We have been talking to clients and contacts in order to understand how businesses have been re purposing through the COVID-19 lock-down. I spoke to Fraser Lloyd Jones, Co-owner of Barefoot Bakery

Barefoot Bakery started life by selling brownies in North Parade Market in Oxford, someone suggested that they expand into a shop-front and from there, customers started to enquire as to whether they would supply their baked goods to trade.

Six years on, the company have two coffee and cake shops in North Oxford and Woodstock, a coffee shack attached to a pub and a large kitchen which is the base for the shops and trade supply. The trade side of the business supplies cafes and restaurants all over the UK.

Since the UK lockdown announcement Fraser and his wife Emily have ‘Been through every emotion that you can do’. They took the decision to furlough all their employees on day one but started to bring people back from week two as their launch of online deliveries took off so quickly. The company now deliver brownies and flapjacks anywhere in the UK via courier and doughnuts, whole cakes and other baked goods delivered locally. ‘Prior to the lockdown, the business had two strands, but we now have three’ says Fraser and he expects the turnover of these three tranches to be equal in value as lockdown easing continues.

The unctuous brownies come in beautifully wrapped boxes with a personalised note. ‘One of the things we have found really lovely is seeing the messages that people write to each other’ says Fraser ‘especially when they are reminiscing about times spent in one of our coffee shops’. Whilst the couple have both worked every day since lockdown Fraser has enjoyed the increase in family-time they have had with their daughter being off school and having some breathing space to make business decisions they had been on the verge of making for some time.

What they have seen is that ‘life is short’ and Fraser likens the pandemic to the process that people go through when they are ill or bereaved. He feels that they will now have more confidence in their entrepreneurial mind-set and when they have a feeling that something will work, they should ’just go for it’.

Fraser’s tip for business-owners surviving the pandemic is

“Stay positive, find a new avenue, trust in your convictions and you will come out of the other side stronger”