They Had £15,000 Left and a Father Who Said No. Here’s How Two Sisters Built an £8M Bakery Empire
(SeaPRwire) – By: Oliver Hawthorne
The British bakery sector has never produced a cleaner lesson in operational discipline than Cutter & Squidge. Two sisters. No outside capital. No corporate rescue. Just a £15,000 bank balance, a shattered partnership with Harrods and Selfridges, and a father who initially refused to acknowledge their success. This is not a rags-to-riches fairy tale. It is a case study in survival through strategic ruthlessness. The business hit nearly £8 million in revenue in 2025. That number is remarkable. The path there is not.
Annabel and Emily Lui were not born into the bakery business. Annabel studied at the London School of Economics and worked in KPMG’s mergers and acquisitions team. Emily became a real-estate lawyer and was promoted to the youngest partner at her firm. Annabel walked away from finance in 2013. She told her father at 13 she wanted to be a pastry chef. He said over his dead body. The sisters launched Cutter & Squidge in 2012 while building it alongside full-time careers. By 2014, things collapsed. Harrods kept the cupcakes. Selfridges pulled their pop-up. The sisters were left with £15,000 and a 15-hour conversation on a sofa. They had already hired staff. They had already rented production space. They had already bought a van. One weekend destroyed the entire setup. Their father helped sand the floors and build the counter for their Soho pop-up. He just made them pay for the materials. That pop-up became the foundation. The Brewer Street flagship followed. By early 2020, there were three stores. Then COVID arrived and closed every single one.
The pivot that saved the business was not a product innovation. It was a logistics decision. The sisters created an afternoon-tea-at-home kit. They could ship it nationally. The online channel grew from 25 percent of revenue to nearly 100 percent. Revenue from that channel grew over 1,600 percent in the following 12 months. That is the single most important number in this story. The brownie box introduced during the pandemic became the highest-volume product. Two million brownies were sold last year. Eighty percent of revenue now comes from direct-to-consumer sales. Only 7 percent from the Soho store. Thirteen percent from wholesale and corporate. Emily Lui estimates that up to 95 percent of customers buy something to send to someone else. Gifting is not a seasonal add-on. It is the core business model. Revenue from hampers jumped 175 percent between June 2025 and June 2026. The sisters now build products around Chinese New Year, Diwali, Eid, and Ramadan. They have turned a traditional London bakery into a nationwide gifting platform without spending a penny of outside investment. The company employs around 50 people. A dozen more during peak periods. They expect 12 percent revenue growth this year and are targeting £10 million by the end of 2027.
Now comes the pressure. Cocoa and chocolate prices have increased 175 percent. Electricity costs are up 15 percent. Business rates are up 25 percent. Pistachios and matcha are each about 50 percent more expensive. Labor costs add another 4 percent annually. The sisters refuse to substitute cheaper ingredients. They track weather in the Ivory Coast the way a chip designer tracks foundry yields. Everything between the oven and the customer’s door is run through technology. AI handles analytics. The product itself is still handmade. That tension between scale and craftsmanship is where most bootstrapped brands break. Cutter & Squidge has not broken. Not yet. The question is whether it can maintain its margin structure as input costs continue their upward trajectory. The sisters have built something genuinely resilient. What they build next will determine whether that resilience becomes a ceiling or a springboard.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne, a Principal Correspondent permanently stationed at an international technology review, covering the intersection of entrepreneurship, operational strategy, and consumer market shifts.