Meet the women behind the Biskery who are changing the face of work for mothers

And so they started making traditional biscuits and cakes from their homes with just £500 investment each, all while keeping down their day jobs.

“We just did it from our kitchens at home, after a day’s work and once the kids had gone to bed,” says Lisa, who also has two children now aged four and seven. “We’d then sell them at markets in Leeds.”

They were determined to build a business around their shared passion for baking. After discovering a baking-embossing tool in TK Maxx, Lisa decided to start putting personalised messages on her German-inspired take on jammy dodgers using a traditional Lebkuchen recipe. It has become their signature product, based on Lisa’s grandmother’s Linzer recipe.

All ingredients are organic and the best quality. But the pair soon realised that their price point was quite high for a biscuit and so turned their attention to the gift market, making personalised and branded biscuits.

“Every order is bespoke,” adds Saskia. “We don’t have stock as such, the orders come in and we fulfil them, package them beautifully and send them out.”

Their first big order was for book publisher Penguin in 2018. “They wanted biscuits with their logo on and it made us realise we must be doing something right.”

As more corporate clients, including the BBC, Fendi and NatWest, started to come in, Saskia and Lisa invested in an edible ink printer to enable them to make print-branded biscuits.

Both women are also passionate about the environment and so all their packaging, even the even the cellophane surrounding their individual biscuits, is plant-based and so fully compostable. “Being sustainable was very important to use from the beginning,” says Saskia. “But one of the first things corporate clients ask us when they make enquiries about our biscuits is about our sustainability.”

The pandemic had a profound effect on the business. “All our B2B [business-to-business] dried up,” says Lisa. “There were no corporate events and so we decided ask people to nominate people they felt deserved a treat.” They still send out “thank-you” biscuits to nominated people free every Tuesday – or “Gratitudesday” as they have renamed it.The pair quickly rebuilt their website to allow customer to purchase their products easily. “Christmas 2020 was the best Christmas we’d had. We realised that if we had a business that could thrive during a pandemic, then maybe it was time to think about quitting out jobs and doing it full time,” adds Lisa. But before they even made that decision it was made for them when Saskia was made redundant. “I knew I didn’t want to start looking for another job that would take me away from my children and so I rang Lisa and said it was now or never,” she says. Lisa decided to take the plunge in 2021 and Blooms Bakery was fully established.

As business continued to take off, they realised they had outgrown their home kitchens. So they approached their former employer, who had a kitchen that was barely used, moving in in June 2021. “It also meant that we could also start hiring people,” says Saskia. “We aren’t risk takers so it was a really big thing for us, to move out of our kitchens and start employing people.”

When the pair started looking into recruitment, they saw the much-referenced “pitfalls” that other employers find when hiring women in their late twenties to mid-thirties. How many years of maternity leave do we have ahead of us? How many lost hours will we see on the books from childcare struggles?

Saskia and Lisa had always been keen to create a business that worked for them and others in the same situation. There seemed to be no point in creating a business according to a blueprint that was broken from the perspective of working mothers. As business continued to grow, they soon outgrew the space at their former employers.

“We also wanted a space of our own and a place where we could all be together,” says Lisa. “We were split between two floors at the digital marketing agency and to be honest I think they were glad to see the back of us as we had boxes all over the place.”In November Lisa and Saskia got the keys to their new premises on Harehills Road in Leeds, within walking distance of both their homes.

They put all their savings into the business but are proud that they have never taken out a loan. They also took the opportunity to rebrand – changing the name to The Biskery.

“Our ambition is to become the go-to brand for personalised biscuits in the UK and we are well on the way to this with our new Leeds bakery which gives us the capacity to create over 300,000 biscuits a year,” adds Lisa.

They now employ nine people – all of them mothers – who bake, decorate and pack every single biscuit by hand. They offer “school hours only” contracts in order to make work sustainable for working parents.

As well as the signature biscuits based on Lisa’s grandmother recipes and filled with cranberry jam, the range includes hand-iced customised cookies, and branded fondant and butter biscuits.

“We hope to inspire other businesses to bring more female values into the world of work.For many mothers, this often is flexibility, empathy and understanding,” says Lisa.

thebiskery.com