Creative side hustles: Cream’s Lottie Webb juggles supper club and client management
Side-hustles can accelerate careers in unexpected directions. As part of our series demystifying industry jobs, Cream client manager Lottie Webb explains how marketing experience has aided a cooking side-gig – and vice versa.
/ Cream
I knew quite young that I wanted to work in advertising. I had a favorite ad at the age of nine (Honda’s ‘Cog’).
But the industry is so much broader than I thought it was when I began six years ago. And I’m seeing jobs that didn’t exist when I started. People are using skills they’ve learned in marketing to start up their own brands or businesses.
I’m big into cooking. I’ve been baking friend’s birthday cakes and hosting mini dinner parties since I left university. During the lockdown, I started a food IG (like many people did) and was dropping off socially distanced excess Guinness cake (and more) to family, friends and neighbors. Last year is when it really took off, though, I made my sister’s wedding cake (a three-tiered pistachio and forced rhubarb cake to feed 80). This gave me a boost of confidence, and I decided to set up a supper club with my best friend Jess, called JELO (Jess & Lottie).
Project management and marketing skills really helped with that. Ahead of time, we’re budgeting, booking a location, planning the menu, booking in practice days – the list is endless. Then on the day, everything has to be prepared on time and be planned meticulously.
On the night guests arrive and are greeted with a welcome drink and then will sit down to a three or four-course meal. There’s music and lots of chatter, but ultimately the nights are about eating good food and trying new flavors.
We’re inspired by lots of different cuisines, so we’re not limited by this - but we’re also English so there will always be a British twist. We had an Italian-inspired menu for the first one: highlights included peccorino arancini with blackberry jam and plum frangipane tart with creme fraiche and pistachio brittle.
We created JELO as a seasonal supper club, which means we’ll only use produce that is in season at the time. We’re also passionate about locally grown food, so where possible we aim to use food grown in the UK and as close to London as possible. It’s also not lost on us that we are in a privileged position to be able to cook and eat good food, so supporting the local community was important to us and we donated the profits to Norwood and Brixton food bank.
Deciding on what we want the JELO brand to be, from concept to values, to design is very much where my marketing brain is needed. We created a logo, decided on the colors, menus and invites. We utilized Instagram to invite people and post collateral after the night. From promoting it on our profiles we’ve both had people message who weren’t able to come, eager to come to the next one.
This was basically my first job out of uni. I had a couple of internships before, one at a documentary production company, and then another working for a small bag brand running their social media. The majority of people at Cream started as grads. Many have come from internships or graduate roles.
I’d love to be a director, that’s perhaps the next step up. But in broader terms, I’m open to seeing where it takes me. My dream, in the far future, is to merge those two passions – cooking and marketing.