If you’ve shopped at John Lewis, Selfridges, Oliver Bonas or a large number of smaller independent retailers in the UK, you may well have seen The Bottled Baking Co products. They’re available in a wide range of mouth watering flavours and varieties. The company sells ready-measured baking mixes that contain all of the dry ingredients you need to bake delicious cookies, cakes, brownies, tray bakes and more, all conveniently within a lovely glass bottle. The Bottled Baking Co has even collaborated with M&S to create bottles containing Percy Pig and Colin the Caterpillar sweets as part of their brownie ingredients.

In this new Start-Up Story, Leeds-based The Bottled Baking Co founder Greg Fraser looks back to the key challenges he overcame before launching his business in 2016, while explaining where his fantastic business idea came from and how he turned it into a successful business. So, what are the key ingredients when you want to start and run a successful and innovative food business?

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When you start your own business, you must minimise your start-up costs, because then your business starts to make a profit much sooner. If you have to shell out for stock, it increases your start-up costs considerably. And you tie up money you could have used to run your business, while there’s also a risk that you’ll be left with stock you can’t shift.

For many small businesses, print on demand provides the perfect solution. If you sell printed items such as greetings cards, wall art/posters, T-shirts, mugs, water bottles or a wide range of other items, print on demand enables you to get the exact amount of products you need after you’ve made a sale, which is far better for your cash flow. And you can trial new products without having to shell out big sums of money.

In this new Start-up Story, Ruth Sparkes of poster/wall art brand Nordhuset explains how she started her own business and she shares her key start-up tips. She also explains what role the global pandemic played in her Nordhuset start-up story and how your business can get the very best out of print on demand.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of Gelato who enable you to create and sell high-quality, custom products and merchandise for your ecommerce business with their print-on-demand services. Sign up to Gelato for free today and get 50% off your first order (within 48 hours of signing up).

Show notes can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Confidence is said to be everything. That’s not strictly true, because other things in life and business are also important. But, confidence can help you to overcome challenges, build relationships, take risks, deal with setbacks but ultimately achieve great things. You need to have confidence in yourself and your business. So, why might that not be the case? What impact can a lack of confidence have on you and your bottom line? Crucially, what can you do to build up your confidence in yourself and your business and what’s the best way to communicate that confidence to your customers?

In this fascinating episode, which contains lots of practical advice, these and other key questions are answered by Debbie Green, founder of award-winning Wishfish Coaching & Development and co-host of the Secrets From a Coach podcast.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of PPL PRS. TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS provides a streamlined music licensing service, with a single point of contact, to make it easier to legally play and perform music in public. Visit themusiclicence.co.uk to find out more.

Show notes can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.