to all of our
clients and partners back at Christmas.
So if you didn't receive 1, we can have a chat afterwards.
Means you're on the naughty list.
But anyways, Emily and Annabelle are from Qatar and Squid, you
guys are the founders. Welcome to the show, how are
you? Great.
Thank you. Thanks.
For having us. Well, it's so good to have you
both here and I'm super excited for today's episode.
But I'm going to dive straight in with the big stat, what
people have seen in the title of this as well.
How do you achieve 500% e-commerce growth in just 12
months? I think it's about having
opportunity, taking that opportunity and being ready for
it. So before the growth we we were
platformed on to Shopify and it allowed us to when the demand
came to be able to process and develop the orders and see the
analytics and what we're selling.
And then what worked, we kind of basically double downed on and
kept working on those products and making them more appealing
for the customer. Also fulfillment, no sleep.
That's my first question. Like how on earth, because you
guys bake products we do. How on earth did you bake so
many brownies so quickly as things like, was it, was it an
overnight like bam, we've got thousands of orders or was it
kind of like week by week and we just keep scaling that process?
Yeah, it was a week by week, one week it was doubled and then it
was double again and then it was double again.
And then we're like, is this going to continue?
Yes, it's continuing. OK, Right.
So let's find a few more people to help us to bake and pack.
And so it sort of escalated like that.
But I think during that time I slept maybe 21 hour of the 24
hours in the day because, you know, we had a conversation and
we were like, we don't know if this is going to continue and we
need to take the opportunity and learn and develop more products.
So that's what we basically focused on.
Amazing, amazing. And from a fulfilment point of
view, like how did you get, like you mentioned, just grabbing
people almost on the street, like can you pick and pack stuff
for us? How do you, how did you scale up
the baking process of that? Like surely you've got recipes,
there's certain ways you want to bake products, They need to be
packaged. You got to order packaging.
Did you have everything ready to go as like a we got a 24 hour
turn around or The nervous laugh says no.
Absolutely not. Like when, when that growth
comes, it's not, you know, you can't, I think you can't predict
that growth as as as much as people think they're like, oh,
I'm going to do this and then we're going to grow like 100
percent, 200 percent, 3%. I don't think it quite works
that way. There's obviously opportunity
and brand recognition which just comes with plugging away,
working your brand. Obviously before that growth,
we'd been around for three years, 3-4 years.
So we had our brand name and, and because we had so much good
SEO with our products and one of the hero products was afternoon
tea at home, which was a hero product of that sort of 18
months to two year period that kind of lent itself to us sort
of growing. But no, you, you, you absolutely
can't go. OK, well, I'm just going to hold
this packaging in hope that we're going to grow 500%.
So you know, packaging or going to our supplies, ordering more
packaging, getting it in time was an absolute nightmare.
Did you ever have to compromise at any point?
Because that's the thing I hear is like, we're just going to
have to use brown boxes because. White boxes.
White because we don't do. Brown Brown was hypothetical
white. Boxes white.
We did use white boxes with really nice, you know, branded
stickers that we could turn around quickly.
But obviously very quickly we understood that the customer
wanted the orange box. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, we've got one here, let's open it.
I mean, you guys made me so hungry when you walked in with a
goodie bag because Byron who's sitting the other side of the
glass was saying like we're going to get any goodies.
But guys, I ordered a slightly bigger box than this, but I
ordered a box of these for our clients at Christmas.
I don't know if I don't even get a zoom in on this, but they're
absolutely delicious. Even opening them, the smell, if
you're right, the packaging is incredible.
I mean, no wonder your SEO is good.
It's because people see that. I think one of the reasons we
bought from you initially, having no connection to you guys
that never spoke to you, never met you.
It was only after that we got talking.
But I saw the packaging and thought as a business, I want my
clients and partners to open this and go, wow, that is so
spec, which is which is our agency.
Like so spec is bright. You know, they're kind of like
bang, here's a really cool thing, Merry Christmas and also
brownies at Christmas. It's not like, yeah, they don't
go hand in hand traditionally, but like everyone was like,
that's such a good shout. And you kind of have like one or
one or two a day. And I spent Christmas and
vegans. So this was perfect for me, just
snacking away. How did you come up with the
branding and the packaging and how much did that evolve?
How much with it was just from the get go?
Let's invest in it before we sort of start selling products.
Yeah, so I think we decided day one it was going to be a brand,
not just like Anibal and Emily's Bakery, which could be, you
know, absolutely we could call it Anibal and Emily's Bakery.
We decided not to. And and the the logo, original
logo was meanings behind why we've we set the business up,
Yeah. So we we had a designer friend
hand draw every single icon and it all meant something to us.
So it all meant something to the brand, personal to us.
And we love the the logo, so many people told us so many
times that it was too fancy and you needed to make it cleaner,
you need to be less busy. We were like, no, This Is Us, we
really believe in this. So our branding comes from
almost a day one of what do we want our brand to look like and
what does it mean to us? So everything that you see now
in our packaging we have in house designers and it all stems
from our original design ethos. And it's disruptive.
So actually the fact you said no to all those things, I love that
it's been because disruptive brands are ones that you
remember. No, there's kind of 2 ends of
the product spectrum. I always see like 1 is like, I
want the thing that's as quiet. Like sometimes with people's
clothing, it's like, I want as quiet as possible.
I just want to kind of blend in here or, you know, I'm new.
I don't want to have imposter syndrome type thing.
Or it's like a no. I just want everyone going like,
whoa, whether it's good or bad, whoa, it's still a wow.
It's like a that that makes a difference.
And so I think, I mean, the branding's incredible.
We've got some more products we'll talk about in a minute as
well. But I mean having everything
hand drawn is, is that someone you still talk to?
Do you still evolve the brand with that?
Do you still develop more packaging with them?
Yeah, we take the essence of what we built at the beginning
and we've moved the brand and the logo and the look of it
along some of it simplified so that it translates into an
orange and white box because obviously you want a multi
coloured box costs like we learn very quickly, multi coloureds
costs a lot of money, more colours, more money.
So we we kind of took the ethos of what we have and then we sort
of use it for different purposes.
So like obviously on site we'll be using more colour.
In brand packaging, we stick to the orange and the white.
So yeah, we have like brand identity across all of our touch
points, but in different ways. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
But also I think because there's only two colours in the
packaging, the products then really sing.
And that's one of the biggest things I think especially with
food, it's got to look nice. The food, it can't be beautiful
packaging and then a horrible dry muffin inside or something,
you know? I mean, you guys are both
laughing and you must have had some disasters in there in the
product lines. Are there any, I know this
wasn't like questions, but just now I've mentioned it, are there
any disaster moments where you guys are like, look, we just, we
can't sell that. That is disgusting.
There was a cake the animal decorated and she's like, what
do you think of it? And I was like, it literally
looks like there's a turd on top.
Like you can't was it? Oh no, I get Cesar.
Yeah, we we definitely have some baking fails like as.
You've got to. That's how you develop the good
recipes. Well, like does this look good?
No, this looks bad. Or if someone says something
like, oh, it looks like such and such and you're like, OK, I
can't Unsee that. So now I'm going to have to
change it. We don't use artificial
colouring, so it's all natural. And we've done that since day
one, since the four people were even bothered about, you know,
what they ate. And so we have to use muted
colours because you can't actually get bright colours from
nature naturally. It doesn't exist, I think.
So our packaging needs to be kind of muted and then
everything needs to be kind of well put together, otherwise it
will just look brown and white or beige if we're not careful.
Yeah, which makes a lot of sense.
I we had another guest, I'm trying to remember her name now,
but she was travelling a lot around the US, so lots of like
day flights, you know, an hour flight to a meeting an hour
back. And because of that, she can
take liquids, but she was always like, I want to brush my teeth
like when I go there meeting somebody or whatever makes fall
for really self-conscious and but I want to brush it.
So she developed this chewable toothpaste that she could use
because she could take a toothbrush, but she couldn't see
it. So she developed that.
But she told me she lost her taste entirely for several weeks
trying to develop one of the products in what used to be a
garage, her garage on the side of the house then became a
science lab. And so I love hearing stories of
like, yeah, just some things we designed tasted great, looked
awful or tasted awful but looked amazing.
But I think with the, I mean, we've been reading in our house,
the ultra process people recently and our, our food shop
now is just lots of plain vegetables and like garlic and
herbs and, and other stuff. And some of the herbs we now
grow in the kitchen and other things on the, you know, on the
side. So I think it's, it's amazing to
do stuff like that when you're almost like ahead of when people
really care about those things. I want to roll back to my first
question, though. Something must have triggered
that 500% growth. And I know what it is because
you've told me, but tell all of our listeners, what were some of
the things that triggered the move from when you had three
stores and you were selling out of those three?
I don't know if they were three bakeries or just three shop
fronts. But when you were selling out of
those, what, what changed to suddenly have this 500% growth
in a single year? What triggered it?
What was the marketing campaign, the mechanism, the the thing
that meant right revenues just going like that at the moment
and we need to keep up. Yeah.
Obviously like the timeline, so it was COVID that basically
changed our whole business model, which I think for us was
basically a 360. We were pre pandemic more
traditionally A bricks and mortar business where we had
three sites across around London.
We were on the trajectory to open an another, another one and
we had another one in the pipeline.
We had a big one, we had a huge one.
It was huge so. You might have dodged a bullet
then. We yeah.
So we were in legals. We were in legals at the time
and then we, we just looked at each other and went, this
doesn't feel right. Our gangs said it wasn't right,
it wasn't right. And so we said no to it.
So we'd obviously thrown quite a few thousand away.
And I think maybe 3 or 4 weeks later then obviously it was
announced that COVID, COVID was coming to the UK and we're not
sure what's happening. And we, you know, we, we just
saw this decline in people coming and.
Especially with food as well. Like, yeah.
Exactly. And during that time and before
that, people weren't really buying cakes and products online
for home delivery. They were picking them up from
store. And those were the kind of
habits that people. Because I guess people's
mindsets, you want it fresh, you want the experience.
Absolutely. You'll go and collect.
It you're going to go collect it or you know, we would get like
people come in and be like, can I have a cake?
And we're like, sure. It's like we go and make that
for me now and I'm like OK, yeah.
And so you know, it was that kind of mentality.
But we had, as I said, launched a brand new site maybe three or
four months before that point. Perfect timing and we were on
our way to developing it. But obviously with bricks and
mortar business, it does take a lot of management time and.
It wasn't a priority because people weren't buying online for
home delivery. They were buying online to pick
up in store. So they could easily walk in
store and just buy on the day because we would have a number,
a certain amount of stock. So it wasn't a priority for us.
So I just remember the day where we said, OK, that's it.
We have to close all the stores, conserve cash.
And we had a meeting in my kitchen and we go, what do we do
now? And so we say, well, we need to
fight, we need to do something. What products do we have that
are ready to go that can just go straight online?
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And I took the products, the photos with my phone and.
Those are great now though, I think people underestimate how
much amazing footage and photography you can get with a
phone with the right light. Well, I've still got the
pictures and they're quite comfortable.
They are quite dodgy. Quite dodgy.
I said can't, but being able to do stuff like that and actually
tell your customers some of that story like we're baking, we're
baking from home or we're a dark kitchen at the moment because
the the shop front's shut. It's.
Yeah. So we, I mean it was our 1
e-commerce person, me and a couple of us and a couple of
others and we just developed, shot it, put it online and
that's how it started. And then we saw some traction
from it. So we kept doing it again and
again and just kept refining the products that were working so
that we could get the nationwide reach.
And we were the first people to do an afternoon tea at home.
We also developed. I remember that because you rang
me. You're like, we need to get
afternoon tea online, How are we going to do it?
It's got fresh cream in it, potty cream.
And I was like. Chat GBC yeah.
Actually it wasn't even chat GBC, it was Google.
It was like, yeah, it was pre chat.
So you had to use, you had to use your brain, actually use
your brain as like I think we might be able to get clotted
cream frozen from the big, the big supplier.
Let's go and see if we can do it.
Yeah. And that will.
Develop some packaging that fit that it fits it in like it's.
Safe keep it safe keep. It safe how are we going to pack
it? How's it not going to move We
obviously we had we learnt so much about stuff not arriving in
perfect condition jam because our jam has 50% less sugar it
goes mouldy quicker. So we had to learn and develop
those kinds of like practical things so that our brand with
what people loved and knew us for got translated into the
nationwide product because you could easily just put any old
whatever inside it. But that's obviously we would
know that our customers wouldn't, they would know it
wouldn't wasn't us. So that was a real learning
curve over a very long and but short period of time, like what
felt like a lifetime. Like if I think back to it,
actually was a very, very short period of time.
Like it was a case of taking what people loved about what we
did, what we were successful at, and bringing it to their door
without your customer knowing that maybe it isn't exactly the
same product because he had to slightly re engineer it, but not
in a way that made it feel any different.
So it was getting that in store experience to people at home.
And I, I remember so many businesses just like, I guess
the word they use in the USA lot and lots, lots of you guys would
use is pivot people pivoting into something completely new.
Even the local brewery, they like, they literally knocked a
building down so that they could create a drive through.
And because of COVID, you won't have any physical contact.
So they had a card machine on a long stick.
And I, I was, I actually even asked them when I was like,
because like, what kind of stick is that?
And they were like, oh, my dad's a window cleaner and he can't go
and clean people's windows right now because you're not let out.
So you lent me the stick and I've just like gaffer taped the
card machine on the end. And I just asked how they would
just sold them one flagship beer.
How many crates of it you want? And you click a button to open
your boot for them. They put it in the boot with
gloves and a mask and everything shut the boot and you scan your
card and off you go. And they were just a queue as
far as the eye can say. I remember when McDonald's first
opened. I'm personally not a customer
McDonald's, but I was just fascinated seeing the like
looking at Google Maps of the traffic, picking every drive
through and it's like, honey, we can go out where McDonald's like
let's go just because you could go somewhere, right.
The fact that I mean, you guys, I think whether it's luck, gut
feel or just pre planning and and doing it well, the fact you
just launched a new site, we got so many phone calls and agency
going like coverts here is like we know and it's like we need to
go direct to consumer. Like all the hotels are shut and
we sell tea to hotels and cafes. And yeah, we do a little bit
online, but we need to like optimize that thing or some
brand saying we sell in shops, we sell to read, we distribute
out to retailers and like saying before we hit record like they
sell in shops. And so actually all the shops
are shut. So we need to have a direct to
consumer brand and we need one now and we need to get get this
off the ground quickly. Some of our retails are still
selling online, but that's 20% of what they do.
So we're losing 80% of our trade here.
And we've got a warehouse full of stuff that we need to
distribute. So I think it's amazing how you
guys were in the almost like the right position to make best use
of it before your competitors could almost react.
Did did you see a point where it kind of tailed off or has it
just continued since? No.
I mean we haven't where we understand from people we talked
to, they've seen they see a peak and then they see their revenue
decline actually would not seen the same.
So what we have tried to do over the last five years is hone in
on who we are now as a brand, what do we stand for as a brand
and how we're going to move forward and, and the products
that we develop going forward as well.
And we've just kept pushing the boundaries of what what we're
able to deliver nationwide because that's what people want.
So we listen to what our customers want and then try and
make that happen. Yeah, we really kind of deep
dived into why people buy from us.
So when we were bricks and mortar, it's a very traditional
setup. People would buy cake, brownies,
our biskies, whatever for an event at the office to take home
for an event. And then our learning through
through, you know, our growth period was that actually people
are buying to gift to somebody else.
And we've managed to transform what is like a cottage industry
of baking into gifting, which is traditionally held by chocolate
companies or florists, florists or cards.
So we've really worked into that and actually realised that
actually what our customers want is they want an amazing gift
from from us to be sent to the front door of somebody that they
love or somebody they're trying to win business of or say thank
you to. And it's a land and it's give
the right message, not feel too. Populent but feel thoughtful
because they're sending. Out a Rolex or something is it?
Exactly right. It's an appropriate gift for an
appropriate moment. Yeah, I think when you send
brownies or something beautiful but also edible that is
delicious, I think you sort of can't go wrong really with that
because yeah, you know, you are satiating the the stomach as
well as like you're like visually and and then.
I'm struggling with the smell of these.
I might close. You should come.
You should. Come to the bakery when it's
brownie When it's brownie time and like you don't like the.
Penguins at. The Yeah, you like.
My daughter loves that. You open the the door and
literally just, it's just chocolate, that's what.
It's called chocolate. Yeah.
I walk in supermarkets and I March to the bakery because, you
know, they pump the fans of, like, the fresh breads.
I'm like, right, loaf of breads. And then like, what does that
come in here for? Yeah, I mean, I think your
journey's amazing and but it's not all been plain sailing, has
it? You mentioned the bleak week.
I decided to call it that, The bleak Week.
Tell me more about the bleak Week.
One of your biggest wholesale customers.
So we had been trading for about 18 months.
I want to stay here 12 months, 12 months.
And, you know, like most start-ups, we've been taken on
by two major retailers, very prestigious retailers in the UK.
We were in store for both of them.
And everyone was like, Oh my God, this is amazing, this is
amazing. You're, you know, you're there,
you've made it. And unfortunately those
retailers like to always find the next best thing.
And in one week we had our contract called for both of
them. And we didn't have any outlets
because we had started off at market stores and then gone
straight into wholesaling with these retailers.
But we had a team and we had premises.
So we had a team of people who trusted us with their
livelihoods. Yeah, Yeah.
And we just thought we sat down together that day.
I mean, it was miserable. We were miserable.
It was it was it. There were tears.
A lot. At least you had each other.
I'm a solo. I'm a solo owner of the
business. I've had some dark days and like
my wife tries but she just doesn't.
I I don't. Know yeah what she goes through
at work. I struggled to sympathise when
you kind of have empty. I get it, yeah.
And so we were just like, what are we gonna do?
Like, what do we do? Do we give up?
Because it's always something
that goes through your mind, doesn't?
It's the first thing it's like, we'll stuff that then what's the
easiest thing to do? Like go go on read.co.uk and
find another job, right just. Yeah.
Are we going to give up on this? And we just said, you know what,
we're not ready to give up. Yeah, we didn't.
We didn't feel that it was right.
I don't think we felt that it was fair.
And actually our buyer from one of the retailers said to us,
what you guys need is your own space with your branding
everywhere. So your branding is so strong,
but I can't give you the space in my store because you're not a
big enough brand to warrant that.
And we said, OK, we thought about that and we had a little
bit of money left in savings, I mean, not much at all.
And we felt, do you know what stuff here?
Let's just blow the last of the money.
What is that going to be at this point?
Exactly? We just thought at this point,
let's just throw the lot. Let's just throw the last bit of
cash we've got. And so we did and we found a
little pop up site in Soho. It was so expensive back there
and people thought we were paying like £50 a day for it,
but it was like 200. It was like £200 a day and back
that back in the day was, was and it and it was, it was an
absolute hole. It was really awful and we had
to like it was an ex walk to walk so we had to like scrape
the walls with. The grease, it was like the
grease of it. You know, we didn't have any
money to like invite anybody to do anything, so we did.
It oh, I'm painting walls in the office as soon as I get back
from my next trip next week. Like I'm literally getting a
roller out and I'll be. Painting.
Oh, I've been there, I've done it.
I enjoy. Painting good.
I've got so you've got this pop up, you've got this.
Pop up and we turned it round in two weeks.
We beg borrowed. We beg borrowed like from a a
coffee, you know, a coffee machine like it was like a
bashed up coffee machine from Soho House that he had.
And I was like, I need it. I don't care.
I'll get a nice one when I've made some money.
And so I remember we we had it nearly ready, but then the
coffee machine like starts leaking.
I was like, I'm not ready to open.
But people just kept coming in and we are you open yet?
You open yet? You open yet?
And I was like, do you know what?
Fuck it, let's just go. And so we opened the door and
that was. And that was it.
We had a few hours. Of coffee's not here like.
There was, there was no coffee, but there was, there were 14
seats and they were like picnic tables which we'd got from IKEA.
That's so quirky though, Like how the amount of, sorry to
interrupt, but the amount of stores I see open now and I'm
like, it's like how many chicken shops are there in London and
they're all just cut and paste. They look, they all look great
for the first two or three years and they become grimy.
And eventually someone else will come and renovate it and change
it from red and green to blue and yellow.
And so that's quirky though. Surely that's part of why it
worked was again like your brain is disruptive.
It's different. It was so makeshift.
We'd yeah. I mean, we'd painted, hand
painted. The hands painted the walls with
our with our logo story and then people just come in and they
kept queuing. And they kept fighting for seats
and they kept. Fighting for seats and I had to
keep going driving back to our bakery where we make everything,
make it and then bring it back so I and.
That's like congestion charge money and like driving through
London and yeah, gosh. Oh no, we did all the deliveries
ourselves, drive the van ourselves.
I love driving the van. I love.
Oh, I hate it. Oh.
I drove, we moved office last Friday and someone's like, do
you want me to? No, I'm driving the van.
No, I, I did. Is anyone else?
In short, no. Driving.
The van love it. Yeah.
So you know, we did, we did all of that and we then had made
enough money that we could invest it into a bigger store,
the a proper store that we we could then really use to to
grow. And that is the flagship store
that we still have today. Nice.
And that's Brewer St. isn't. It Brewer St.
Yeah. Nice, nice.
And I think, I mean, Byron said he walked past it the other day
as well. And I I think literally the next
day I was in town. So I took a slight detour.
And again, it's it's bright orange.
Yeah, it looks so nice. But I mean, even with the pop up
shop, people must love the product.
I mean, that is if you ever needed proof of concept.
If you didn't even you know, not you would have got so much of
that anyway from the TV retailers.
But even if you didn't have that the proof of concept that people
are happy to sit on an IKEA picnic bench, you know,
somewhere that was, I was going to say badly pet.
I'm sure you did an amazing job, but it.
Was rough and reliable. You guys, yeah, you guys were in
a hurry. Like, you just need to open that
door. People are knocking on it.
Just let them buy stuff. Or Penguin.
You know, back then there was no Deliveroo.
So we would have customers come from the city in an Uber, take
510 KS with them, take them back, take them away with them.
Yeah, yeah. So you know, we then could then
we saw OK, well there is a market for for that.
And so that side with the business grew and yeah, people
would be sending their drivers picking up I need this and the
list of this and the other. And we would be working with
creators who are huge now but were sort of up and coming.
There perfect though, grow with them.
Like we always say to, we always say to brands, choose supplies
that you're going to grow with. Don't choose the big one because
you can't afford them yet. Don't choose the tiny one
because you'll outgrow them and it's painful to move like choose
someone that's growing with you. And I think that that applies
across the board from partners to sister companies to
partnerships you do with other brands and all that sort of
stuff. We got a stat written on my
notes, though. 4 million brownie pieces.
Yeah, what's this? Is that is that to date?
Not today, no. Just in one year.
One year 4 million the. Last piece, so 2025.
OK. So my big question then is, I
know I asked about this earlier when you had that exponential
growth through COVID, how on earth do you bake 4 million
brown? And that's just brownies, isn't
it? That's just brownies, the whole
range of the products. How on earth do you keep up a
supply chain like that? And I guess the other question I
really want to ask that I've never really asked brands before
is with a few guys, it's baking rather than kind of traditional
manufacturing of like a ice or clothing or something.
But how do you guys balance the like having enough equipment and
staff to run that? But also like there's always
that kind of risk and gamble factor, isn't there?
Of like what if the sales come down, there'll be there'll be
weeks where you just have a slow week, there's nothing you can
do. How do you how do you manage
that and how have you built that?
What's the supply process actually look like from
ingredients through to everything else?
Hand overs operations. Well, you start with the huff.
I love that. With the volume that we do, we
have any volume of the ingredients that we have, we
have no choice but to actually to protect our pricing become
like futures traders in various commodities, so cocoa,
chocolate, butter, sugar. Sugar.
Flour, flour because we use so hungry again, tons and tons and
tons of it. So in that respect, we just have
to forecast. We use a lot of tech, we use our
brains, we look at history, we look at trading environments, we
look at everything that's going on to forecast as best we can,
and we know where the ups and downs are generally going to
come. Sometimes you get surprises,
sometimes you don't. In terms of actually
manufacturing, we always have to have a little bit of capacity
because we always want to be at that point of being ready.
There's a spike, there's a spike.
And you know, having sort of done that growth and being
prepared but not exactly operationally ready for a spike,
which was so on, you know, it was just, it was, it was mad.
We want to have the ability to be able to flex up if we need
to. We make everything by hand.
We have a little bit of machinery to help with some of
the heavy lifting, but it's not long lines.
Some people have got these brownie lines and they're just
like, it's like a whole side of a room and the mix goes, gets
mixed and then it gets put through and then it comes out
cut the other side. We don't have that kind of
machinery there. Used to be a doughnut machine on
Brighton Beach. I used to go two years ago, my
wife, when we were she was down at uni and we were dating and it
literally had that like they just like the dough got squirted
out of a machine. It went on a conveyor belt and
it went through the like, you know, it was, it was fried.
I guess it's yeah. Fried in the world, yeah.
Bubbles. Yeah, it goes through the fry
bit, it comes out and then it flips itself onto some sugar and
then the guy at the end just kind of chucks him in a bag.
It sounds like that sounds like what a lot of your competitors
are doing is just. That conveyor belt they are,
they do have these conveyor belts, so.
What's the advantage of doing it by hand?
And it's probably a really simple question, but I'm not a
Baker. It's, I mean, it's part of our
ethos is, is to have that hand made in London.
Do you ever find that in your warehouse you have dead stock,
You can't sell it, no one wants to buy it, and you can't get a
refund on it. Or alternatively, you're missing
inventory in your warehouse that you need, you've got sales
coming in and you're low on stock and you haven't ordered
more stock. In time, all these things hit
profit. And I've been there.
I've run my own Shopify store and had exactly that problem,
but we've partnered up with Inventory Planner who have the
most incredible app to help you manage that and forecast exactly
what products, what skews even down to what colour of product
you need to order in advance to make sure stock levels remain
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Yeah, I think handmade is there is a there's a touch and an
element to baking that you can't necessarily get with machine and
then the hand finishing like to get the kind of decoration on
top of it to visually look great.
You can never get that with machine.
Yeah, you can always telltale when something's made by a
machine because it's obviously very uniform.
Very, very. Perfect.
You know, our, like Emily said, our ethos is very much that we
are handmade and that you can see the imperfections of people
because it's a craft, you know? You know, the added value that
we give our customers is the fact that it's made with love
and care from our team and not made with a machine.
Otherwise you could go somewhere else, right?
And I guess with baking as well, like you get air bubbles and
other stuff, there's loads of unpredictable things that if you
did the same thing 1000 times, you get 1000 different outcomes.
But but also like, I know a lot of competitors, well, not even
competitors. I just know a lot of baking
businesses have gone under and why?
Because I've taken their staff like after their inmate, we've
done it, we've taken their staff on and I and I quizzed them and
I asked them like what was going on?
Because, you know, obviously there's always something to
learn about bigger businesses than us and the reason they went
under. And she said it's because the
machinery produced the product and it was always very wasteful.
So 50% of everything they made for the machine went in the bin
and they were supplying big supermarkets and things.
That's obviously then their margin output wasn't great.
So where we make it in small batches, if there is an issue
with an ingredient or something like that, we don't have that
huge wastage. We shouldn't have any wastage
anyway because we make to order so we don't have any wastage,
but we don't make in such a huge size that if something goes
wrong that it's going in the bin.
Yeah. You see that when you've made a
tiny quantity, you fix it, and then.
You fix it, Yeah, yeah. And you can also have better
quality control when it is smaller batches as well.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, looking at some of the
stats recently around the world of like how much food is wasted,
Yeah. To hear that a machine is a 50%
success rate, you're like, surely someone in accounts has
gone. That's a terrible idea.
Like. They didn't.
They didn't because they looked at, they looked at the cost of
labour. True and gone.
Oh well, if we have this machine we can cut all the labour costs
here because you don't, you only need one person or two people to
run it, but they actually don't think about the other issues
that might happen along the. Way and I, I mean, I've worked
with thousands of brands over the years as soon as they start
cutting costs and trying to make savings And like I'm, I'm more
experienced now. So it's, it's days, not months
or years before I finally sit like the FD or someone down
going, why are you trying to shrink the company?
And they're like, of course, we're not trying to shrink the
company. We're trying to grow it.
We're trying to scale it and then I sort of say, but you're
you're cutting costs. So if you do less marketing, you
will have less customers. Like the issue is like for you
guys, it's going to be a repeat purchase and that's going to
happen because of all the branding and everything is, is a
key part. It's flavour, it's flavour,
taste and I guess no side effects.
Yeah, I'm sure we've all had baking experience.
Why I don't bake anymore? But but it's the fact that
people have enjoyed the product so much.
It's such a high quality product or it was a gift, as you said
earlier, like a gift has that effect.
And someone says that was so delicious, like I've ordered
some for someone else now and it's like, and the brand just
spreads, spreads, spreads. And you're not going to get that
if a machine has a lower rate or it has to be higher sugar to
make it last longer because it's packaged differently.
And you guys are? Baking demands so.
We don't use any preservatives and obviously to get through the
machinery the mix has to be a certain viscosity etcetera,
which. Which means you need to
generally means, which is what we understood that you have to
add like vegetable fat to it. So, so if you're doing on mass,
mass production like through these machines, you've got to
add a lot of additives and things like Emily said to get
them in into the right consistency.
So we learn a lot of things. So there are some things our
mixes work with that we don't have to add anything to it.
It's as you would make it at home.
Otherwise we don't use the machine.
Yeah, yeah. So there's, yeah, only those two
options for us, really. Which?
It works. It's so good.
Yeah, yeah. But I always think all of this
stuff, just thinking with marketing hat on, it's like some
brands I've worked with in the past, it's like write another
phone charger or something. It's like, what are we supposed
to say about this one? There's nothing unique about it.
Everybody's already got one. They probably order it in
emergency and they're very price conscious.
And if they're ordering in an emergency, they're price
conscious because they probably just broke a cheap 1.
And so you start to, you start to look at the use cases of
products like that. And it's from a marketing point
of view. It's like I can't.
You've used to mention turd earlier so I'll use it again,
but you can't Polish a turd like it's just the product is.
Just hand rolling litter though. You can, but the smell would
still be there. So glitter and perfume.
Anyway, enough jokes about that because hear people
unsubscribing as we talk. But I think the, the point being
is you guys, because of the way you do things, you have, I mean,
the fact that you looked across the room as well, I think says a
lot actually about the fact that we can make them be partly
because of the marketing and the journey and the story.
And I love the fact you're intertwining that so much.
That's the bit the FD who's got this automated machinery doesn't
look at. They don't see the like, why
aren't people buying our products?
Ah, we must pull back our marketing budgets.
You're like, no, no, try and work out why they're not buying
the product. Have we ruined the product
itself or something broken Technically on the website, I
often find if there's a drastic drop, there's normally a very
simple quick fix to it. It's normally a technical
problem or it's like a, oh, we changed the recipe that week.
Let's just talk to customer customers like we've got.
Let's set a 48 hour deadline, talk to some customers, find out
what's going on. Yeah, we take that really
seriously. We have a customer service team
and we have regular updates on. Every every day and if there is
an issue, if there is a customer complaint which?
Inherently, there always will. Be because it's subjective.
Yeah, taste. There's a lot of moaners out.
There, there maybe Karen. They are our customers are very
particular I like to say and they know what they like and
they don't and they know what they don't like.
And every time a complaint comes in which is around quality or
taste, it gets dropped into a Slack channel and we pick it up
immediately our. Whole senior team knows.
About it, our whole senior team knows about it any we'll look at
the we'll look at the product, we'll look at the process, we'll
look at our records and obviously then we'll keep an eye
out to see if there are any other similar complaints.
But that I mean even that's just one because we are so focused in
and dialled in to making sure our customer gets what.
Yeah. But again, marketing story, like
the thing we're always looking for, I don't do e-mail, but in
our agency, but we talk to clients about it a lot.
We review the data for them and say like this is working, this
is not, this is what you should test, you know, kind of send
them off and do the next bit. And the thing we find an e-mail
all the time is why haven't you sent an e-mail for two or three
weeks? So like we're going to talk
about that, you know, like hit, you know, just sending an e-mail
out to everyone say that we've improved our production process.
Why? Well, we spoke to this customer
and they mentioned this and we were never aware of that because
we don't receive our products. So now we've listened, we've
changed this and as a, you know, we want to say thank you to
Barbara or whoever the customer was, or Karen.
I nearly mentioned Karen three times today, but all the Karens
I know are lovely. So I feel bad.
It's a very British analogy as well.
But the, but I think the point being is that marketing story,
it gives you something to talk about.
It's a, you know, it's a story to put out on social channels to
be like, you know, we we've just tweaked our packaging to look
like this. And what, what channels do you
guys use to actually engage with the customer and tell these
stories? What are the main ones?
Instagram, TikTok and e-mail are our main channels.
Yeah. Nice.
And do you find the big question I love asking Browns like you
guys where it's, it's delicious and it runs out, which means
it's not like a sofa where it's like in five years I need
another one and I'll shop at lots of retailers.
It's like, actually that was delicious.
I want that one again. And it's run out because I ate,
I mean, I ate them in like 3 days our whole box because I was
living with some vegans at Christmas.
So I had the run of the milk based brownies genius.
And I ordered them. But with a product like yours,
do you find you have to do too much or do do a lot of like,
nudging to get people to come back and purchase and remind
them, like even a little nudge? Or do you find, actually, we
just see the same person ordering again and they're
unsubscribed from e-mail and like they often do giftings,
they're not receiving it themselves, but they just keep
ordering? Some some people will order like
a really big order like 5 and a half 1000 lbs every year.
Some people will be repeat purchases that will spend.
You know, 10/15/20 times in a year because they do all the
gifting at a cut. So at my son's school, there was
a mum and she, she was like, oh, I didn't realize you, you were
in cut transcription. I said yes.
She was like, I use you for every single occasion because I
know that your, your products and your gifts will land.
And I don't have to worry about that because we, we do a lot of
gifting, not only for like Christmas, Mother's Day, Easter,
but we also do it for cultural occasions.
So Chinese New Year is big for us, obviously Eid and Ramadan,
Diwali. And we sort of lean into those
things because we we feel as ethnic minorities that we also
were not, we haven't been like represented in in mainstream and
we actually want. It's very Christian in the UK,
isn't it? Yes, we get Christmas.
We Easter. Yeah, absolutely.
And I love all those things because also celebrate them.
We get 2 slices of the pie where we where we we celebrate.
We just love to celebrate because that's just in our
culture. We love to eat, we love to
celebrate. It's all all good.
So she she, although is not of any of those face felt that she
can use our brand and gift for those reasons because she, you
know, she really feels that we represent and the the she
doesn't ever think worry or what am I going to give somebody?
Yeah, absolutely. And I guess last question I want
to land with and it's one, one of the main reasons I shop with
you guys was the packaging. It looked amazing.
I read some of the reviews and I could see exactly that the
product was going to land really well with people and it did.
And, and also The thing is a lot of people we say, can you just
send us, you know, continue address, We want to send
something over to you. It was hilarious as well, seeing
which ones put their office address and which ones fit their
home. And it was like who's on good
terms with their colleagues? It's basically the the thing.
But one of the things, one of the things I loved was it
because it because we were just getting thrown addresses.
So I kind of, I think I emailed you guys first saying we're
going to be ordering like two or three this day, nothing for a
day or two and then another two or three and then one that day.
And then and you guys offer next day delivery, say, how on earth
do you get such an amazing fresh product And it tastes fresh as
well. How do you get such an amazing
fresh product delivered to next day?
How do you, how do you deal with those spikes from a logistics
point of view to go like, well, we've just had that one five and
a half 1000 LB order in. Well, we need to get baking and
we need to turn this around and it's got to arrive by like 5:00
PM tomorrow and it's currently like 3:00 PM.
We have a really good text. You must, I guess that.
So from Shopify, what what, what that does because it has open
APR, we can we can actually plug in different pieces of like
software, you know, warehouse management system and that then
that links also in with our planner who then pushes that
through into like a production planning system that we have.
So. As you say to try and forecast
and pre plan. Yeah, exactly.
Forecast pre plan, but also like from from a dispatch
perspective, what the team have to do when at what time they
have a very strict timeline of what needs to happen.
So they might be baking lots of these one minute, then a
complete arrangement of staff and then a giant Cape for.
A corporate exactly well, we've got different rooms for
different things, OK, so we have different teams that do
different things and they do that thing day in day out and we
plan with. The so open to issues.
Oh my. I won't ask you now, but I'm
sure that over a beer there's some good stories of like.
Yeah, there have been some disasters.
Yes, it's amazing to hear how you've got humans physically
making a product, tech working through and even the tech, I
mean I've been working with tech 20 years.
Like I know how volatile it can be when it's like the API is
working fine and the thing and you're like Shopify is updated.
The API was like where's the developer now 5.
PM on a Friday normally. What do you mean?
He's on a flight to Ibiza. Stop the plane or pay for his.
Wi-Fi WhatsApp. We've got a WhatsApp emergency
without without devs. Of course you have, because we,
they, they, and. It did go down.
And it did go down and you know, we've got, we have like complex
like date picker and stuff like that, which we custom built or
off because back then there was no, there was no apps like there
are in the ecosystem now. Page speed to do it that way as
well. So again, you kind of did
something early that you would have been asked.
To do Yeah, we had no idea what to do.
Yeah. So.
But it's a pain in the ass and it really but it, but that is a
critical part of our business because obviously that's people
want to choose when they want to send their products.
So if that doesn't work, then they can't check out.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I appreciate you
guys coming over and and news to me because I've been in a dark
room, but it's raining on your way over as well.
So I appreciate you fighting through the elements of London
to be here. And thank you so much for the
gifts as well. It's amazing that you guys have
bought some products with you, but thanks for your time.
If people want to reach out, they want to try your products
or they're based in a lot of ours, a lot of you guys in the
US, but if they want to see the branding and and go and learn
from you guys, what's the website?
What are the social handles? How can they?
Get so website
www.cutterandsquidge.com That's the same for Instagram.
So it's just at cutter and Squidge.
Mm hmm. Tiktok is the Cutter and Squidge
and that's how it goes. Nice, nice.
Well, again, thank you so much guys.
And for everybody listening at home, if you enjoyed today's
episode, hit the subscribe button.
Definitely check these guys out as well.
I if you first time listening as well.
I post every Tuesday little tea break talks where I choose a
topic about 30 to 60 seconds before hitting record and just
tell you what's going on in that world.
We actually have a spin the spin the wheel that's going to be
starting soon as well. And I'm literally going to spin
it and go all right, that's all about loyalty.
Again, last week this happened. So check out my Tuesday episodes
and every Friday we're posting episode like this.
And so hit the subscribe button. Hope you can join us again soon.
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