Meet the Experience Provider – The Biskery
Grab a cuppa and have a read of our latest blog. In this edition of Meet the Experience Provider, we chat with Saskia, who, along with her business partner Lisa, runs the Leeds-based bakery The Biskery. Their business caught our eye during lockdown when they sent out free ‘kindness’ biscuits with personal notes to people in need of a little lift. They’ve continued this with their Gratitudesday initiative, where every Tuesday at 10am, they give away a limited number of their signature Thank You Jam Biscuits. Lisa and Saskia are a constant source of inspiration to us here at Uniquely Local, with the way they run their business around school hours and their dedication to championing a way of working that suits them and their team of working mums.
What inspired you both to transition from digital marketing to launching a bakery business?
Initially, we started baking as an outlet for our creativity. We started at possibly the busiest times in our personal lives though, as we were both mothers to very young children!
We never planned to build a business. We never had those ambitions. We started with a shared hobby (baking treats from our home countries Germany and The Netherlands) that allowed us to reconnect with the women we were before we had children. And it accidentally turned into a successful business. All because we followed opportunities that came our way via this glorified hobby.
Starting a business as new mums is a bold move. How did your experiences of motherhood shape the way you approached The Biskery’s early days?
It was a pretty bold move. But it is not surprising at the same time. We were mothers, employees, wives, etc. And when we were baking together we were able to return to the women before we had kids. It became a creative space for us as women. We came together in the evenings to bake for markets when the kids were sleeping.
And we have since come to see this pattern play out in many female entrepreneurs who turned to building businesses to fit their new reality of motherhood.
When we started working full time in the business in 2021 and needed a team to expand. We knew that we didn’t want to build a standard 9-5 mentality business. We realised we were in charge and we had a unique opportunity to build a business that worked for us; and so we did just that in an unconventional way. We decided to open school hours only. Less even! We were open from 09:30 – 14:30. So that the whole team could drop and collect their children from school.
This model naturally attracted mums who wanted/needed to work and contribute to their household finances, but were interested to work part time. To this day these are our core baking hours five days a week. What it has given us is true flexibility to absorb the demands of our clients. We have the set up to extend our working days if and when we need to.
You’ve spoken about creating a family-first workplace. What specific policies or practices do you think other businesses should adopt to support working parents, particularly mothers?
I think the understanding needs to grow that working mums (parents) do not all have the same experiences. Parents of primary school age children have different needs to parents of high school kids. And new mums need the support to start back into work on terms that are sustainable for their mental health and new household realities.
It also has to be recognised that part time contracts, need to be that – part time. Not expecting returning to work mothers to still be outputting the same results in 32 contracted hours as they used to do in 40 hours. This is something I hear from so many new mums who return to work. And for many that is the reason they go back into full time work. Because there is few things more demoralising than being paid part time wage, but doing a full time job.
In our experience working mums are some of the most skilled, efficient and effective team members. And this needs to be recognised by employers. People are hired to do a job. Not to sit and do their hours. That mind shift alone is a major change for working mums. It gives them the flexibility and trust to fully commit to both of their roles.
As an all-female team, how do you foster a supportive work environment that enables your staff, many of whom are working mums, to thrive?
We support each other in The Biskery. We are a team of six and most of us are working mums. We understand each others’ realities and it makes us all compassionate and empathetic.
This means our team feel confident to let us know what they need to succeed at home. And when they need time off or when they need to work alternate hours they always make a case for how it would work for the business as well.
This two-way thinking is what makes it work. We all want to make it work at home and at work. And when all parties come to the table like that the outcome is a functioning business, no matter how unconventional the solution may sometimes be. Bringing kids to work has been one of them!
Many female entrepreneurs face the pressure of work-life balance. How do you both manage your time between running a successful business and raising happy children?
It is not easy nor straight forward. And some weeks we get the balance better than other weeks.
Our biggest strength is that as co-founders there are two of us. So we can divide and conquer and over the years we have become better at this. When one of us is up against it, or has a child poorly at home, the other steps up to support.
This partnership has been the making of this business. It also helps that our kids are getting older and are so much more independent then when we started 8 years ago!
Both our sets of kids are happy; and I like to think in part that is due to the decision to build this business from our home kitchens while they were asleep in the evenings.
Your business saw significant growth during the pandemic. What strategies did you use to adapt and thrive in such challenging times?
I will be honest and say back then we were not business savvy enough to say that we used any clear strategies to drive our growth during the pandemic.
In business, I know now, part of the work is building good foundation and structures from day one so that when success does find you, you are ready.
In essence that is what happened to us during the pandemic. We had built a new e-commerce website in 2018. We kept updating it and posting content on it for a year and a half even though no one ever ordered anything in our online shop. When Covid hit and the world went online our website was there to serve people and for the first time in 18 months since the website had gone live people were transacting on it.
The lesson here is to put the structures in place for success. Long before you are successful act out what it would look like to be successful. That is what we did. Not only with our website, but also with our accounts and our production processes.
The Biskery started with just £1,000 of your own money. What were the key factors that have allowed you to scale without external investment?
One of the main reasons we were able to make this work is due to our digital marketing knowledge. Lisa and I both worked as digital marketeers for about eight years. That knowledge we were able to leverage in our own business from day one. If we would have had to pay for this service we would have needed to pour a lot more funds into the business.
We had a website without even needing one in the early days and we started optimising it for valuable keywords in our industry. We didn’t know it at the start, but our digital marketing knowledge allowed us to be visible far beyond the physical markets in and around Leeds. It put us directly in front of people actively looking for biscuits all over the UK!
Aside from this I think we are both very conscientious people. We never want to let each other down and so we worked quite hard in the early days.
On top of that we didn’t take a salary from the business for the first three years. Putting every bit of profit back into the business to allow it to grow.
You have mentioned previously that “kindness and connection” are the real products you sell, not just biscuits. Can you tell me more about the power of this message and how it resonates with your customers?
It is a very relevant message in the current Zeitgeist. We are all seemingly so closely connected with so many people online, but we have never been lonelier in our private lives.
I think people crave connection and compassion.
Our message isn’t anything special or new, but it is a sign of the times to witness how people all over the UK and beyond have such a strong reaction to this message of kindness and connection and how they want to participate with it.
It is one of the aspects of our business that makes us beyond proud to serve anyone who is driven by these same outcomes. It is very humbling to be able to facilitate more kindness and more connection between people. All through the simple, yet powerful, act of gifting personalised biscuits. or via our Free Tuesday Gratitudesday biscuit scheme. Where we have a limited amount of free Thank You biscuits available to gift to people you are grateful for in your life.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced as female entrepreneurs in a male-dominated business world, and how did you navigate them?
The small minded perception, often by men, that assumes because we are working mums who started a business this must be a little hobby of ours. This notion is purely based on other peoples’ beliefs of what mothers can achieve in the business world.
It is a stereo type that Lisa and I combat on a daily basis.
We are bonafide business women. And what we have achieved, so far, as working mums (with limited amounts of time and resources) is so much more than many a man will ever truly comprehend.
What advice would you give to other mothers or female entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting their own business?
Start giving your ideas time. When we started in 2016 we were mums to very young children. And we had very little time available to work in/on our business. But we came together in the time that we were able to carve out for ourselves outside of our roles as mums and wives.
Your creative ideas are worthy of your time. And soon you will see that as your personal circumstances change so will your available time. And you find yourself spending more time on your creative idea. And all of the sudden you look back, and if you stuck with it like us, you may find yourself running an actual business.
And Lisa always says: clarity comes from action not from thought. We can spend our whole life thinking of the perfect idea or concept for a business, but the best way to make it come to life is by doing, not by thinking. So we encourage you to start working on it.
Looking back at your journey, is there anything you would do differently? What lessons have you learned along the way?
We have very little regrets. The organic way our business grew was correct for the time we had available in our personal circumstances.
What’s next for The Biskery? Are there any exciting projects or expansions on the horizon?
We are enjoying growing the business in terms of maximising the production space available in our biskery.
Looking further into the future we are eager to see what our family friendly business model could ultimately look like. What an artisanal biscuit business powered by working mums, and operating at scale could look like. This is something we are both very keen to explore. How far can we push the flexible arrangement we have currently created for working parents, while still operating a profitable bespoke biscuit bakery where employees thrive.
Watch this space to find out!
A huge thank you to Saskia for taking the time to talk to us. Find out more about The Biskery on their website https://www.thebiskery.com/
And if you fancy a group biscuit decorating session with friends or work colleagues, you can book a session for up to 6 people at the Biskery bakery in North Leeds.
