Small Business Super Heroes - Magnificent Marrow

The coronavirus pandemic disrupted businesses all across the country and made it extremely difficult for some to continue trading. This series highlights the businesses that have been most affected by lockdown restrictions but despite the adversities faced, managed to adapt and thrive. Not only is this an opportunity for them to showcase their resilience, it is also a spotlight on these small business super heroes that deserve some love post-pandemic. For this week’s interview, we spoke to Emma Soulsby, Co-Founder of Magnificent Marrow, a fresh food and flower delivery company.

Magnificent Marrow is a family-run delivery service bringing you the freshest food and flowers to your doorstep. Serving boroughs throughout Greater London, the surrounding counties and now nationwide, they deliver a wide range of fruit, vegetables, flowers and plants, focusing on quality and convenience to keep their customers’ cupboards well-stocked and their homes bright.

1. How did the pandemic and lockdown restrictions affect your business?

2020 was set to the best year so far of Emma Soulsby Flowers with some amazing weddings booked including our first destination wedding in the south of France. The week of lockdown all my brides called to postpone their weddings. It was such an anxious time for myself and my brides but all my clients were so amazing, they just wanted to help and do what was best for my business, offering to pay deposits with the belief that they would only be postponing their wedding for a few months. 

I was terrified, everything I had poured my heart and soul into was crumbling right in front of my eyes. Everything I had built was lost in a matter of weeks. Initially it paralysed me, I found I couldn’t do anything but just contact all the people I owed money to and tell them that they wouldn't be getting paid any time soon. 

Luckily I didn’t have any staff so I didn’t have to let anyone go but it was still so hard to see freelancers and the general wedding industry fall apart and have no idea when it might end. This is why when we started Magnificent Marrow I made a conscious effort to hire those that I knew and those who had lost jobs in the pandemic. My wedding PA, Nadine now works with me on MM, the take down crew I hired as our drivers, and we even have an actress and a guy who worked in theatre working in our shop. I know what it is like to feel the fear of losing everything and not being able to take control of it because the situation is so unprecedented. 

My partner and co-founder of MM, Leigh Daley is an amazing florist and worked at The New Covent Garden Flower Market - overnight the market was closed. The borders were closed as well so trying to get flowers was a real struggle. Leigh was furloughed and his career seemed so uncertain.

I eventually got a government grant which paid for the rent for my flower unit, paid outstanding wages, props bills that I had and all that money went on the flower side of things. There was nothing left to put into the new business. However, I had just sold my old house in the North which gave us funding to launch Magnificent Marrow. I know I was so lucky to have that extra funding but at the same time it was scary putting it into a business that we had literally created overnight.

2. How did you adapt or pivot your business to continue operating?

We pivoted by launching Magnificent Marrow. The Saturday morning after lockdown I was at home just watching the news. I saw a veg market in the north talk about how people were struggling to get food and that gave me the idea. We could help all those people who were stressed and worried about getting fresh food. Leigh came home not long after and as I went to tell him my idea, he said exactly the same thing at the same time. That’s when I thought, ‘OK this isn’t a crazy idea. We could do this.’ We built a website that week, contacted all the suppliers that we knew from the market, and by the Wednesday we had launched. By Friday I was delivering the first MM boxes.

The night before our first deliveries I didn’t go to bed. We couldn't get printer ink because of the lockdown, so at midnight on Thursday I was handwriting my delivery notes. And then we had to be at the market at 1pm to pick the produce for our boxes. Looking back it was crazy how it all started, we were using the forecourt at the fruitmarket of one of Leigh’s contacts to park our van which we were then packing the boxes out the back of. We had 20 orders the first day and I delivered them all myself.

At the start, fruit and veg prices were high because of the demand. We were only offering three types of boxes - Fruit box, Veg box and Salad box plus eggs… people were buying 60 eggs at a time! Leigh’s experience of working at the market and pricing meant that we were able to balance our costs. 

I called in all the favours I could think of. High profile people who I had given free flowers for events, I contacted them and asked them to shout about us on Instagram. I used my Emma Soulsby Instagram account and shouted about the launch of MM to my 10k followers and just asked anyone I knew to spread the word. At the time people were frightened about the whole situation and they were scared they weren’t going to be able to get food, so people were happy to talk about us. 

3. What inspired you to keep going, despite the difficulties of lockdown?

For those who own independent and small businesses it isn’t just a job, it is our whole lives. Leigh and I work every hour of the day, seven days a week to make Magnificent Marrow a success and to bring a unique service to our customers and local community - we have only had one day off in the last year which was Christmas Day. When we first started we believed it would be a short term way to make a living while also helping provide good quality, fresh food to the public during a difficult time. But as time went on it has become a passion and a business that we adore and want to grow and make a huge success of. 

4. How will this change your business going forward?

I will be running Magnificent Marrow alongside Emma Soulsby Flowers, while Leigh will be working full time at Magnificent Marrow. Now that hopefully weddings and events will be allowed to happen I plan to do both. I guess for us, the silver lining of the pandemic is that it forced us to start a new, wonderful business that had the pandemic never happened we probably wouldn’t have started. 

5. What advice would you give to yourself one year ago?

Don’t let the fear get to you. It is terrifying. Doing something we hadn’t planned to do and ploughing all our money into something that we created in a week with no business plan or strategy.  We are constantly trying to make our offering better and we have done this by listening to people who are experts in their area and this has meant that we have aggressively expanded the business. Because everything has moved so fast it has meant we often don't have time to appreciate how far we have come but the plus side is that it means that we also don’t have much time to listen to the fear.

To show support for Emma, Leigh and the Magnificent Marrow team and learn more about their business, you can head to the website and Instagram page.