After 13 years… Wildcraft is closing 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 us the chance to begin anew!

In 2024, I was approached by someone I trusted to buy the lease for the café. 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.

Around the same time, the break date was approaching in February 2025 and that would allow me to exit the lease for 6-10 Green Road without any penalties. I realised I wasn't ready to say goodbye and I owed it to myself to try one last time to refit the café, give Wildcraft everything I had, and see if it could truly work in the 6 months I had left on the lease. If it didn’t, I could always use the break clause and step away.

But he kept asking me to reconsider. He kept persuading me to reassign the lease to him instead and I trusted him. Especially when he paid a deposit, which went straight toward rent while negotiations dragged on. Month after month, 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 let the break clause pass, 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 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. 2 weeks ago, the landlord forfeited the cafe premises and his next step will be 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.

Peter and I haven’t been able to draw our full salaries since November, to make sure that we could continue to pay our bakers, overheads and the supplies we needed to keep baking. We made this work because we knew that the lease reassignment funds would have stabilised the bakehouse and allowed us to recover.

As you may know, the last 4 years have been incredibly difficult for our family and every penny of our life savings has gone into keeping Wildcraft alive while I fought to claw my way out of the worst autistic burnout I have ever experienced. Peter left his stable job in engineering to support me through everything and fought harder than I have ever seen anyone fight, to keep everything together when I couldn't even leave the house. Mountains of therapy and support allowed me to start to recover and I got better. I am the healthiest and strongest I have ever been, and I was so excited about all the plans we had for 2026.

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 am not ready for it to end like this.

So I am 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.

Because baking is not just my job! It is a core part of my identity and where I find peace.

Turning the garage into a working bakery will take months, 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.

I am incredibly lucky that some of the original equipment I used to build Wildcraft still belongs to me. But when we lose the business, we will also lose many of the tools and supplies I’ve spent years gathering. These will eventually need replacing, however our priority now is to just get the project up and running by converting the garage! I opened my first professional bakery on the Penraevon Industrial Estate in 2017 with 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! Then burnout hit.

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 your help.

I know this is a lot to ask.

But 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 no longer 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?

We've already raised enough to make a start! At £2k, we have a viable starting point. If that’s all we raise, here’s the contingency plan:

Clear out our 1.5x2.5m snug, relocate crafting supplies and piano, add prep bench, shelving, mixer and single phase commercial oven and a 20L Hobart mixer. Box out cupboard under the stairs to create a WC, which would get us over the line for Food Standards compliance. Begin production and slowly build from there. But please don't make me! Because baking in my house with my hyperactive & inquisitive children would drive me nuts! It's also not ideal because my neurodivergent kids have multiple food aversions that mean that they need to eat gluten. Which means I wouldnt be able to sell our products as Gluten Free, regardless of what protocols i put in place to manage risks.

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.