Edwina Mill, a mum-of-three and former part-time preschool teacher, had no idea her love of baking would turn into the huge success it is today.
Raised on a rural property in southern New South Wales, Edwina said she grew up around a mum who was “always baking” and a grandma who “always had tins of homemade biscuits”.
Her own experience started with baking a few cakes for birthdays and weddings that helped bring in a few hundred dollars extra a year.
After having her third child, the mum and part-time teacher, who now lives in Inverell in rural NSW with her husband and children, lost interest in baking cakes but had the idea to try her hand at iced biscuits in her spare time.
“I’d seen them around, people liked the personalised monogramming, but there was nothing that was local, so I thought I might give it a go,” she said.
“I started on my Instagram page which attracted local interest and I started to get some local orders.”
From this “modest” start five years ago, she now has 4000 followers and got a major boost 12 months ago when she signed up to Buy from the Bush, a campaign that started to help businesses in rural areas cope after drought hit NSW.
“I was featured 12 months ago almost to the day and I was told to brace myself,” she said. “I had an absolute influx of messages. At that point I didn’t have a website, so people were contacting me on social media.
“I was sitting on the couch with my husband writing down the orders as they came through,” she explained to news.com.au. “In the initial two months I made 10,000 biscuits.”
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While looking after her three young children and managing the massive influx of orders, Edwina had the help of an “unpaid team of friends and family” as well as one employee to help make dough and pack the biscuits.
“I had friends and family who dropped everything and flew up here to help. It was a real team effort,” she said.
Her sister helped her build a website to cope with the orders that continued to roll in. “Once the website was up and running, it was an absolute game-changer,” she said. “People can go online and put in their orders and that streamlined everything.”
It went from “physically writing down orders one by one” to then connecting with Australia Post and being able to print labels “instead of scribbling on boxes”.
“We thought, let’s do this for six months and see how it goes,” Edwina recalls. “It’s been very overwhelming, very exciting though, and I’m so grateful for Buy from the Bush team for this incredible opportunity.”
She’s made around 30,000 biscuits this year and can hardly keep up with the number of orders coming through. “It’s getting to the point where I’ll need to employ someone to help me,” she said.
Edwina has landed corporate orders – including big businesses like Qantas – which meant baking thousands of biscuits from scratch.
While the corporate orders have slowed down over the pandemic, Edwina said COVID-19 has not deterred business. She admits it’s been a busy time having three children at home during COVID while orders have picked up because more people are at home.
Edwina recently launched a wholesale range with her biscuits stocked in various retail stores.
Being preedominately a “one-woman show”, the big challenge for Edwina has been finding the time to run the business while being a busy mum. “I’m juggling everything. I make biscuits, do the bookwork, manage the website and ensure I’ve go the stock levels,” she said, but is quick to credit her husband for his support.
“Our house is like a commercial kitchen and our living room is like a storage warehouse with boxes everywhere,” she laughs.
Edwina decided to give up her long-term teaching career about six months into the Buy from the Bush success.
Since launching the Christmas range just a week ago, Edwina has had about $10,000 in sales come through in that week alone, she revealed.
Being local and offering a handmade product has been the point of difference that has helped the business grow.
“Buy from the Bush has been incredible to give my little business the great exposure to the rest of Australia. The new marketplace has opened up a whole lot of new and repeat customers,” she said.
“It has completely changed my business from a small-scale local biscuit business to now sending hundreds to thousands of handmade iced biscuits all over Australia each and every week.”
Buy from the Bush founder Grace Brennan said the program has connected about 350 rural businesses to urban shoppers in the past year.
When Grace launched the Instagram account around a year ago, she was astounded to get 100,000 followers in just the first month.
“It tapped into a real appetite in the city to help people in the bush,” she explained. “It enabled people in their loungerooms in Sydney to help out businesses in the country.”
Some of the businesses, including farmers and local artists, have seen huge growth very quickly.
“Some of the artists, after we shared their work, would make more in one night compared to what they would do in a whole year,” she said.
One farmer saw his dried fruit product make $40,000 in 24 hours, she explained.
“We see real significant sales for these businesses,” she said. “We’d feature a hat and the retailer would sell out. I’ve had wholesale companies thanking me for the campaign because their stockists in regional Australia are doing so amazingly.”
What started as an Instagram campaign has grown into a partnership with PayPal that Grace said is “creating some permancy, connecting bush businesses globally”.
Grace believes people have got on board because they like to support local Australian businesses. “People are wanting to connect to the story instead of mass produced items,” she said.
More than 200 Australian rural and regional businesses have signed up to the Buy from the Bush PayPal marketplace since it was launched last week.
PayPal’s recent e-commerce index 2020 research found Australians are backing homegrown businesses and brands in critical times of need with two-in-five Australians consciously supporting local businesses to help them recover from the pandemic.
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