It’s Paul Griffiths

I was working in a normal job & living with my parents before I started Babycakes, I quit partying for a whole month & spent my money on 50 t-shirts. I gave away 25 shirts to my friends & sold the other 25. After they sold (in the first weekend), I re-ordered another 50, then 100, then 200 & etc etc etc. almost straight away I realised thats it had taken off & I had to quit my job & work at it full time.

I was living with my parents at the time & fulfilling all the orders myself in my bedroom. Within a few weeks of quitting my job, Babycakes had taken over the whole of my parents house, there were boxes of shirts, badges, return forms & envelopes everywhere. I had to get my friends to help me pack orders in my parents front room & then help me take them to the post office to send them off to all over the world.

We were spending about 2 hours a day at the post office because we had to weigh each order & get the right stamps to make sure they all got to the right places. The main post office in my hometown had 3 checkouts & we realized that if me, joel & greg went to a checkout each we could get all the orders sent out in about 45 minutes. One day the manager dude came out and asked me to have a talk with him. He told me that the other customers were complaining about us taking up all the checkouts & that we couldnt use that post office any longer. oh shiiiiii.

We then had to mission around for a few days looking for new post offices until we got banned from them too. Eventually my friend kyle found out that if you are posting a TRILLION things everyday, a post man would come & pick up all the parcels for you!!!!!!!! WOAH..

A few weeks later, my parents house was way too full of Babycakes stuff, I needed an office & I needed to employ someone full time to help me get all the orders packed. So I got a small office in the town next to my hometown & employed joel to take care of packing everyday & I would work on new designs. This went on for about a month until we ran out of room in the new office & needed bigger space so we got an even bigger office next door, with a massive studio space where we worked on beanbags & partied all night.

When we were in the big office, I had to employ more people to take care of new jobs that needed to be done, henry started doing customer services, greg helped pack orders with joel & kyle did the accounting / tax /PAYE side of stuff that nobody else had a clue about. at this point we were doing thousands of orders a week.

After a few months of pwning online sales I had the idea to have a little party, I invited customers to come & party at a hotel. We rented the ball room & told the hotel staff that we were having a small, private party. On the night hundreds of people turned up, it went crazy. People raided the bar & the whole hotel turned into a huge house party. Eventually the hotel staff called the police and the party was stopped, our sound guy (Matt) was arrested.

On August 10th 2008 we opened the first ever Babycakes store in Manchester. The opening was amazing & we had our first official (legal) party the same night.

When the store opened in Manchester, me & alot of my friends moved to Manchester because we had opened the babycakes factory & new HQ there. With the new shop, factory / warehouse & HQ I got to employ lots more people to fulfill all the new jobs that were being created. I met Matt Johnson when I was looking for someone to manage my first store (he eventually became general manager of Babycakes). My friend Joe had experience tour managing bands & organizing big tours, so he became the Babycakes event manager, his girlfriend Carli (and my girlfriends sister) became the warehouse manager. Dave Smith has over 20 years experience running the finances of huge business & at this point Babycakes had started to turn over more that £1 million in 6 months & we needed the staff to manage all of it.

Last summer we went on Warped tour in the US. We had a pop up store in 48 states across america & 200 limited shirts in each state. We sold out at each day. We then had our Babycakes eyewear launch party in Los Angeles. 2,500 turned up. In October we had a sold out UK party tour & I was nominated for the fashion awards.

The amount of people involved now is crazy, we have a fabric specialist, 3 web guys, wearhouse staff, printing staff & designers all based at the HQ in Manchester. We have people working on our second store opening, product development for next years lines & events on both sides of the atlantic.