You're about to judge whether you can trust me with your business.

Good. You should

Two decades inside the rooms where world famous brands get made.

Agencies. Global brands. The full machinery.

Then I built something of my own. By hand. On a shoestring.

It got into Vogue, onto Ottolenghi's pass, loved by royalty and onto a superyacht.

Here's what that looked like.

My husband made the ovens. I made everything else.

The brand. The pricing. The press strategy. The pivot from B2B to D2C during lockdown.

A decade bootstrapped. A bit of funding along the way. Then we raised close to £500k.

Decided the timing wasn't right. Made a clean break. More on that later.

Here’s what Harrison Ovens looked like.

Operations, New Product Dev + Financial Strategy, Planning and Managment

I didn't just build the brand. I built the business around it.

Every operational function. All of it in house.

  • Team building and recruitment

  • Supplier negotiation and management

  • New product development from brief to launch

  • UK deliveries, International logistics and supply chain

  • Ecommerce and studio management

On the finance side:

  • Investor-grade financial model built with our Fractional CFO, Dave - an ex-KPMG forensic accountant. P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, depreciation schedules. Month by month. He taught me so much.

  • £25k government startup loan

  • £50k Kent County Council grant. Three rounds of pitching. Final pitch to 12 people with Q&A.

  • Close to £500k raised in private equity. Decided the timing wasn't right.

One person holding everything together while the product got made in the workshop next door.

Brand Strategy and Positioning

I built the brand from scratch. No agency. No brand consultant.

Premium luxury positioning. That single decision shaped everything else. The price point. The press targets. The clients we went after. The ones we said no to.

I commissioned market research across 3 sectors: outdoor cooking, professional kitchen equipment, British luxury brands. All 3 were growing. We sat at the intersection of all 3.

Walpole Group Brands of Tomorrow

The Walpole Group runs a competitive programme for British luxury brands. Application, website assessment, pitch deck, live pitch to a panel of board members at Mishcon de Reya.

12 brands accepted from hundreds. And we were one of them in 2024.

The mentoring covered funding, IP, global export and brand building at the highest level. Rolls Royce. Bentley. Burberry. Same programme.

I bring that knowledge directly into my clients' businesses.

Creative Direction - Brand visual story-telling and TOV

I built the visual identity from scratch.

Every element designed to sit alongside luxury British brand like Bentley, Burberry and Aston Martin. Not to look like them. To belong in the same conversation, within the same audience.

I wrote the brand story, directed the tone of voice, locked everything into brand guidelines. Then I directed every shoot. Every product image. Every lifestyle photograph.

The website. The catalogue. The configurator.

All of it briefed, directed and signed off by me.

No creative agency. No brand consultant.

One person with decades of experience who knew exactly what it needed to look like and made sure it did - with the help of very talented chef and photographer friends!

Marketing, Events + PR - D2C

Instagram gave us direct global reach.

10,000 followers. Every one the right person - niche targeting.

D2C came during lockdown when hospitality died.

We had to pivot - fast!

We got the £25K bounce-back and we built a new brand ‘Harrison at Home’ and developed a new product for the garden ‘The Harrison Atom’.

We launched at Chelsea Flower Show.

Won the RHS 5-star award in 2022.

Won it again in 2023.

The press came to us.

Chef James Cochran - Meatopia Festival, London

Image courtesy of Elle Decor USA - full page feature.

The Chelsea Flower Show fan-base - they had a theme.

Brian May - Rock Royalty- Queen

Doninic West - Mock Royalty

(Prince Charles in The Crown)

Queen Elizabeth II

Actual royalty. Beatrice loved the ovens too!

B2B sold itself.

Ottolenghi had one.

Corrigan had one.

Atherton followed.

We never had to discount or give an oven away.

We never made a cold sales call.

Who bought them.

Global reach

The orders came in without a sales team.

UK. Europe. USA. Asia. Australia.

The Hamptons. The Bahamas. St Maartens. Mallorca. Biarritz. Zurich. Singapore. Amsterdam. Stockholm. Lisbon. Miami. Dallas. Los Angeles. Harlem. Ghent. Edinburgh.

Superyachts.

The Estée Lauder family. Billionaires we'll never name.

No paid ads. No outbound. No distributor.

Just a product people told each other about.

USA - Barcelona Wine Bars

We worked with the Department for International Trade to crack the US market.

They flew us to North Carolina. We ran a charcoal oven cooking workshop for chefs from across America.

We came home with a 20-oven deal from Barcelona Wine Bar Group. 20 restaurants across Charlotte, Miami, Austin and Raleigh.

No cold calls. No US distributor. Just the product, the cooking, and the room.

The Superyacht.

Our ‘Icon’ oven is on this boat.

Shahid Khan’s superyacht Kismet II.

The worlds 2nd largest, the first with a charcoal oven.

In partnership with Lurssen Yachts.

Lots and lots of technical meetings.

The honest story of what happened next.

We were flying. Revenue doubled for the eighth year running. Premium editorial coverage. Serious investor conversations. We were confident.

We borrowed to fund our second year at Chelsea, the R&D and the marketing launch for our biggest product yet.

Then the Liz Truss mini-budget happened.

Mortgage rates doubled. Consumer spending stopped. Chelsea didn't return what it should have. I was so deep in investor conversations I took my eye off the cashflow.

We started the business at the most unsettled time. Brexit. Covid. The Suez Canal crisis. We'd bent and not broken every time.

But like many wonderful British luxury businesses, we relied heavily on consumer confidence. And that's what let us down.

Trying to save our beautiful business burnt us out. We made a clean break. What a ride.

Sometimes you can't see around the corner. That's not failure. That's founder life. These were the best years of our lives. Just ensure you have fun on the journey.

I set up FFS so I can keep my eye on the ball.

While you make the thing.