Fourth-generation Scottish family firm loses one-tenth of sales to Brexit

Bradfords Bakers was founded in Glasgow in 1924 and grew over the years to become something of an institution after bringing the Miss Cranston name back to the city centre.

Its retail shops, however, closed through the recession in 2013 and since then the gift shop has been operating completely online under Claire McGoldrick – the fourth-generation Bradford to run the business – and her husband James.

He told The National that the complication of Brexit and dealing with the new regulations and paperwork for shipping to EU countries had hit the company’s income.

“You’re looking around about the 10% mark and we’re lucky in a sense that the UK market’s been very big for us at the moment and it’s purely and simply because of Covid,” he said.

READ MORE: Scots innovators create 'world's first' plant-based water bottle

“People need to send gifts for loved ones, so that’s offset the Brexit problems at the moment.

“And 10% doesn’t sound a lot to people, but it is a lot because companies don’t tend to work on massive profit margins and therefore once you shave that off it starts to create issues.”

Since the UK left the EU in January, the biggest impact has been on Bradfords’ sales to Europe, with the need for added certification for their products becoming – overnight – more expensive and time-consuming.

Added to this is the levy that EU customers could be hit with on delivery – which could be more than the cost of the parcel itself.

McGoldrick, the company’s MD, said: “The difficulty is that pre-Brexit all we did was simply send the goods which were things like hampers, with things like cakes that we make, jams, shortbread, cheese, all that sort of thing.

“Because of the way this is now being implemented, what’s happening is if we try and send for example a hamper that has a bottle of wine in it, with cheese, crackers and stuff like that, we can list the contents the way we do for America. That’s fine because we’ve got all the paperwork. But they are looking for certificates for certifying things like the cheese and the wine – they’re implementing rules for large businesses that ship that type of products in bulk.

“If you were a company like Walkers sending an entire lorry load of the shortbread ... they’d say it’s £150 to certify the whole truck, pretty much the same product and it’s done. But that truck could be holding £100,000 worth of goods so in the scheme of things it’s just a bit of paperwork.

“But when you start talking about what we do on a small scale or any other internet retailer that may be sending small quantities ... they then turn around and say, ‘we’re not going to accept that because we require you to have these food certificates for each shipment’.

“So the cost of that buries your business.”

READ MORE: Scot sets up successful textiles firm after losing her job in the pandemic

Bradfords has a number of corporate customers, and McGoldrick said that while international orders were still being made, those to Europe had caused the most problems.

They might want an order split between different locations – perhaps to a couple of locations in the EU with most of the order to a non-European destination, which could make the whole process much more expensive and time-consuming for the 12-person operation.

McGoldrick feared some of that income could be lost forever, despite their attempts to deal with it: “We’ve done a lot to mitigate this but we’ve got to be pragmatic and say that market could be gone forever.

“We then have to make that up in some other way, so we’ve done a lot more on marketing ... getting our name out there to bring in more business and protect the company and employees, who depend on the jobs ... so we’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”