Ecommerce / Food & Drink
Williams Handbaked
Turning a much-loved Christmas brand into a business that sells all year round.
Williams Handbaked is a family bakery in the heart of Lancashire, famous for its Eccles cakes, luxury biscuits, flapjacks and traybakes. Generations in, it has built its name on proper, handmade baking and a loyal following who treat its products as a treat worth giving.
Like a lot of food brands, its commercial year revolved around one moment in the calendar. Christmas gifting was strong and dependable, but demand fell away the rest of the year. The ambition was clear: protect everything that makes the brand special while turning it from a seasonal gift into something people buy all year round, for themselves as much as for others.
The hardest ten months of the year.
We came on board for Q4, the busiest and least forgiving period of the year, with two jobs at once. First, make the absolute most of the Christmas gifting peak, when demand is high but competition and cost are at their worst. Second, and far harder, prove that everyday demand could be built in the quiet months from January onwards, all on a deliberately small budget.
For a gifting brand, Christmas almost sells itself. The real test, the one that decides whether a seasonal favourite becomes a year-round business, is the other ten months. That was the brief we set ourselves.
The strategy behind the results.
Our guiding principle went against the grain: treat Williams as a year-round brand that happens to have a big Christmas, not a Christmas brand that goes quiet. Everything ran as one full-funnel system across Google and Meta, not a set of disconnected campaigns.
Through peak we leaned hard into gifting intent, capturing people actively searching for hampers and food gifts on Google Shopping and Search, and putting the brand in front of gift-buyers on Meta at the moment they were shopping. Creative was built around occasions and the bestselling ranges so the message always matched the moment.
Out of season we changed gear entirely. Always-on prospecting kept building awareness with new audiences, a steady cadence of fresh creative stopped anything fatiguing, and a disciplined test-and-learn programme found the products, messages and moments that drive everyday, non-gift purchases. Every pound was measured against real sales, so we could cut what did not work and reinvest into what did, scaling the model only once it had earned it.
The numbers that matter.
The result is a brand that grows all year round, not just in December. Since we took over, every single month is up year on year. The Christmas peak grew again, and the traditionally quiet months from January onwards more than doubled.
That is the real prize: proven, repeatable demand across the whole calendar, and a model built to keep scaling.
Want results like Williams Handbaked?
We will build the plan, run the channels and report on what actually matters: your commercial growth.