16th November 2022
SPHERE meets Harriet Hastings, who transformed luxury gifting in 2007 when she founded Biscuiteers with her husband Stevie. Today the purpose-built Ministry of Biscuits in Wimbledon, hand-ices 3 million biscuits a year, 25% of them for Christmas.
My personal style signature is… for work I love a trouser suit and trainers – not too formal but quite empowering
We decided to focus on a biscuit business because... biscuits are totally perfect for gifting - a blank design canvas that can be used to create personalised stylish gifts and you can post them too!
The first biscuits we created were for iced handbags for Anya Hindmarch, today we create biscuits for… Christian Dior, Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, Cartier and Mulberry to name a few.
My favourite things in our Christmas range this year are… our Nutcracker collection is a firm Biscuiteers favourite and the theme of our new Christmas TV ad. We also have some gorgeous, licensed collections including Monopoly and The Snowman. Look out for our new Christmas macaron collection and our award-winning mince pies.
We have done some extraordinary ‘big builds’... we rebuilt Waddesdon Manor as a giant gingerbread dolls house complete with all the furnishings including the paintings, carpets and furniture made out of sugar. We also built a life size gingerbread house in Paris for Charlotte Olympia as a kind of edible pop-up shop!
I describe our icing designers as “artists”... many of our icers come from artistic backgrounds although we provide the actual biscuit icing training. Our most skilled icers work in the studio on bespoke projects, to enable us to take our new ideas to the absolute max.
I worked on the Women’s Prize for Fiction for 27 years, and today... I am so incredibly proud of the cultural impact it has made and its commitment to raising women’s voices. In the last few years the prize has become a charity and does some amazing outreach work to discover new writers from diverse backgrounds.
Biscuiteers HQ is in Wimbledon, but we have been going to Suffolk at weekends for over 20 years... and it was a wonderful place to bring up my children with different sorts of opportunities. They were all very into horses! I just feel completely different there. London is where we all work and Suffolk is for relaxation.
My favourite place in the world is... our house in North Suffolk – it’s in middle of nowhere and the definition of peace and quiet for me.
The best meal I’ve ever eaten in London is... at Fallow in St James’s where my son works as a chef.
The highlight of my career so far has to be…I am very proud of Biscuiteers, the brand we have created and the team we have built around us. Every day is genuinely different, and I am always learning new things which I love.
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