Bara: A Slice of Wales in the Heart of London

When Zoë picked up the phone to chat, she was mid-way through rolling bread. Which seemed very on brand. She and her business partner Cissy co-founded ‘Bara’, a Welsh café based in Peckham, just four months ago. We gave her a call to hear how they built a brand and a community, around what they love most.

Hey Zoë! Bara is a very interesting name for a brand. Where did it come from? And how did the rest of the brand grow from there?

So Cissy is Welsh, and in Welsh ‘Bara’ means 'bread'. We both really love bread and wanted it to be an integral part of what we do. For the branding, one of our reference points was the ‘Mabinogion’, an old Welsh storybook with really beautiful Celtic lettering. The other reference point was this old Welsh cookbook from the 50s that Cissy found on Etsy. Funny story, a couple of weeks after she ordered it, her dad actually texted her to say he'd found the EXACT same book clearing out her grandma's things, with all of her annotations still in it. We took a lot of inspiration from the illustrations in that.

We noticed on Instagram that you posted a sourcing trip to Wales. It feels like the whole project is inspired by Welsh culture?

Yeah, a lot of our produce comes directly from Wales actually. We use Car-y-Môr for our seafood, a butcher's called Stanley Jones from Wrexham, and our honey comes from a farm near Aberystwyth. But I think the bigger thing for us is championing Welsh produce that doesn't typically get as much of a spotlight as it should in London. We want Bara to feel like a little slice of Wales in the city.

You also dropped some very cool football jerseys recently. What was the story behind those?

So we had a pop up with our coffee supplier, Coaltown, at the London Coffee Festival. And Cissy is a part of a Welsh creative group who had done some jerseys a couple of years ago. So we asked the designer of those, Amie Sey, if she would be interested in creating some with us. It was a really fun thing to do for the community and they were very popular. We also wanted to use the profits from the sales to give to the charity, Well Grounded.

Bara is four months old and already feels like a mainstay in Peckham. Building their business upon Cissy's Welsh heritage, from the branding to the suppliers, has helped them to foster a community that people love coming back to (but the incredible Welsh Honey Butter Pancake definitely help with that too!).