Marcus Richards
My Baker’s vision is to provide attractive delicious cakes to discerning customers, and in doing so provide much needed revenue to independent artisanal bakers.
Tell us about yourself?
I had a 20 year career as a business adviser but was keen to run my own thing.
My wife Mel is a baker, who baked for My Baker under the previous owners.
Therefore, when the opportunity came up to take the reins at My Baker, we thought it was the ideal opportunity for our combination of skills.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Keep your core mission and aims in mind and execute your strategy – avoid going down rabbit-holes.
What problem does your business solve?
Time-poor customers may have left it late to buy a cake, but still want something special. As a large, nationwide network of talented artisanal bakers, we can produce cakes from our collections or bespoke cakes, at very short notice.
So as a customer with a few days to go, you don’t want to be ringing round bakers to check who has availability. We’ll always have a capable baker who can make the cake.
Bakers may not have time to perfect their marketing, liaise with customers and bake. With My Baker as an ally, they have a marketing machine generating additional orders for them.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We saw a gap in the market for time-poor professionals and customers buying cakes in another part of the UK, or indeed international customers (we serve a lot of them), who want to be able to order a cake and know a quality product can be delivered, even at short notice.
Some refer to us as “Interflora for Cakes” which is quite a useful way to think about it.
We hope one day people will say “Interflora? I think it’s like My Baker, but for flowers”!
What is your magic sauce?
We’re a people business with two key stakeholder groups – our customers and our bakers. We work hard to deliver great, hassle-free cakes for our customers, and make the experience enjoyable for our bakers.
For customers, that means a customer services team on the phone 10am-6pm, seven days a week, and a willingness to discuss customisation and bespoke cakes, offer dietary options, and delivery seven days a week.
For bakers, it means hassle free orders (just bake and deliver), no joining or membership fees, transparency on prices and the ability to say yes or no to specific orders, therefore topping up income in quieter periods, with no obligation to take on orders when busy.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We want to be the UK’s go-to brand for cakes that are a little bit special. We’d like to have over 1,000 bakers nationwide and seamless UK coverage.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Scaling on both sides is the biggest challenge. We need more sales where we have the bakers to cover them, and more bakers where there are still gaps in our coverage.
But we’re delighted with the progress we’ve made. We bought a business that serviced London and Birmingham. It now covers most major UK cities, as you can see from our coverage map:
https://mybaker.co/pages/where-we-deliver
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’re always looking for talented bakers to join the team. Bakers can register their interest at:
https://mybaker.co/pages/become-a-baker
Customers can buy a cake from our collections with as little as 48 hours’ notice (24 at a push if they call us first:
https://mybaker.co/collections
We are also happy to bring their vision to life with a full bespoke cake service, from concept to cake:
