The leadership team from WISE in Boston visited the U.K. capital to meet inspiring entrepreneurs and market-leading businesses operating in Britain.
LONDON — “We want beauty in this place,” Tom Molnar told Northeastern University students visiting his Gail’s bakery headquarters. “I don’t agree with growth without beauty.”
Molnar is the co-founder of Gail’s, an American-owned artisanal bakery and coffee shop chain in the U.K. that started with a single branch and 35 staff in 2005. It now has 175 sites that generate £300 million ($388 million) in sales annually, feeding 500,000 mouths a week and employing 4,000 people in the process.
The audience for this fast-talking skateboarding Floridian included 10 of the most entrepreneurial female students from Northeastern in Boston.
The leadership team of the student-led Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) organization toured the headquarters of Gail’s — which Bain Capital, a Boston-based private investment firm, acquired a controlling stake in through a £200 million ($259 million) investment in 2021 — in Camden Town, north London as part of their “Trek” networking trip to London.
As part of their weeklong trip to the European city in March, they visited the U.K. head office of tech giant Apple, spoke to chiefs at financial services firm Deloitte and major supermarket Tesco and explored the Houses of Parliament, the seat of British democracy.
When the WISE representatives joined Molnar, he was in the middle of Gail’s development kitchen holding a meeting about a renovation of one of his London shops. Inviting the students to sit in on the talks, the former management consultant quizzed designers about every detail, right down to the aesthetics and price of the new chairs being fitted.
Molnar explained afterward that his desire to get into the nuts and bolts of the business, which reports suggest has a £500 million ($646 million) price tag on its head, is about reminding his staff that Gail’s wants to grow the business but that beauty and quality produce need to remain at the heart of that drive.
“I have to be everywhere in the business,” Molnar said, “to give people the confidence [to say], ‘No, that’s the wrong way.’
“I know that option might be a bit cheaper or easier. But that’s not the pressure here. The pressure here is to be better every year — that’s what we say.
“You have no right to grow — you earn your right to grow. I always say quality comes before growth. We grow because we are the best — we are high quality and we are thoughtful.
“It is quality first, and then it is growth. It is also about beauty — good things come with quality. I don’t want to grow and have ugly places. There are enough ugly places out there.”
Alyssa Leblanc, co-director of WISE, said she enjoyed hearing Molnar explain the philosophy behind Gail’s “mission-driven” business.
“[Molnar] was saying that you can’t just keep expanding and expanding — Gail’s has to keep their specific mission in mind,” said the 22-year-old neuroscience student. “You can see what drives people — it is the quality. It is about what the professionals think will work well rather than following trends.”
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For fellow co-director Jizelle Dorego, she was inspired by how Gail’s was forging its own path rather than looking to emulate food industry competitors. Dorego, a business administration major, said the entire experience of the Trek to London had helped her to think differently about her career after graduating.
“It was really inspiring to hear Tom talk about how to be different, how to differentiate yourself and to make your own path and grow from there — that was my biggest takeaway,” the New Jersey native said.
“That’s actually been my biggest takeaway from London in general. We were at a Founders Forum meeting and there was someone talking there who came from a law background, who went on to become a banker and then decided to be an entrepreneur.
“London is helping me to be OK with what I don’t know and throw myself into the unknown rather than following a linear path up the corporate ladder. I’m getting a lot of inspiration to explore my own passions rather than following a specific path.”
Trek has turned into an annual trip for the core team that runs WISE, with the group spending time exploring new cities and meeting people who are fronting startups and market-leading businesses. The London jaunt is the third of its kind, with previous trips to San Francisco and Paris.
Last year’s trip to the French capital was the first time leaving the U.S. for Amelia Brooks, the vice-president of WISE Global. “Before we went to San Francisco, I’d never been on a plane before,” she said. “I didn’t even have a passport before we went to Paris.”
Brooks, from Springfield, Massachusetts, said the experience of traveling and meeting successful people in the business world was helping the organization to develop while also supporting individual networking. The fourth-year business administration student highlighted that she secured both an internship and a fellowship off the back of meetings in San Francisco in 2023.
“We are getting a wider mindset of how the world works,” she explained. “We are being exposed to so many different things. On multiple occasions I have contacted people that I have met on these trips.
“Meeting people and understanding their stories, it just makes me so excited. And for me, this really fills my cup. I love meeting new people. So not only for WISE, but personally, I feel we’re all really growing and expanding here. It is really exciting that we have such generous donors that allow us to do this and allow us this experience.”
The Trek trips are funded by sponsor Lea Anne Dunton, a former co-chair of a Northeastern Parents of Alumni subcommittee. Dunton remains active with Mosaic, a multidisciplinary alliance of student entrepreneurs. Dunton and her husband, Gary, established the Dunton Family Deanship at Northeastern in 2016.
Raissa Arora, vice president of Trek, was involved in planning the London trip from start to finish.
Hailing from Mumbai in India, the business administration and communications studies student said it was fascinating to be given a tour of Parliament by her fellow countryman Lord Karan Bilimoria, the founder of popular U.K. beer brand Cobra. In the late 1980s, the Indian businessman came up with the idea of producing a less gassy lager that would pair better with rich curries — a cuisine that had become popular in Britain.
Arora, 21, said there were two reasons WISE chose to travel to London: to explore its burgeoning startup culture and to have the chance to visit another Northeastern campus.
“London’s making so much more effort into investing in startups and growing that out,” said Arora. “That is interesting to see in a country that has a very well-established economy but which is still developing its business culture, in that sense.
“And then the Northeastern University campus being here was also a strong reason for choosing to come to London. Being able to connect the campuses was really important — a lot of WISE students go to London and then come back to Boston. But not all Boston students go to London to study, so it is about bridging that gap and making Northeastern a global community.”