Jennifer Sieg meets Harriet Hastings, founder of hand-iced biscuit brand, Biscuiteers
Building a successful business takes a focussed mind and a steady hand. One look at the intricate biscuits made by Harriet Hastings, and it’s clear she has both.
Hastings, now 60, founded her hand-iced biscuit crafting business, Biscuiteers, in 2007, jumping at the opportunity to shape a new kind of “sector” in the gift-giving industry.
Today, it’s become something of a British success story, now seeing 77 per cent year-on-year growth since its pre-pandemic levels.
Demand for the ecommerce business soared during the pandemic, when gift giving became a new way for consumers to connect with one another.
Orders began to double, with turnover soaring from £392,000 during its first year of operations in 2008 to over £11m in the year ending April 2020.
From May 2023 to April 2024, Biscuiteers hit a new record to ring in sales of £12m.
And, thanks to Hastings’ keen attention to detail and long-established knowledge of marketing, the Wimbledon-headquartered brand is now navigating the road to overseas.
Launching its products in major retailers across the US, which has been one of its largest exporters for years, is next.
Icing the brand
Hastings’ desire to create a hand-iced biscuit brand started as a pastime. She just had her fourth child and decided to take some time off work.
“I had a bit more time on my hands and I suddenly started thinking about gifting,” she says.
“I was particularly thinking about food gifting and what a big space it was in the market and how it wasn’t being really well served by the existing players at the time.”
After testing out a few recipes in the kitchen of her husband’s catering and events company, the demand for a new type of “personalised” gift-giving trend started to grow.
Fortunately, with her marketing experience and time spent working in brand PR in the consumer tech division of Trimedia, she caught on quickly.
“The concept of the business when we started was a DTC (direct-to-consumer) brand, and I think that was also probably the fashionable way to look at things in those days,” she says.
A group of people learn how to ice biscuits at one of Biscuiteers’ icing cafe locations.
“It was early on in the excitement that ecommerce was everything because it cut a lot of the costs out of business.”
However, partnering with other businesses soon became a crucial part of the brand’s growth strategy.
Building relationships with some big-name fashion brands, such as Mulberry, Burberry and Selfridges, was just the start. The business-to-business arm of Biscuiteers has now seen an annual growth rate of 20 per cent.
The cookie or biscuit dilemma
Building a brand does not come without its challenges, especially when taking your product to the next level.
And for Hastings, America is on the horizon.
But the name Biscuiteers, she says, may pose one of the biggest barriers to cross.
What Brits call a biscuit, Americans would call a cookie.
It just wouldn’t ever have occurred to us when we named it Biscuiteers that this would ever be a challenge.
“It just wouldn’t ever have occurred to us when we named it Biscuiteers that this would ever be a challenge,” she says with a smile.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Hastings’ background has meant she is particularly adaptable to the challenges of brand presentation.
“Training in marketing and brand has been the single most useful thing that I have brought to the experience,” she notes.
Beginning with their US website, Hastings was sure to include the word “cookies” in the metadata first and foremost, with an educational explainer on the site itself.
“If you don’t have cookies in your metadata, no one would ever find you,” Hastings points out.
She adds: “We do actually explain the difference between a twice baked English biscuit and a cookie because there are some differences.
“It’s not perfect if I’m honest. But on the other hand, we are very much presenting ourselves in the US as a very British brand. So the decision we’ve taken is to lean into that.”
Ingredients for success
In hindsight, there are a number of other opportunities and decisions Hastings regrets missing out on, some of which she didn’t even know were available in the first place.
Having self-funded £80,000 of initial investment into the packaging and design of Biscuiteers’ products, the last thing Hastings had thought about was the need for outside investment.
Meaning, like many others, she missed the mark on schemes available to early-stage start-ups, such as the enterprise investment scheme (EIS), which is only available for start-ups under seven years old.
If you want to raise investment it will be incredibly hard for you to do so once that’s passed.
“If you want to raise investment it will be incredibly hard for you to do so once that’s passed,” she says.
She adds: “I personally feel that it needs complete restructuring so that all businesses, regardless of time [and] scale, get one shot at it.
“It’s one of those things where a really good scheme, which is really important by the way, to stimulate investment has unintended consequences in the way that it’s structured.”
Regardless of the “what ifs,” Hastings has managed to build a global manufacturing brand, with a strong team of 160, in the heart of London.
“The thing that I’m actually most proud of, and I think people don’t necessarily see from the outside, is that we’ve built a manufacturing business, and I’ve built one in London,” Hastings says.
“Building manufacturing businesses these days is really, really hard, and it’s by far the hardest thing that we’ve done.”
CV
Name: Harriet Hastings
Company: Biscuiteers
Founded: 2007
Staff: 170
Title: Founder and CEO
Age: 60
Born: Reading, UK
Lives: London and Suffolk
Studied: History
Talents: Cutting through the bullsh*t!
Motto: JFDI – encourages bold ambition, decisiveness and ‘try it’ mentality. It was motto of one of my early bosses
Most known for: Building Biscuiteers brand and running Women’s Prize for Fiction for 27 years
First ambition: I was going to be a publisher – something of a family business and I worked in publishing for 5 years
Favourite book: The Cazalet chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Best piece of advice: Your business is really only as good as your team – get that right, good things will follow