S6 Ep 14 | The Unexpected Story Behind Humble Crumble Ft. Founder Kim Innes

0:04Welcome to Beyond Marketing, the podcast. I'm Mara Genovese, the founder and CEO of Amgen Power Global Integrated Market Agency. Today, I'm joined by someone who turned one of Britain's simplest desserts into one of its most exciting food brands. But beyond building hump and crumble, Kim Innes has carved her own path as a founder, choosing creativity over convention and proving that success doesn't always mean following the traditional CEO playbook. Welcome to the Beyond Marketing, the podcast here. Thank you for having me. It's just so exciting to have you here. I'm a big fan of you, of what you have built and the success of Humble Grumble.

0:53I was speaking with the team before you joined because I was like, I'm so intrigued of like why humble crumble why crumble where this idea come from because it's not just in Britain people like I get a lot of guests that come from Brazil and like family that comes overseas and then they show up these are the place that we wanted to go like the shops the rest of things to eat and in the past two years every guest that I had coming from Brazil humble crumble was in the list well that's good to know that is very good to know so that means like the brand is not just here that's the awareness of what you have viewed is is is global i think the i think the reach has been global we're obviously just a yes a uk brand predominantly in london but to answer your question around why crumble to begin with um i think it's just it's something very natural organic to me It's something I used to make a lot for my family growing up.

1:53And it really brought my family together. I've got quite a large family. I'm the youngest of five kids. And so my sisters and brothers would be off and out doing different things. And then when I put crumble on the table, it would bring us all together. And I just really enjoyed those moments. And I just decided to make a crumble a week for the next decade. I made my first crumble when I was like 11 or 12. Wow. and then when I was at university I was standing outside of an ice cream shop in the middle of winter and they just didn't have any customers and I was thinking to myself is there an opposite of ice cream is there a hot dessert that people could take around and I thought well why don't they make crumble and then I was like well I should make this crumble it's my thing um so that's where the idea came from was just like there's this problem with ice cream businesses I guess and then a love of crumble in general but I um I couldn't see any anyone who had done it in that way of making individual portions of crumbles because crumbles have traditionally always been a sharing dish um and I was really excited to start the idea of like maybe looking into opening a cafe until I realized how expensive it would be I could not understand like you know how anyone manages to open a cafe when they have all the rent to pay all the fit out costs um marketing the hiring and then you've got like business rates on top of things I was like it's just it's so expensive so I did I just stopped doing I just stopped the idea um and I didn't do anything with it for two years because I was 21 when I had the idea and I just thought I'm too young to do this I don't know what I'm doing so I went and I was a restaurant manager in France for a bit and I then worked for a supper club ticketing company when I came back to London and one day I was made redundant from that job because they got bought by a larger company and I felt like I was at ground zero again and so I just decided to strip back the idea completely and go as small as possible and start in a market store.

3:59I read a book called The Lean Startup which essentially says that you shouldn't create a business plan you should basically prove your concept and so I decided to just put out a version of what I thought humble crumble could be and at the time it was actually alcohol infused crumbles because I thought crumble and alcohol two things that the British public love if I put it together that's all in combination turned out not to be very popular at all. I think it confused people. But how did you do this test? So you just open a pop-up? I just opened on a Saturday market in a farmer's market and I just you know I had some crumble with me and I thought this might be how I want to serve it.

4:44So I actually displayed them in cocktail glasses to begin with so you could see through everything. Okay. I originally called it a crumble bar rather than a crumble bakery because I thought the whole fusion between alcohol we tried to be a sustainable business and so i had the tagline of eat responsibly um and so it just confused people and i did have a couple of people who would come up to me and say i don't quite understand what you're selling and so that's it was a real signal to me that i needed to simplify things yeah um but i was still quite stubborn about it and i really wanted people to have like really interesting crumbles and so i actually refused to put apple crumble on the menu for the first year did you like focus on more like plum and spiced crumbles and things that i think taste better than an apple crumble and you were doing the recipe at home yeah doing all the tasks i would make everything at home so i moved back in with my parents after i was made redundant and um so they were living inst alban so i would drive up in the morning into london and sell from the farmer's market there and then drive back but make everything in my parents just you just me um i mean on some days i did have some friends helping me but it was but like cooking and everything yeah experience it was all you it was all me i decided after about a year of doing weekend markets you know i was like maybe i should just see what it's like to put apple crumble on the menu and as soon as i put it on the menu i just started making money i was like wow okay that's the apple crumble there's no way you can run away from it yeah well it was like the simplest lesson i guess is just get you can't tell people what they want so true like people want what they want and you should just give them the best version of that that you can that you can give them um and that's when you just realize okay i'm gonna go to that direction yeah as in so we what we do is we now have um like traditional crumbles so apple crumble and apple and cinnamon crumble rhubarb crumble berry crumbles and then we'll put a monthly special on the menu which is the more of the wild card so for instance we've got strawberries and cream crumble which is obviously a hybrid between the dessert that's had at Wimbledon and then a crumble next month we're going to have a lemon meringue crumble so blueberry in the base crumble topping lemon curd and then a Italian meringue on top how was the transition like for markets to open your new your first shop so when you realize okay now it's time that i can actually have my own shop so how that happened was like so something that you planned no or you didn't plan did you have an investor or you just went for yourself how how that happened so we don't have any investors and we've never we've never taken on any investment um it's just been like a business that's sort of been it grew quite slowly over the first two years and then because I was just doing weekend markets and events and then I was like I need to stop having one foot in the door one foot out the door and I need to have a seven day a week location just because I was like if it's not a viable business every day then to be honest it's probably not worth doing and so I managed to get a spot in Spitalfields Market which was a two by two meter stall and that was my like go hard go home moment i opened and then three days later it was the lockdown which was pretty humbling i have to say wow okay um there was 2019 2020 yeah so march 2020 uh yeah i think i opened on the 16th of march and i think 19th of march we went into lockdown yeah um so yeah i mean there was i pivoted in lockdown but it's probably not that relevant um but came back after um what when we were allowed to come back because open-air markets were allowed to open um restaurants had to be shut yeah i came back to the market and it was completely empty it was just stallholders and a few customers coming through the market but the market had said we're not going to charge anyone rent we just want you to be open so I decided at that point to move my operation so I had previously rented a commercial kitchen one day a week and I was like I can't afford to do that plus I'm also standing around in Spitalfields market all day basically twiddling my thumbs so I'd rather be making something rather than standing around so I moved an oven I moved fridges mixers everything into the two by two meter stall and just started um one cooking on site which brought in people from the smell and then also the theater good I used to have people saying that they just walked into the market because they could smell this buttery crumble and they were just searching for it and I was like oh that seems like a good thing to keep um and then the other thing is I was experimenting with monthly specials um as a way of having something that was limited um provide that scarcity mindset I guess being like I have to go down and try it now rather than in a couple months time so it was actually the third special that I did that went viral it was a pumpkin crumble served inside of a miniature a pumpkin timeout posted about it and i didn't even get a notification because they got my handle wrong and i just suddenly was at this i was at the market and suddenly like a whole queue of people were at my store in a completely empty master i didn't know what it was coming from and they when a customer showed me the post and i was like freaking out because i was like this is amazing but i also was like i only have 10 pumpkins and i've got a queue of 50 people i don't know what going to do and you were by yourself at the point or you have people helping you I had someone helping me at that time yeah but you were the only one like the the CEO the founder you're doing everything the ideas and etc yeah I don't know if you can call yourself a CEO it's just a company of one really but um it was just it was just me and then it was my boyfriend at the time who was just helping out help you yeah so what did you like you saw the queue and then you go like wow this is happening well it was more like reaction like I you know I've got to make more crumble topping i've got a bit more custard it was just i didn't think i really like processed the moment i was like i need to i need to get it i need to serve the customer basically um and the crazy thing about that was that it just led to this snowball moment on social media where i think because humble crumble was the first of its kind it was it was a novel idea but also recognizable to the uk population because they it's the nation's favorite dessert crumble and so i think it was something like wow look at this amazing thing i understand it let's go get it you know when we can or let's go down because it's an open air market we can go there restaurants are shut so we had this huge spike and then all these food influencers were like i want to take a picture of this i want to go there and it just like kind of flooded instagram and tiktok you already have a very strong social media channel we had about 2 000 followers at the time and then with the influencers did like probably they helped a lot they helped a lot awareness because it was like a ugc content for you because for then all the it is like a good package and a good food to take a picture and talk about the experience it's funny because a lot of people are like oh what's your like social media strategies as like how do you run an account i'm like pretty much all of the things you might have seen have been from other people okay so you kind of repurpose it's more like my point around that is that a lot of the people discovered us via you know other channels but they're like they see the product and they're like they're really good at what they do at their marketing it's like but that there may be a strategy behind it but that was you know a lot of you know it captured a moment you know organic as you say yeah because i was looking at the TikTok and I put the hashtag so you guys have just so much content in that organically content which is very unique in the sense that you guys were a brand that was like you have a good product, good food but the social media really elevate and get you the reach and awareness of your product definitely and now you have five stores in London how that growth path starting to like when you start realizing that this is beyond just one shop this is actually it's it's getting the traction yeah and it's getting people like interest we have the social we have the press and you're so young but that doesn't mean that because you're young you cannot you know build a you know a successful business but are you like a risk taker or how how is the process of growth works for you um well i think being my mindset around starting a business i was like i'm so young i don't have much to lose so i didn't have any obligations of like children or a mortgage or anything like that so i was like my risk is actually quite low to start um in terms of and also i was just starting in a farmer's market so i was always like i think i can break even at least you know and i can live with family so my costs are low but when the business was growing i always had this anxiety around is the the hype gonna go down like is this is this thing how do you sustain it but like you know just because people are here now is this something that they're going to be around for in like a year's time two years time and um I think I don't I'm not the most confident person and so to have a lot of confidence in my ideas is is not something that I'm I'm not used to so I actually do credit the growth of Humble Crumble to my partner who is now the CEO of Humble Crumble because he also works in the food industry he's a co-founder of chai guys and um he was just like kim this business is genuinely really unique what you've created is wonderful um and you've got all this interest right now like we need to strike while the iron is hot and you know people might look potentially at what you're selling as a bit of a gimmick because you're in a market stall and you know they haven't quite seen it before some people might get it some people might not get it so we need to go into a physical store and we need to have a presence and we need to be very mindful about the design that we have to like show customers but also to show future landlords like what we can do with a space so our first like proper bakery like bricks and mortar bakery is our one in spitalfields that we're in now and we spent a lot of time making it look quite you know refined like it's all wood yeah it's beautiful and it's got lovely arches and like pendant lights and it's the more like sophisticated of all of our sites the other ones they they all have their own footprint and um like design to it but that one was very intentional to try and be like let's really invest in the site to show people what the brand really is like let it grow up a bit and he's someone who is really good with actually pretty much everything in terms he's very creative but he's also very commercially minded and he studied like business at university and understands more around like finance agreements and things like that where I would be a bit too scared to take on debt but he made me understand that you're taking an asset finance and paying something over five years would actually be really good and help us grow so that was one of the reasons why we didn't have to take on investments we decided to decide to take on debt instead yeah majority and then did you have any understanding of finance when you started the business i mean i could do some basic maths but i i've since done some business courses that have helped me like understand how to read a p &l and you know do like all the accounting stuff I understand it I don't love looking at it but I'm asking this question because when I started the business yeah 10 years ago I didn't have a clue like people say like have you done your P &Ls like what are you talking about what's it's just like what is the P &L yeah uh but I think we as we learn as we grow we need to like be forced to learn because it's important we always have to have someone that understands more than we do exactly and also I guess the whole point of growing a business and a company is this group of people at the end of the day and people should have different skills to you who can maybe help you understand a p &l or look at it for you and then when it comes to sustain because the business has been around now like eight years eight years and then you manage to continue to grow and sustain the business like the clientele and also getting even more attraction i just said like it's a local business but there is a global reach and global awareness which is spectacular for you know for a brand that it's resonating all the counters and people come in here and are interesting to go and experience because they heard or they saw in social media yeah i think the reason why we've been able to sustain the growth is because we're really really passionate about the product and making sure that even if you know if someone from brazil sees humble crumble and then comes through the door and then has a bad crumble you know they're not going to talk about it they're not going to recommend it you know you've got we had the all very organic um moment where people were like wow there's this concept that exists and then all these people came through the door and actually one of the interesting things about the influences that came is they would have conversations with me being like this product looks amazing i did not expect it to taste amazing too because they were saying how their experience of stuff was that it looks good for social media and tastes terrible and i was like well that's such a short like as a a short-term goal i guess it's just to get the the instagram thing but the the real longevity is is the product and yeah you've got to just keep making sure that the product is great um and that's that is why the product is not just the crumble it's a service it's you know the experience is a whole experience yeah it's a tutorial that you said exactly and then how do you keep innovating so because you have to as you said like you have to keep innovating bringing new flavors and special occasions so how what innovation means to you and to your business well innovation is like a core element of like it's one of our values um because i really think if you if you you know stand still that's when you go under um and i think the innovation side of things is the way of just keeping it fun so what we do is um you know we think about one what specials have done really well um and try and analyze why they've done well what we've found is that when a customer can under understand it i think with marketing it's all about understanding they need to understand it instantly so for instance when we do a sticky toffee crumble the customer understands it because they know that they love sticky toffee pudding and they they love they love crumble um same thing with like a trifle crumble like when they have that understanding around it i think it helps us sell them um so that's been an interesting thing to learn but as well i think we just like to just experiment with different things in terms of the flavors like also our team get really involved for instance like this year we came out with the chinese new year special for the first time because one of our team members who's chinese was like I'd love to create this and so we just were like go for it um and you know she introduced us to an Asian pear which I didn't realize existed it's one of those things that gets like harder as you cook it rather than softer which I like I don't understand the science behind it but it was fascinating and it was good it was really good and I don't like pear which so that was like Asian pear I like but yeah so I think it's just like trying to give people an environment where they feel like they can contribute and um you know they get the opportunity to even just try stuff and we encourage everyone to if they have an idea to kind of but i used to very much involved in the product development so you used to participating on creating your own ideas together with your team yeah i think the the i think i i i've now stepped into more of a marketing role and i think they're so tied like the the product that we're putting out and the marketing is so so yes I think I'm very involved in it but I do delegate a lot of stuff so I don't always have enough time to refine down a recipe so some of the team will help with that but you train that team yeah I train the team but also I'm involved in like I taste test with them so what I'll do is if someone wants to come up with a crumble I will go to the sites I'll try the crumble and I'll give them feedback and they'll keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking it until I think it's right and then it won't just be me then everyone in the head office comes and they taste it as well and we have like a group you know discussion around it because it's not just it doesn't just matter what i like so and uh you like in every shop they have their own bakery is doing that it's a fresh it's the same day how do you keep that operation running so smoothly and as a leader so how do you keep your team engaged and providing the excellence in the product as you started back in the days when you're doing your market farming market well i can't take credit for that because um we have an operations team that run the the daily operations of the business and you know the team training etc but you know early days we tried to codify everything that was around humble crumble and actually one of the things about crumble is that it's whilst we're very specific in how we like stuff done we believe we can teach anyone how to make a crumble and so that really allows us to hire people that are the most passionate and most interested rather than not unless sometimes you go to a bakery and they've got really great skills but maybe not the best people skills like um but you know to make a croissant takes three days and you really need to be quite specialized whereas to make a crumble we we're constantly making it in in um we're constantly making crumbles up to demand so it's as fresh as it can be and so we we just make sure that everyone can learn how to make the bake because we deconstruct every element so we can get someone to be like okay you're making custard today now that custard you know or you're on the you're serving people today make sure you like really get your piping done correctly we kind of break it all down into sections sections yeah and why humble um well first i love rhymes and i just thought humble crumble just sounded lovely but i also um really want humble crumble to be a sustainable business as much as it can be operationally it's not always possible to be the best in that but having that as the mindset of let's see if we can constantly try and be better um that's sort of where the humble crumble came into and also it was somewhat a bit of a joke as well I don't know I've sometimes I have I think I have a strange sense of humor but I was like you know you think of a humble crumble you you don't think of anything that's that special but then if you come and you see this absolutely loaded crumble that's beautiful it's like a work of art it's like but that's not very humble is it like it's kind of a thing that people remark upon and have remarked upon as well now like you just did an incredible collaboration with uh mugler fragrance yeah it's a how do you see brand partnerships collaborations is something that you were moving like how do you take on brand partnership let's put this way because i i guess there's probably you get a lot of requests of brands who wanted to collaborate it or influencers wanted to collaborate it yeah how do you filter that in the sense of ensuring that is a good line with the brand and also is a collaboration that's going to add value to home on crumble sure um you're right we've had so many requests to do collaborations over the years um and we've I believe this is our first actual collaboration with the company like wow like we've done like things with maybe other hospitality businesses stuff and like a non-hospitality business um it's the first collaboration that we've done and you know we've said no to a lot because they haven't reflected the values of the brand and like one of the things that we get reached out to a lot is like can you put this on top of a crumble like can you put this sweet on top of the crumble and it's like well actually we make everything from scratch so to buy something to like put on top of the crumble doesn't really feel that brand aligned um and the idea of when Mugla came to us and said you know we're creating these fragrances they're part of the like the gourmand like category that Mugla created of like bringing food into perfume it just felt really right and they were also like you can have complete creative like control on this that we trust what you do which is really nice for a big company especially a big company like l 'oreal so yeah you can get that as often at all absolutely like amazing that they had that faith in us and it ended up just being like a really fun thing because smell and taste are so linked amazing um i found it fascinating i love it smell and then eat and then smell again about how the flavor changed it was just a full-on experience it was one of genuinely one of the most fun things I've done is eating that crumble which is one of the reasons why I'm like I'm so glad we did it and it's such a reason to be like yes to this collaboration but it reminds me like when you say like is it something that you can smell and eat but it's just now it's referring me back what you said when you were at Spetsfield and then people are coming because of the smell when you move the bakery to your shop yeah so that being the smell the the sensorial is always being there but then now putting a fragrance collaboration it just makes everything makes a lot of sense it's something like 90 % of taste is smell yeah so if that's sort of why um champagne glasses are like designed the ones that are round yeah not the ones that are tall the designs like that so that you can put your nose and the bubbles will hit your nose and release the fragrance so you smell it before you actually taste it and that helps elevate the taste experience and it's just like something that I just find fascinating because I've lost my sense of smell before and I lost my sense of taste and it was you know actually horrible trying to eat food it was like just like feeling all the textures yeah no enjoyment so and then that collaboration with makes you excited to take in more collaborations like yeah i think as long as they're the right ones but i will also just say the other one of the other reasons why we haven't done collaborations before is that the team hasn't been large enough to do it and now you now we have a team that's able to like dedicate time away from the bakeries to try and figure out all of the logistics and you know commercials etc around that separate to the running of the business of the bakeries which has been you know pretty demanding over the last six years how many employees do you guys have now almost 100 but that that i just want to say there's a lot of them are part-time so no but it's uh but it's you it's uh it's it's incredible and how do you feel like yourself like when you look back when you're 21 that you had idea but you didn't go through because you're young and then you made redundant and then you started the business when you look it back how how does it make you feel I really don't think about it very much I that might be like not a great answer I'm obviously I'm proud that I've done I I did it I'm proud that I you know I had an idea and I like took the steps to make it happen and I started obviously with the idea of like this is probably going to fail but like let me just try anyway and it's amazing that it led to a success so I'm really grateful for that I'm grateful for myself for trying um but I'm I guess I just I kind of am in a bit of disbelief by it because I my vision for it was to start a small cafe and I went to the street food market to figure out if it was a viable business and then I don't like it kind of took on a life of its own and the business is completely shaped by the customer actually and it's just being like very reactive to what people want and trying to really cater to them that is i also feel like the last you know eight years it has been a lot of just reacting reacting reacting so i don't really take that much time to like pause and reflect and reflect yeah but it's been kind of the most amazing thing to see how many like lives we've touched and you know So both in the good, we're part of people's, yeah, the part of people's stories, both in the good times and the bad times.

30:51And it's just, I didn't quite realize how much, I didn't quite realize how much food meant to people and how much crumble meant to people as well. And like having a treat and a place that's like welcoming. Make you feel, right? Because it's make you feel. And I think that's something that you started doing in your own kitchen with your parents and it's now reaching so many people and the pleasure that they're having in that moment it must feel like yeah incredibly special I mean one of the things like I've had it where um obviously makes me quite sad but we have quite a few of our customers are actually quite ill and they're going through treatments and hospitals and stuff and that we are like their treat at the end of their treatment that's beautiful and um like people have come up to me and said like oh my son has leukemia and this is you know we've come here after the treatment and i just want to say thank you and i'm like i that was not my it was not my intention at all but you're like i don't know what to say like are you welcome but like i'm also like really glad that we could help in some way help in some way yeah that's the end of the day it's not just about the sales it's about how your product is impacting people's life in so many different ways yeah and this is and i think that's when you find your purpose right because like i don't know how you feel about because you know like being a founder and start a new business when we're creating we never know as you said where this is going to lead our career or our life and i don't know for you but for me at the beginning i didn't even know the purpose of what I was doing.

32:31I knew that I wanted to have a market agency and I knew I wanted to create storytelling for brands, but the purpose was not defined. It was just like, let's try and see what it's going to take. And I think looking at your story, it's just like there's so much purpose in what you're doing that is not just selling the product. Yeah, there has to be a why behind the brand. The single founder, your why? I think there's multiple whys like I think we well we exist to make people happy or provide a moment of happiness but I think for me personally it's all about connection it's like crumble's been the thing that's connected me to different people um allowed me to connect with my family allowed me to connect with my friends it's why I've shown love um for the people that I care about um but also I think when when I've seen our customers there'll be people who are like coming and just having a moment for themselves or they're coming with a group of people and they really want to show them this thing that they found and they really love and they want to share they want to share humble crumble with their loved ones and so for me it's about connection um yeah because the day of the day you're connecting the people that are coming to the shop they are they are going groups and families and uh and have you ever thought that you would be like an you let's phrase that better.

33:56Entrepreneurship. Have you ever taught that one day you would be an entrepreneur? The label entrepreneur is something that I thought was for, like, Alan Sugar and maybe Elon Musk and all the really, like, you know, maybe successful men, I guess. But they're doing, like, really – they're running really big companies. and you know when you're someone just setting up in a market store with some crumbles in it I was like I'm not sure I can call myself an entrepreneur um but I'm just someone who's definitely trying something but um I

34:40think I learned about the possibility of running a business from my brother he um he's about five no sorry that's wrong he's nine years older than me and when he came back from university he I think it was during like 2008 like he didn't they they didn't have much uh job opportunities and so he decided to actually train as a mechanic and he loved cars since he was a kid so for him it was the best career yeah and you know he spent a long time like in a pretty unglamorous um role you know fixing cars in the middle of winter and what he would then do is he would come home at the end of the day and he'd take on private clients and so my parents driveway he would be fixing cars and so I would be inside the house watching my tv or something and I just my brother behind me in the driveway would be fixing cars and I managed to see him do that into a point where he was able to save enough money to like then open his own garage and like build a business and so it was like I think that pathway of like running a business to me felt more accessible because I was like you start you start from just the idea and you start from one customer and then that grows and it's a series of really small steps not like straight away straight into this huge company i've got to take on all this investment your brother was your number one inspiration at the beginning i think so i think but i also just like he's i say he's inspired me to sort of think about different ways of like approaching making money so like not necessarily being employed um and so like even when i was younger we would watch like dragon's den together and the idea of starting business was always something that quite excited me i'd even write down the um the questions like the dragons would ask in case i ever went on dragon's den and was able to answer the questions um and like i i haven't really had traditional employment in my life i've had about one year and maybe 18 months of traditional employment but everything else i've been self-employed so i started off as a cleaner from my neighbors and my like friends and family um earning around 10 pounds an hour and then as soon as I finished my GCSEs I became a tutor literally tutoring GCSE students what I just learned was earning 20 pounds an hour and I carried that on until I was at university where I set up a tutoring agency where I took other I just took a commission from other people I found them the the tutors and the students etc I ended up stopping that because I didn't really enjoy it but it was like a fun way of being like how can you make the most money out of like the same amount of time um but at the same time I do sort of wish I'd gone and like worked in a pub or a bakery or something because I think it would have been interesting to have that perspective of being like part of a team and being an employee um that company and like as a woman have you ever felt that because you're a woman i'm telling you your own experience as well that you could not make it or you have people coming to you saying things that make you feel not confident enough to carry on um i think pretty much every time someone's tried to diminish my efforts because i'm a woman it's not made me not want to carry on it's just made me quite angry and if anything it's fueled me to be like i'm gonna prove you wrong um definitely in the early days with uh different food markets then they're run by pretty you know it's pretty old school these markets they're like geezers you know the whole like sexism is like just the whole it's just part of the the of the life there and you know i've had to kind of swallow a hold my tongue i guess um quite a few times because you're like i'm like i want something from you like i need to have a spot here but i needed to but then you know once humble crumble actually built a name for itself like that stopped so it was like i think it was like a battle to prove the worth and then once the worth was proven the sexism stopped i didn't know like what sexism sexism means when i started the business and until someone tells me like it's just this environment shows just like how you're dealing with that it's just so much sex it was like what that actually means because i knew what was happening but i didn't know the word the word yeah and then i was like wow getting getting the word for it like you know actually takes the power away it takes the power away and i was like wait a second i cannot take this yeah but uh at the beginning because it's just so new like right when you're starting a business and again being a woman in your case you're super young my case i'm coming from like brazil is someone that's foreign what she wants to do it here so this is just so many challenges but then once you learn how to navigate into that and then let's prove then they're wrong it's just it is the best feeling yeah and also i think that's not to say that sexism is definitely not a good thing but there is a power in people underestimating you 100 100 and then do you think that your story and your voice and what you have built and why you're going to continue to build what do you think is your responsibility as a woman as you know a young entrepreneur like you're not the word but the reality is that you are do you feel that you have a responsibility on using your voice to help other women to talk about your experience how do you feel about it so i haven't really said this to anyone before but starting humble crumble is my like feminist act wow i love that it's one of the reasons why it's quite pink as well um i think it's you know we're 90 female um in the bakeries in the in the team actually and so i just think it's pretty powerful to have all these women every single day working together and creating like amazing products that you know a company that is now really well regarded and especially in the early days just seeing you know i as soon as we went viral i had to hire a team and it was these um like five 20 year olds that you know they they were meant to be at university but it was covid and so they were all loads of time on their hands yeah and they just like absolutely smashed it all working together in like quite small condition like quite tight market like just getting it done and I was like what a powerful signal this is this like young group of women just just working hard and getting like a lot of um love from people for the product that they're putting out there and then it's all through you that has the ideas as if i mean like through you because you you have the courage to start and having the courage to start you brought this community of young girls together which is very powerful yeah i do sometimes feel like get being like the founder of the business you get so much um praise that's maybe not it's not that it's undeserved but it's just like the company is a group of people it's a group of people and like you know as i'm the most known person in the business um other people's work i get the credit for and it's not fair um so i think that people were lovely but it's so true because no one can succeed alone it's impossible because you can have the idea you can have the vision but if you don't have the people that can do with you or for you it's impossible no it's like i mean at the moment like i i'm not involved in the bakery operations i'm not in the in the team as i as i used to be and you know it's because i have this amazing team that keeps running keeps it running and keeps the quality high and it's really them that's running humble crumble at the moment do Do you think if you take yourself out of the business, the business will run?

43:10It's mostly without you. Because this is a very important question for future. Because again, I'm asking you that question because when I speak with investors or private equity, those conversations, the first question they always ask me is just like, if you remove yourself out of the business do you think the business will continue to be successful or running it alone without you and then sometimes I don't know how yet the answer would be I think it would still be a successful business without me I think you know the team that are there are really passionate about what they do and we have a really great culture and I think as I say innovation is part of it but I think that it's not to say that the soul would go because it definitely wouldn't but i just think i think i'm important to the like you know like the culture in a way of the business and just you know being the being i don't know sometimes i feel like the mom of the business i mean well well done well done you know like good idea like let's let's do that you know giving the validation empowering them right with your energy your soul actually i think the reason i say that is that because we're an independent business it's different you're not creating a business based off of what investors want and so the metrics for success yes they are also commercial but it's not that's not the fundamental reason it's around that feeling it's around creating something for the customer and you know because we don't have investors for instance we we can pay people the like in just like leading industry levels that we're one of like 200 hospitality businesses that pay the living at the london living wage um and that's not that's not to discredit other hospitality businesses it's really hard to the hospitality is really struggling at the moment and the margins are thin but like i think if we had investors they would probably be like you're paying people too much you know or you're paying too much for these your ingredients and so for sure you would have that so i think if i stepped away in that capacity i think something might shift yeah and that's that's the thing where i'm like i don't think i could sell the business because the even if like it's sometimes really challenging and you know i need a break i really need a break for a holiday where i'm not disrupted by work um i i wouldn't want someone who to come and buy the business to then just change what's made it special um because they're looking at a p &l on the bottom line and the margin and trying to make that as big as possible as big as possible so you don't have future plans so your future plans is continue to be independent or you just go with to see why this is gonna take you see where it takes us i mean like we yeah i think we just want to see where things go um i i've never created a business plan so to put it that way i just always like see what see what this is gonna obviously plan like the next six months and stuff yes not this is where the five-year vision is or anything like that i think like nowadays it's very difficult to plan the five years so it's like i think like back in the days you wouldn't even ask that question for people their interview like where do you see yourself in five years and then it's the same as the business where do you see the business five years but i think the world is changing so rapidly especially with technology that is so difficult to kind of forecast more than six months i always say that to my you know to my partner it's just like it's a let's forecast the next six months let's plan the next six months because the world is evolving consumer is changing technology is like every single day is a new tool is a new ai it's just it's it's just very very more at least the way i see this is more of a challenge to to plan long-term future it's also hard to plan when you don't necessarily know what's possible it's so true i love that yeah so i mean i think that's been one of my things as being someone who started at 23 having very little experience it's like i don't know what's possible i don't know how i started don't know how a lease works like i don't understand this what is a break clause what is rent free like all these things and like learning things so like as you learn i guess it's easier to plan the future but i think that's where i think a lot of people get hung up when they start a business is they think they need to know everything and it's the thing that's gonna make you never start is just being like i need to constantly learn before i even know what i need to be learning no i would definitely say just go for it because you're gonna learn with with the process and then like the the mistakes and the failures will be the bad thing that's gonna happen to you because it's when you're really going to to learn and is important of of the process if you have to say three the biggest learnings like let's say three learnings that you think that have changed you as a as a human as a big question for since you started the business so if you have looked like three learnings that you think that humble and crumble change you forever um

48:56i don't know if i have three but one that really comes to mind is that

49:04um i'm not sure if i know how to define it properly but i've had this thought around you know we serve a crumble and it's an apple crumble with custard and you know one person will absolutely love it and one person will hate it but it's the exact same product and it's made made made completely in the same way and so like reputation and people's perception of something is is entirely down to the individual and their preferences and so you can't please everybody and I think that's the thing when I first started out I really wanted to please everybody and it would really upset me when someone didn't like the crumble but I'm like it's it's difficult to please everyone you can't please everyone and I think that's just something to know I guess that's why you know you haven't you haven't you have your niches and you have your customers and people that love you and you know some people that be like oh that's that's not for me and is that okay and that's fine exactly because there's so many things like that I don't like but it's not that it's not going to change other ones businesses yeah it's not like I don't like the business or anything like that it's just you know it's personal preference um so i'd say that's probably one of them i mean i think that humble crumble is just a testament of the whole like just start and um like iterate along the way and your business model will shape it's by the customers if you get constant feedback from customers and i think being in a in a market and literally face to face with people and you can even if they're not talking to you you can see their their body language their facial expressions etc when they're looking at your menu for instance it's like um very important to get a lot of feedback i'm trying to think of a third one it's not coming to me at the moment i said three just because i thought it was a nice number well the other thing is lesson is that you don't have to say something just because it's asked exactly exactly king it's just like you know i've been following your journey and then i saw you on a podcast and i said to andrea can you please figure it out and bring into this podcast because it's just like and i know you explained to me about why humble but i think you're very humble yeah i get that a lot you are very humble and i think that's my takeaway today it's just like the humble crumble like it's it's it's a it's the the personalization of who you are because you're extremely humble and this is just so unusual to see it from a founder from someone that created a business that is so successful because i've interviewed so many people and i'm a founder myself and i know what it takes but it's not everyone that can have the courage to be so humble as you are and be so successful and then you have a very very soft soul and heart and it's beautiful and you're very well deserved to be where you are thank you, thank you so much for being here today and take your time because I know you're very busy but you took the time to be here, there's someone enjoying as well the nap here guys if you're like listening to these episodes it's just like it's fascinating to hear from King herself the story of of Humble Crumble and how she, you know, created this amazing business that connected people, that makes people feel good about it and the incredible product.

52:41So if you haven't tried Humble Crumble, I'm sure that after listening to this episode, the first thing you're going to do is to go to one of the Humble Crumble stores here in London. And if you're not following us yet, make sure you do on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Podcast, Amazon. And please follow us on Instagram, Beyond Marketing, in the podcast King. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you.