Bradfords Bakers was founded in Glasgow in 1924. For much of the twentieth century the bakery traded from multiple locations in and around the city; its Sauchiehall Street branch was, for a time, the largest retail bakery in the UK. Success built by the second and third generations of the Bradford family looked secure, but the 2008 banking crisis and subsequent recession proved too much for the store estate. By 2012 the family had begun permanently closing its high-street doors.

Claire McGoldrick, the fourth-generation Bradford now running the business with her husband James, refused to let the company end there. In 2006 the couple had already launched an online branch, allowing customers across the UK and beyond to order baked treats and gifts. When the shops closed, that online channel became Bradfords Bakers’ lifeline. Claire and James redefined the business as an e-commerce gift company, best known today for its hampers.

The pivot also created space for new brands. In 2014 Claire and James founded Send Them Balloons and Send Them Cupcakes to showcase the company’s wider offering and reach new customers. In 2024 Bradfords Bakers marked its centenary: a century that has seen financial ruin, a devastating fire, post-Brexit supply-chain disruption and a global pandemic. The business remains small—employing just 12 staff, 11 of them women—but the team now dispatches hundreds of gifts nationwide every week. Here, Claire shares how resilience and agility have kept her family business alive.

Tell us about you

My name is Claire McGoldrick, and I am the fourth-generation family member to run our business. I grew up with the family business and learned baking and confectionery from a young age from my brother and my father, who managed the bakery in its third generation. I never formally studied bakery or confectionery; everything I know came from my father, a craft baker and confectioner.

I joined the company officially in my late teens as an office manager and became a director at 21 in 1992. James owned an IT company that looked after the technical side of our business, which is how we met. We married in 2002 and he joined the company the following year. He focused on technical innovation: together we founded the online branch and created the Bakery ATM, essentially a vending machine that sold fresh cupcakes, which we placed in Glasgow’s St Enoch Centre.

After we had to close our stores, we kept the business afloat and went on to found Send Them Cupcakes and Send Them Balloons. We still live in Scotland and have a son and a daughter.

Why did you start your business?

In the cases of Send Them Balloons and Send Them Cupcakes, we wanted to tell the world that we offered more than hampers. We wanted to reach new customers, and because we already had the e-commerce systems for Bradfords Bakers, it was straightforward to create the two new companies. It made fantastic business sense.

Since we already baked cupcakes as part of Bradfords Bakers, Send Them Cupcakes was simple to launch in June 2014. For Send Them Balloons, we just had to source balloons and the means to inflate and box them for safe delivery. Both cupcakes and balloons were niche markets, so they were easy to enter, and more than a decade on we still face few major competitors.

Send Them Balloons also benefits from its sister companies: we send free gifts with balloon orders over a certain value. These can be vanilla cupcakes, personalised chocolate bars, small chocolate fudge cakes or doughnuts, depending on the order. Because we already have the bakery attached, this is easy to offer and sets us apart.

In the case of Bradfords Bakers, the business was 88 years old in 2012 when we had to start closing our stores. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather had given so much to manage it. I wanted to honour the hard work they had put in over the decades, and to do that we had to keep fighting and adapting to bring the business into a form that could survive. It was difficult and a massive change, but I’m glad we did it. Now Bradfords Bakers and its sister companies are flourishing.

What are your values?

Agility and resilience. These have been, and still are, our redeeming assets as we face adversity. After the banking crisis wiped out our stores, we showed resilience by refusing defeat; we showed agility by completely altering our business model to trade solely online.

We continue to practise agility and resilience as we face the pressures affecting small businesses across the UK. Post-Brexit rules disrupted our access to some packaging materials, so we adapted by sourcing more from UK suppliers. That was a costly short-term solution, but it kept deliveries moving. More recently, inflation and rising energy costs have forced us to review every process, negotiate harder with suppliers and look for efficiencies while protecting quality. The ability to adapt quickly is still what keeps us trading.

What are the toughest challenges?

Through my time as a director of Bradfords Bakers, we have seen many challenges, and I’m pleased to say we have overcome them all.

In December 2001 a fire at one of our branches destroyed the offices and 60% of the building. Rebuilding was difficult because we lost a lot of equipment that produced traditional items, so those offerings were unavailable for a time. The fire hit just weeks before Christmas, which made it feel even more devastating.

Of course, the recession was beyond challenging—it propelled us into administration. Recovery was slow; once we stabilised, we focused on taking care of our customers and developing the business.

Brexit restricted our access to packaging and added paperwork and delays. The pandemic brought further disruption, but it also created opportunity. Demand for delivery services surged during lockdowns, and we were able to double our staff from six to 12. We were glad to offer employment at a time of such insecurity. Today we are focused on retaining those customers and keeping the business resilient through the cost-of-living pressures that many households and small firms are feeling.

Your best piece of advice?

Be stubborn. When you get into business, you’re going to feel a lot of pushback and sometimes, no matter how good your idea is or how sound your business model is, you’ll probably experience failure to some degree. That doesn’t mean you or your business are failures. So be stubborn, push yourself back up when you’re knocked down, adapt, survive and keep going.