Paul Bradford Sugarcraft School, the online cake-decorating tutorial business, is to launch a major marketing campaign after "striking gold" in the US market, as it seeks to triple its current £1m turnover in subscription sales and accreditation courses.
The business, now returned to its roots in Linlithgow where Paul Bradford (36) started as an apprentice baker in 1997, already has 140,000 global "members" signed up to its creative cake-icing tutorials. Meanwhile Bradford himself is increasingly in demand to teach courses and give demonstrations from throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the US. He is about to embark on a six weeks of teaching engagements in New Zealand and Australia, followed by another in Tampa, Florida.
Bradford, who has created cakes for the Queen and for Prince Albert of Monaco, developed the business model with his partner David Brice after selling his hit Linlithgow-based cake business Truly Scrumptious, which had concessions at Jenners, Loch Lomond Shores and House of Fraser. The pair also opened a hit cupcake cafe in the West Lothian village of Torphicen which caught the early stages of Britain's ongoing bakery boom, "with a 45 minute queue out the door."
Brice said: "It was in the really bad winter of 2011, when everything ground to a halt, we had wedding cakes that we couldn't get out to the venues, it was horrific. Paul and I were snow-bound for a few days and we said 'let's create some online tutorials', and that's where it started. We changed the business model splitting it up into the cake making part and the part with the courses and online tutorials. We were filming the videos for a year and created this membership model."
"Truly Scrumptious was split up, and three years ago we sold the bakery business as at that stage the online tutorials were taking off and paying the revenues we moved up to Kenmore in Perthshire for a year and started working with two IT marketing consultants."
"The nature of the business means that we could live anywhere in the world and we stayed in Spain for a year but despite loving the weather and the food, we had strong yearning to come back to Scotland. We could be in Australia, the US, Dubai, but we have come back to Linlithgow where it all started."
PBSS, which now employs seven people, sells £5000 "accredited tutor" courses that allow graduates to market themselves as Paul Bradford cake decorators, as well as its basic free subscription memberships, which allow the company to sell products through to a rapidly expanding database of email subscribers, in exchange for access to 100 free tutorial videos.
Brice said: "The cost of sales doesn't increase per customer. It takes 30p to acquire customer in exchange for email address after a year that customer will be worth an average of £6 in sales."
He ascribed the success of the brand to the revival in handicrafts that often accompanies recessions, also the pair's "passion" for the business of cakes. "Paul has always tried to be the trend, rather than keeping up with the trend, and I've always had a passion for using IT to grow business."
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