When Lise Madsen announced she wanted to study pastry making instead of going
to university, her father was not amused.
She said: “My father was against it because I had a very good baccalaureate
exam result and he thought it was wasted on making cakes. He thought I
should be a lawyer or something like that.”
Fortunately, her mother could see the wisdom of doing something she was
passionate about and Madsen was allowed to pursue her dream.
The middle one of three children, Madsen was born and brought up in Denmark,
where her father was a construction engineer and her mother a teacher.
Halfway through her baccalaureate she took a year out to work as an au pair
in France, where she discovered French pastries and, more importantly,
Gaston Lenôtre, a French pastry chef renowned for the high quality of his
products.
As a child, Madsen had always loved baking and as a teenager she worked in a
hotel at weekends making desserts. So when she left school at 18 she headed
straight back to France, having enrolled on a two-year course at Lenôtre’s
pastry school in Paris.
After one year she moved on to a management-training course within the
organisation and ended up staying a total of five years, opening a store for
Lenôtre in Germany. She left in 1992 at the age of 24 to move to London to
be with an English boyfriend.
“I was a kept woman for three months and then I went crazy with boredom,” said
Madsen. “I missed having a professional stimulation.”
She got a job with a chain of tea rooms but resigned after three months
because working there was such a miserable experience after the commitment
to high quality to which she had become used. .
So she wrote a letter to the chef and restaurateur Albert Roux, who she knew
followed very high standards of quality, asking for his advice.
“To my big surprise, Albert wrote back and said he thought he could offer me a
job. It turned out he’d trained at the pastry school as well and knew
Lenôtre very well, and so that was enough of a reference.”
Roux gave her a job managing his Roux Britannia restaurant in London and she
stayed there two years until the restaurant was sold. By this time her
relationship with the English boyfriend had ended, but Madsen wanted to stay
in Britain.
She worked for several companies as a consultant and project manager,
including china manufacturer Thomas Goode until, in 2000, at the age of 33,
Madsen decided she wanted to start up a business of her own.
She said: “It was a combination of desire for independence and having enough
professional confidence to do it.”
Madsen decided to make organic cakes that instead of being healthy but bland
were full of rich, “sinful” ingredients. “I thought there had to be a market
for these products because I couldn’t find them myself as a consumer,” she
said. “They were normal cakes. There was nothing weird about them, they were
not sugar-free or low fat, they were just sinful organic cakes.”
She sold her flat to give her some money to live on while the business got
going and raised £70,000 from friends and her previous employers at Thomas
Goode in return for 17.5% of the equity after her investors valued her
business idea at £400,000.
Then Madsen found an industrial unit in Hammersmith, west London, got a grant
for £320,000 from the London Development Agency and started making her cakes
in 2001. She said: “I spent a lot of time developing recipes and redoing
them until I was satisfied. I remember working on a chocolate cookie all
night until the sun came up. I was just so determined to get it right.”
Her first customer was Planet Organic, the organic food-shop chain. She made
muffins, brownies, flapjacks, cookies and biscotti under the brand name
Buttercup Bakery and drove round on a scooter delivering them.
Sales went well. Madsen registered the website name for her business and
designed a logo, but when she applied for trademark protection she
discovered that a bakery in the north of England had already
trademark-protected a sentence using the name buttercup in the category of
flour confectionery.
She ignored the problem for about a year, but when the other bakery threatened
to sue she realised she had to take action.
So she changed the name of her business to Honeyrose, which was the closest
flower she could find to a buttercup, a move that enabled her to keep her
existing logo.
Fortnum & Mason and Waitrose have now also taken on the Honeyrose Bakery
range, putting them in 110 stores. Turnover this year is expected to be £3m,
and Madsen gives away 5% of annual profits to worthwhile causes through the
charitable organisation she has set up, Yellow Flower Foundation.
Her biggest mistake, she said, was starting out with too little capital. “In
hindsight I should have raised more money and kept fewer shares. I would
probably have been able to grow the company quicker initially and it
wouldn’t have been as stressful.
“I think I had this attitude of I can do it all myself. But starting with too
low an investment meant the first two years were a nightmare with cash-flow
issues. I owed a huge amount of money to the PAYE; at one point they were
financing the business. We came very close to the edge.”
She also worked three months in a row without taking a day off. She did,
however, manage to meet her husband four years into the business and he
recently joined the company as sales and marketing director.
Now aged 40 and married with two children, Madsen thinks the secret of her
success has been determination. “You’ve got to be strong. I started on my
own without a business partner and it was extremely stressful at the
beginning because, while I had total freedom, there was an enormous burden
that I couldn’t share with anyone.”
She has this advice for others. “Start with a lot of conviction and don’t
listen to people who say it can’t be done.
“Have confidence in yourself and if you think you’re on to something that’s
right then stick to it.”
