Bread Ahead — Brand positioning for an iconic London bakery expanding overseas
Brand strategy · Positioning · Franchise showcase · Brand rollout
Bakery and hospitality · London, UAE and Saudi Arabia
The context
Bread Ahead was growing quickly in several directions at once.
Borough Market was booming, Wembley had opened, Pavilion Road was trading in Chelsea, and the brand was already operating across Dubai, Jeddah and Riyadh. More territories were in conversation.
I was introduced by Charlie Mander at Presman & Colard, who were advising Bread Ahead on the franchise programme.
The challenge
Matthew Jones knew exactly what Bread Ahead was. Very little of it existed on paper.
The story, the standards, the values and the reasons the business worked had all developed naturally over the years. That’s fine when the founder is close to everything. It becomes much harder when you’re asking someone in another country to invest in the business and represent the brand in a market where nobody has queued at Borough Market.
This was a commercial challenge rather than simply a presentation problem. Potential partners needed to understand what made Bread Ahead different, while the business needed to protect what made it successful as it expanded.
Without that clarity, partners hesitate, standards can drift between markets, and over time you risk losing some of what made the brand worth franchising in the first place.
The approach
Matthew was clear from the start that the Bakery School had to carry through into new markets. What came out of the workshops was why that mattered commercially.
The obvious approach when taking a bakery international would be to simplify everything around the product. A teaching kitchen adds another operational layer and could easily be seen as something a franchise partner would rather do without.
But the more we looked at it, the clearer it became that the school was actually one of Bread Ahead’s biggest strengths.
It’s how the craft transfers. Franchisees train there, learn the recipes and understand the standards before taking that knowledge back into their own market. It gives Bread Ahead a genuine way of passing on what makes the business special, rather than simply handing over a brand and expecting everything to stay consistent.
Once we had that clarity, the wider proposition followed.
Bread Ahead isn’t simply a product being rolled out internationally. It’s a craft being passed on.
The work
I started by spending a day with Matthew across four London sites, meeting the teams, understanding how each location worked and, importantly, tasting everything.
From there we ran positioning workshops covering the mission, brand promise, personality and values. Education, quality and community emerged as the three core principles the business would build around.
I then created the Franchise Showcase, a fifty-page document bringing the whole proposition together. It covered the Bread Ahead story and positioning, the market opportunity, how the business model works, brand standards and the franchise proposition.
I wrote, art directed and designed the full document.
Alongside this, I helped consolidate the brand across key in-store touchpoints including menus, signage and packaging.
The whole project was completed in six weeks.
The impact
Bread Ahead still uses the Franchise Showcase today.
It has been shared with prospective partners in the US and across the Gulf, and remains an important tool for explaining the business to people considering investing in the brand.
Bread Ahead has continued expanding across the Middle East and has since opened in Times Square, New York.
Tell me about your project
If you're taking a brand into new markets and most of what makes it work still only exists in your head, that's usually the first thing worth fixing. Tell me where you are and I'll come back to you within a working day.