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Bounce Back Better… Big Bakes Bakery
10th December 2020
Big Bakes Bakery, is a bakery specialising in delicious cupcakes and traybakes based in Torquay, Devon. Big Bakes Bakery is run by owners Charlie and Ryan and their bakes have amassed a cult following locally and now throughout the UK with the addition of their postal boxes.
Kate Pace, Tax Executive and part of our Food & Drink team caught up with Charlie to find out more about the business and how business has been throughout the pandemic.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves and the history of your business?
I went to University and Ryan was a chef at fine dining restaurants. We always knew we wanted to work in the food industry and I wanted to have a business. Around 10 years ago, Ryan was asked by my best friend to make some cupcakes for her 21st birthday. He used to do the patisserie side of things in the restaurants. The cakes went down really well, there were so many people asking where she got them from and we thought perhaps we could just take a few orders for birthdays etc. and it just started like that. At first we just started taking a couple of orders here an there on the side whilst we were still working and then we decided to book a stall at our local market. We sold out so quickly and we realised we might have something good going on here and we decided to book a couple more markets, that’s literally how it started and here we are 10 years later!
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So, when did you set up your shop in St. Marychurch?
We actually signed the lease 4 years ago and opened the shop about 3 and a half years ago and it’s just grown so much. We only got the shop by chance, we were initially looking for a kitchen so we could produce more stock for the events and the food festivals and we were just walking past our now shop one day and thought what a massive space it was and thought we could turn it into a kitchen and just have a tiny little shop at the front with a display window to display some of the cakes. We thought it would just be a casual thing on the side to what we were already doing but as soon as we opened the shop it just completely took over. We actually then ended up actually cancelling events - we used to do them every weekend but now we only do about 6 a year because the shop is just so busy it keeps us going.
Whilst studying for my business degree at Uni I was working for a local supermarket as a department manager, which went hand in hand as we had to be doing a management work placement alongside one of our courses. I actually kept that job when I left uni for about 3-4 years, mainly for the financial security because of the risks involved with starting up your own business but after a while we thought to ourselves let’s take the plunge and both be self-employed and we haven’t looked back since, we can’t imagine working for someone again now.
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How did the first lockdown impact your business and how have you diversified?
For the last year or two we had been talking about starting a postal service but you know what it’s like once you’re busy with work you just carry on as you are because you’re too busy to start anything new. It’s quite hard to stop and say let’s actually try this postal service.
When the first lockdown came, I’m not going to lie, I was completely laid back about the whole thing; I honestly thought we’d have to shut the shop for like 2 weeks maximum so we just took two weeks off and enjoyed the time off because we had been so busy. When they announced that it was going to be 3 weeks and then another 3 weeks we thought maybe we need to do something. It took a little while for the furlough scheme to start paying out and we didn’t really want to be dipping into our savings to be paying our staff so we decided to start a local delivery service first, which we started for the Easter weekend.
Easter is normally a very busy time in the shop for us so we decided that we would make up a little mixture box, post it on social media and just get people to message if they wanted to order and we would just deliver to them and it would be quite simple. As soon as we put the post on, within half an hour I had 400 messages, my phone crashed about 3 times it just couldn’t cope with the amount of messages that were coming through, it was crazy!
We quickly realised the boxes were going to be a lot more popular than we first thought! We got back to everyone who responded to our post, which took the whole of the next day and obviously because we couldn’t make and deliver 400 boxes between 2 of us, we had to just operate a first come first served policy and book in as many as we could and then everyone else we just had to say I’m so sorry but it was first come first served and I’m going to have to say no this time. Even all of the people who missed out were really lovely about it and said to let them know if we were going to do it again as they would definitely like to order.
We decided we could do a weekly lockdown box but we just couldn’t take orders the way we did the first time as it just took ages to go back to each person individually and take their details etc. We quickly set up an online shop page and set up with PayPal to help take the payments and help keep everyone’s details secure and it just went from there and each week it just grew and grew. It got to a point where they were just selling out in 30 seconds; we had some people messaging saying that they couldn’t believe it, they were on there at one minute past and they still didn’t get a box. I apologised and explained we had put put loads of boxes on but when you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people trying to get them all at once it’s just impossible. Some of our customers even compared it to getting Glastonbury tickets because they were just sat there refreshing the page waiting for them to go online, which was really funny!
When the first lockdown came, I honestly thought we’d have to shut the shop for like 2 weeks maximum so we just took two weeks off and enjoyed the time off because we had been so busy.
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When did you start your postal service?
Our weekly lockdown boxes were going really well but we were conscious we didn’t want it to get boring. We’ve got quite a good social media following on Instagram and we were having lots of people message who weren’t in our delivery area asking if there was any way they could order and we thought this was the ideal opportunity for us to try out the postal service.
We started the postal service in June this year. We wanted to wait a couple of months because we could see other businesses around the country who were doing a similar thing in lockdown and they were saying that even though they were sending their packages first class they were taking around 5-7 days to get there and when you’re selling a fresh product, obviously we need to make sure it gets there as quick as possible. We purposefully delayed it to make sure that the postal service had caught up with the backlog again so rather than doing it in March/April when there was a complete lockdown we waited until we were just coming out of lockdown and it seemed to work well because everything was getting there in good time and they’ve been really popular.
How did you find the second lockdown compared to the first one for your business?
I feel like it was a little bit different, the first lockdown was absolute madness and we were overwhelmed with how busy we were, we just couldn’t keep up with it. I also think it was because it was new for everyone and a lot of people were still getting 80% of their wage and not going out and spending so people could afford to treat themselves. You also had the novelty of people being at home and not being allowed to go out so it's exciting to order something to receive at home. However the second lockdown, as much as we were still doing the deliveries and things were still going really well, they weren’t selling out in minutes like they were in the first lockdown, they took a bit longer to sell out completely, which is absolutely fine because it gave everyone a fairer chance, everyone who wanted one was able to get one rather than fighting over the screens so that’s a good thing.
I think the reason for this is because this time around, people are feeling a little more fed up of it, more people had potentially lost their jobs and people couldn’t quite afford things as they thought they could in the first lockdown, there were also lots of people who could still go out in the second lockdown and lots still went to work so weren’t in to receive it and loads of shops that were still open.
Next year we are planning on doing some events and festivals when they’re allowed to be back on. We’d also really love to open a second shop - it’s been in the pipeline for a little while now.
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What are your future plans for the business?
Obviously we would normally be at the Exeter Christmas Market right now which is really strange because for the last 7 years we’ve done a Christmas market which is lots of really long solid days and this year we’re actually able to watch Christmas films and even got a real Christmas tree, which is really lovely. It’s really strange but we are trying to make the best of it and enjoy the festive stuff.
Next year we are planning on doing some events and festivals when they’re allowed to be back on.
We’d also really love to open a second shop - it’s been in the pipeline for a little while now. Last year we actually started looking at different premises but the pandemic has definitely delayed it. Not in a negative way, instead we’ve just kind of brought the postal thing forward and swapped them around a little bit so we are still doing everything we want to do just in a slightly different order. We are still looking at getting a second shop but obviously we are just being a little bit more cautious now because we don’t want to rush into things and then all of this happen all over again. We’d like to have the second shop in Exeter, it’s obviously our local city and it’s really not that far from us and from doing things like the Exeter Food Festival and the Exeter Christmas Market, we’ve got quite a good customer base in Exeter already so I think that would definitely be the place that we would like to go to first.
What tips would give to anyone who is looking to start out on their own in their business?
It’s really difficult, we get messaged this quite a lot on social media and we get people asking for advice, even financial advice and I’m like “I’m not trained for this!” So I suppose the advice we would give is just really try and do something a little bit different.
The baking industry is massively saturated there’s so many people doing baking from home and things like that so:
- Try and do something a little bit different to stand out from the crowd, and
- I think the most important thing is to be really passionate about what you do - we are definitely passionate about it - I absolutely LOVE cake! And anywhere we go we are hunting down the cake shops and just seeing how other people are doing it and then just trying to do things in our own way so I think that’s the most important thing for any business that’s not even just a cake business - as long as you are passionate about what you do then I think you’re going be putting the time and effort in which is what’s needed.
Big Bakes Bakery is a fantastic local business and their cakes and traybakes are delicious. Check out their Facebook and Instagram pages here to find out more about their opening times and their postal boxes.
