We were lucky to catch up with Harriet Hastings recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Harriet thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

How did you actually start – what was the process of going from idea to execution – walk us through some of the main steps that allowed you to launch your business? Tell it to us as a story – you had the idea, then what happened? What was the next day, hour, month or year like? What did you have to figure out, look into, setup, etc in order to move beyond the idea phase and actually launch?

Back in 2007 I had just left my job as consumer brand director after the birth of my fourth child. I was helping my husband with his London based catering company Lettice Events and running the Women’s Prize for Fiction which i helped to found back in 1996. I had spent my career advising consumer brands and e-commerce businesses and I guess I was intrigued by the idea of launching a consumer brand of my own. I realised that there was an opportunity in food gifting that wasn’t being met by existing players – particularly as an online service. We were actually in New York when we saw some iced biscuits (sugar cookies) in a small shop in Chelsea market and realised that they could be the perfect canvas for our idea. Biscuits have long shelf life, they are portable and most importantly can be created in a limitless number of designs. Biscuiteers is a design business at heart – we create beautiful designs for all life’s key occasions and designs and logos for corporate clients. We started experimenting in Lettice’s kitchens and employed art students to help us ice our initial collections which included shoes and handbags. We believed that our hand-iced biscuits could compete with traditional flowers and chocolates to offer a more stylish and personalised gifting solution. In fact our launch slogan ‘why send flowers when you can send Biscuiteers’ is still on our website. The lifestyle media and fashion press got it immediately and within four months we had paid back our initial investment and moved to new dedicated bakery.

Harriet , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Biscuiteers has created a whole new sector in the gifting market – a more stylish alternative to flowers and chocolates. We hand-ice around 3 million biscuits a year at the Ministry of Biscuits in Wimbledon, London and ship around the world. We bake a British twice baked biscuit which is nearest to a sugar cookie in the US. It has been created as the perfect canvas for our icing designs. We create collections of biscuits seasonally for all occasions and of course thank yous and birthdays and new babies among many others. We also have large corporate business working for incredible brands including Christian Dior, Chanel, Tiffany, Mulberry and Nespresso. We have two icing cafes in London if you are visiting which are the home of the school of icing in Notting Hill and Belgravia. You will find our biscuits in many iconic stores including Harrods, Selfridges, Liberty and Fortnum & Mason. We are also very famous for our beautiful hand-illustrated packaging which is designed to be kept long after the biscuits are gone! We are very proud of our hand-iced manufacturing model which we have designed ourselves and which enables us to create a beautiful handmade product at scale.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

The biggest risk we took was taking an online e-commerce brand on to the high street back in 2013. We had always conceived Biscuiteers as an online business but a lot of our customers were asking where they could come and visit us. We also felt that a physical presence would be an important marketing asset. We didn’t know if we could run a shop profitably as it was such a new concept so we were inspired by pottery cafes to create a fully experiential space offering DIY icing, icing lessons and children’s parties. It was a big investment for a small brand but it did definitely shift perceptions and become an incredibly valuable marketing platform. Our first shop in Notting Hill is one of the ten most instagrammed shop fronts in London and was created with social media in mind. I think of it as a 365 day out of home marketing platform. Not only are the shops an important income stream but they are the focus of our influencer marketing, corporate events and a customer acquisition piece where we meet a lot of our international clients. High street retail is a very different business and we had to learn a lot and made lots of mistakes along the way before we got the model right. Now we have second shop in Belgravia..

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The hardest part of our journey has been designing and building a manufacturing facility that enables us to build an artisanal business at scale. There were no models for us to copy so we have had to evolve our own solutions. In 2019 we finally managed to move the business from the 3 or 4 sites we were operating out of to our own purpose built HQ The Ministry of Biscuits which has given us capacity to scale. This was the first time all. our employees were based in one place. Immediately after that came the pandemic in March 2020. As a manufacturing business we continued to operate throughout but with a small number of staff and we had to completely re-configure our building overnight to create more space for everyone, introducing shift work and one way systems. Our office staff were at home so I remember it as one of the most challenging management experiences I have had while dealing with the unprecedented demand we experienced through COVID. We learnt a lot and some of the practices we introduced have stuck including a real focus on staff communication.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.biscuiteers.com/
• Instagram: instagram.com/biscuiteersltd
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/BiscuiteersLtd
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/biscuiteers-baking-company
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BiscuiteersLtd
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@biscuiteersltd
• Other: www.linkedin.com/harriethastings

Image Credits
Please credit James Robinson for the image of Harriet