After 13 years… Wildcraft has closed its doors.

I never imagined I would be writing these words and I am not ready for this journey to be over. I need your help to give me the chance to begin anew!

In 2024, I was approached by someone I trusted to buy the lease for the café, so I could downsize and focus on wholesale and mai order. At the time, I was already in negotiations with another buyer and was close to signing contracts. But this person, who I had a long working relationship with, asked me to pull out and promised to match the deal. I agreed to switch if he paid me a deposit so that I knew he was serious. He agreed and the deposit went straight toward rent while negotiations dragged on for months, while he reassured me everything was going ahead. He spoke about the thousands he had already invested and how excited he was to turn 6-10 Green Road into everything I had always dreamed it could be.

So I turned away other buyers and stayed committed to his offer.

And then, out of nowhere… he pulled out. He said he found a better premises elsewhere. The Heads of Terms we had signed turned out to be worthless. By then we had fallen into arrears on the empty café unit.

When we signed the lease back in 2020, we didn’t have the funds for a large rent deposit, so my bakehouse stood as guarantor. The next step will be for the landlord to come for the bakehouse to cover the debt it guaranteed, but we simply don’t have the money. This disaster was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The lease reassignment funds would have stabilised the bakehouse and allowed us to recover, but now what seemed like a dream solution has turned into a nightmare that has left us out of funds, out of strength, and entering insolvency.

I never thought it would come to this. I am angry. But more than anything… I am profoundly sad.

Wildcraft has been my life’s work. I built it from a home bakery into something real, something loved, something shared, and I'm not ready for it to end like this. So I'm asking for your help to return to my roots, and begin again.

At the bottom of our garden sits a 40-foot concrete garage that we’ve only ever used for storage. But it is the perfect space to set up a microbakery, where I can keep baking, teaching, and creating.

Baking isn't just my job! It's a core part of my identity and where I find peace.

Turning the garage into a working bakery will take time, and it won’t be cheap. It currently has no water, no drainage, and no proper power supply. Just connecting 3-phase electricity (the minimum needed to run essential equipment and my ovens) will cost over £5,000, and that's why I need your help!

This time round, I am starting small and keeping it small. I have learned so much about running a bakery business over the years and I know I can make this work! But not without money.

I know this is a lot to ask, but I know how much people love the bakery that I've built and I have faith that enough of you will still believe in me, that we can make this happen!

I believe in this community. You have walked beside me every step of the Wildcraft journey. You have stood by me through growth, challenge, and change and I am asking you to please walk beside me one more time.

We've been so lucky that Peter has already landed a new job back in Engineering with an immediate start date. Which means we don't have to worry about keeping a roof over our heads! But what I love to do is baking, and as someone who cannot work in a conventional gluten bakery due to my health, my options are so limited. Which was why I started Wildcraft to begin with, and I have so many things I still want to try!

Help us say goodbye to Wildcraft…and help us build what comes next. I know that together, we can make it beautiful!

❤️

FAQ's:

What happens if you dont raise the full £10k?

I would find a way to start baking and keep working to raise enough funds to make the project happen. When I moved out of my dining room and opened my first professional bakery on the Penraevon Industrial Estate in 2017, I had just £1000 and a load of salvaged equipment. With a hell of a lot of hard work and determination, that grew into a business that employed 25 people across two sites! I know how to work with a tight budget and be creative with it!

Why is the new Microbakery model more viable than the old Wildcraft setup?

Running Wildcraft as both a bakehouse and a separate café was incredibly expensive. Rent, rates, insurance, utilities, and compliance totalled nearly £9k per month, which required over £21k in sales to cover, but had to be paid out even if we hadn't sold a single item! Operating from my garage removes that entirely. But bigger than the financial impact of the new plan, is the psychological one.

I’m autistic and ADHD with a PDA profile. So high levels of external demand (like financial pressure and responsibility for others’ livelihoods!) push my nervous system into shutdown. When pressure spiked, I couldn’t leave the house, emails triggered panic attacks and posting on social media filled me with terror.

Those aren’t optional tasks in a modern business, they’re essential! An entrepreneur running from survival mode cannot think strategically, which means they are even more exposed to risks. I wasn’t failing because I didn’t understand the numbers or know what I was doing. I was overwhelmed by a system that required constant high output just to stand still.

The Microbakery model is different because it has no fixed costs that wouldn't already be covered by Peter's engineering salary, no staff wage burden, no responsibility for a second premises, total control over pace, and best of all, a physically small, organised workspace designed around how my brain works. That level of control and predictability will allow me to function in a way that I haven't in years! This isn’t a scaled-down version of the same model, it’s a structurally different one, and that difference is what makes it viable.