10 years ago, I launched my sugar-free dessert business, Fools & Queens, into Fortnum & Mason. At the time, blogging was just my side hustle.
Fools & Queens, originally known as Proper Pudding, was born in 2014, not long after I left the RAF. I’d teamed up with an Army chum — a very decent cook with a glint in his eye and a hankering to try his hand at entrepreneurialism. I wasn’t in a desperate rush to join the corporate world, so I hopped aboard.
We sold our first batch of puddings at a random food market in Spitalfields in July 2014. No branding, no business plan, no clue about marketing (digital or otherwise). But plenty of aplomb and fanfare — from us, mostly.
A lucky tweet from the inimitable Hannah Betts (featured in the photo – also friend of Matt’s) helped us gain our first sliver of traction. She raved about our ‘fabulous wares’ and how much-needed they were to ease her pre-menstrual woes. We clung onto that tweet like gospel.
Over the next 12 months, we rebranded to Fools & Queens, and rumbled our way around London’s food markets — Queen’s Park (where I served Nicole Kidman and Sasha Wilkins, who very kindly introduced us to the CEO of Fortnum & Mason), Primrose Hill (Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Davies, Gemma Jones), Kings Road, and a few others lost to time and burnout.
But we knew we were only treading water.
The big bucks in FMCG come from volume.
And to get a foot in the door with the likes of Planet Organic, Wholefoods, or Selfridges, we needed one thing: brand recognition.
Sound familiar?
Blogging became our secret weapon. I created a blog content plan and started documenting our journey—messy, honest, and in real time.
I blogged about market life, behind-the-scenes chaos, and product experiments. People followed the story. They felt like they were part of it. We weren’t just another pudding brand—we were a brand with a voice, and a growing online community.
Without realising it, I was learning how content creates connection, and how connection drives sales.
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From Fortnum & Mason to freelance content writing
What started as a way to shout about our markets and new flavours became something else entirely — a content engine that quietly built our visibility, earned us loyal customers, and helped us land stockists. All without paying a single penny in ads.
But selling a handful of £2.50 puddings didn’t pay well, and my mortgage provider didn’t care how creamy our custard was.
So, to bring in a few extra pounds, I started a little side hustle — selling my wordsmithing skills to other small brands who needed help being seen online.
One of my first clients was Raw Halo — a delicious raw, vegan chocolate brand made with organic ingredients and sweetened with coconut sugar. Another early win? Phil Spencer (yes, that Phil Spencer from Location Location). He was launching his pet project, MoveIQ, and needed a ton of content.
From there, I picked up work with CV Library, became a regular contributor for Harver, and even started writing for HuffPost, covering topics like pregnancy, parenting, sugar shaming, and the juggle of self employment.
Each writing gig led to the next.
With a few known names under my belt, I pitched to Country Life (they said yes). Then I landed a feature in The Guardian’s (then) Small Business section, writing about the near-impossible task of growing a start-up food business organically in London.
All of this, by the way, was happening alongside my pudding business. I was cooking at 5am, packing cool bags, lugging stock to Queen’s Park in the back of my car — and then coming home to write blog posts for other people late into the night.
It was scrappy. But it worked.
And it was laying the foundation for what I do now.
The press came calling (and the puddings got serious)
With Fortnum & Mason on board, doors started to open. We secured a white-label listing with Coco Di Mama, the Italian lunch chain that seemed to have a shop on every London corner.
From there, our own-label puddings made it into Planet Organic, Wholefoods, and Selfridges. The big time felt within reach. Sort of.
My personal highlight — and possibly the most ridiculous ‘pinch me’ moment — came when, thanks to some very persistent internet sleuthing, I tracked down the dessert buyer for Waitrose. She agreed to a meeting. I’m still not sure how.
Armed with nothing more than a box of our best products and an unshakeable belief that we were destined to be on supermarket shelves, we set off to Bracknell, early one Spring morning, hearts pounding and a box of our 2-star Great Taste Award-winning Lemon Possets.
I remember thinking, this is it. This is the moment we stop being scrappy market traders and start being a “proper” FMCG brand.
But life, as it tends to, had other plans.
I fell pregnant. The cost of dairy soared. We couldn’t outsource manufacturing at a price that made sense. And gradually, painfully, the wheels came off.
And in the summer of 2017, we closed the kitchen doors for the last time.
Turns out, writing was the real business all along
It took me a long time to stop viewing Fools & Queens as a spectacular failure.
For a while, it felt like I’d built something with heart, hustle and a damn good product… only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and watch my first business baby fall apart because of timing, economics, and the sheer impossibility of scaling chilled desserts without a factory and a rich parent to back it.
But slowly, (and time is a healer), I started to see the ending for what it was: a launchpad. A stepping stone. A messy, sugar-free beginning.
Because here’s what I’ve come to realise:
While everything else came and went — the dessert business, the early mornings at markets, the start-ups and side projects — there was one thing that never let me down: content writing.
Through every version of my entrepreneurial life — the pudding business, the sleep-care subscription box, the online community for working mums, the digital marketing consultancy — I always wrote my way in.
Blog posts, emails, social captions, product pages, pitch decks — whatever it was, I could write it. And when I wrote, people listened. They clicked. They followed. They bought.
What began as a way to save money on marketing quickly became my most valuable skill. It’s what helped me build a following. Launch products. Sell services. Get press. Grow an audience from scratch.
And now, ten years after setting up that first stall in Spitalfields, the thing I once did to “make ends meet” is the thing I teach full time.
My side hustle became my main hustle.
And that shift — from doing it for myself to teaching other female founders how to do it too — feels like the most natural evolution in the world.
10 years into content marketing, blogging still outperforms everything else
The algorithm’s had more facelifts than a Real Housewife.
Instagram’s gone from flat lays to frantic Reels.
And the digital landscape shifts faster than my five-year-old changes snack preferences.
But one thing has never changed: good content still works.
Content that’s written for humans and optimised for search. Content with purpose, not padding. Content that matches what your dream customer is already Googling at 10pm on a Tuesday, desperate for a solution.
Search-optimised content — the kind I’ve been quietly writing for the last decade — is still the most sustainable, scalable, and sane way to grow an online business.
- Especially if you sell a product or service.
- Especially if you want your website to bring in sales without you having to post on socials daily or pay for ads.
Writing content for search engines is a different beast. It isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about building assets.
Blog posts, website pages, product descriptions, meta descriptions — all created with strategy, search intent, and staying power.
That’s what I teach. Because writing isn’t just what built my business.
It is my business.
And if you’re a product-based founder wondering whether blogging is still worth it — trust me, it is.
It has been the sales engine behind everything I’ve ever built. And now it’s the thing I help other women use to build their own empires.
I love my job!
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