Learn how Becky and Thea, inspired by an Amsterdam pancake house, decided to start making and selling traditional and alternative welsh cakes – including a cheese and leek flavoured one!
Find out how MamGu Welshcakes are using online platforms to reach more customers and bring them to the café in Pembrokeshire.
So, my business partner Becky and I decided to teach ourselves to make Welsh cakes and after three months of teaching ourselves to make Welsh cakes, we went and sold them at festivals – and it just grew from there and it’s amazing.
We predominantly make traditional and alternative Welsh cakes but we’re also a café and we carry the same theme along with our traditional Welsh cuisine.
It’s all very weather dependant and also tidal dependant because we live in a harbour but we are pretty busy for our breakfasts and then we can be very busy for lunches as well. But Welsh cakes tend to be our main thing.
We do all sorts of different flavours ranging from the traditional ones to dark chocolate and orange, a laver bread Welsh cake served with fresh Solva crab, to cinnamon. We’ll do cheese and leek Welsh cakes with a big cooked breakfast. We then had 12 flavours before we knew it.
To promote our business, we use a lot of social media. We predominantly use Facebook and Instagram. On Instagram the other day I posted our crempogs which are awesome Welsh pancakes with a slow motion video of chocolate dripping. It’s things that will get the end-users mouth watering.
The support we’ve had from Superfast Business Wales has been fantastic. We’ve had one to ones, consultations, we’ve had training. They have given us advice on our website, on how to use different platforms within social media such as Facebook and Instagram. We’ve been on courses, so yeah, they’ve been invaluable to us really.
So we were lucky enough to have recently been on Countryfile so we have made the public aware that we were on it via our Facebook - that has created huge engagement for us. But I won’t post multiple times a week if I don’t feel that it’s useful content for the public to read.
So, Superfast Business Wales suggested we use iZettle as our form of till and stock take keeping. It has allowed us to see what are our best selling products, what are maybe are our least selling products. It’s helped us be able to adapt and grow the business.
Being in such a remote location, people have said to us ‘oh we saw you on the internet’ and so they’ll locate us, they’ll use Google maps. They’ll use TripAdvisor. They’ll use all of these different platforms to find us.
If somebody was starting their own business, I couldn’t recommend Superfast Business Wales highly enough. The support you get is fantastic, they really point you in the right direction and they will really help you grow your business.