A decade on from leaving school with no real plan on what to do with their lives, two best friends who started out baking cookies in their kitchen in 2021 recently celebrated three years in business with their successful coffee shop in Tuam.

Rachel Perry and Aoife McNevin sat their Leaving Cert in 2016. While they didn’t have a clear plan on what would happen next, they both knew that third- level education would not feature in their futures.

While Aoife did flirt with university life – she enrolled in a commerce degree at University of Galway but left after three months – the pair have drawn on a rich and varied life and work experience to guide them through their first few years of their dual business. This includes Down the Lane café in Tuam and the bakery that sustains it, Mór Bakes which started out as a pandemic passion project.

Speaking to Irish Country Living as the dust settles on this year’s Leaving Cert results, the girls are very conscious that there will be many young people across the country who haven’t quite figured out their next steps.

Aoife says she always felt pressure to go to college when she was in secondary school, and that while she was glad she went to see what it was all about, she has no regrets about dropping out.

“I grew up watching my mother run her own businesses, that’s actually how Rachel and I got to know each other, my Mam was Rachel’s childminder when we were small,” she says.

“I never had any pressure at home to go down the college route. But in school, the question was: where are you going to college? Not – are you going to college? When I found myself in a lecture theatre with 300-plus students, I knew it wasn’t the place for me.”

I was always confident that if I was left to my own devices, my creativity and that willingness to work hard would come through

Rachel was even more resolute that her formal education would end the day she sat her last Leaving Cert exam.

“I hated my final year of school, all the rules and the restrictions. We weren’t allowed to be different or express ourselves and I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a rebel. But it was only that last year I really struggled with the pressure of it all. I did Transition Year and loved that and enjoyed fifth year too but I always knew college wasn’t part of the plan. Like Aoife, I’d watched my parents, who have such a strong work ethic and had been working from a very young age.

“I was always confident that if I was left to my own devices, my creativity and that willingness to work hard would come through.”

While both young women worked in a number of different jobs in the years after they left school, it wasn’t until the pandemic that the seeds of their current business empire were sown.

“We were living together with our partners, Martin and Fearghal, in an apartment in Galway city and we started baking cookies at the weekends, which we’d sell to local cafés,” explains Aoife.

“We were sitting outside Monroes one evening, having a drink because that’s the only way you could socialise during Covid and we made an Instagram page for our bakery, Mór Bakes. Within a few hours we had 300 likes so we decided to message local cafés offering them samples of our bakes. Over the next few weeks 13 cafés across the city and county took on our produce, and we are still supplying to seven of those, five years on.”

Croc and roll

Rachel says that while neither had any formal business background or qualifications to back themselves, the secret to their success was their naivety.

“We had a mantra of ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ We were also holding down our full-time jobs, so this was a passion project at the weekends that got our name out there,” she adds.

“It was actually Fearghal and Martin who encouraged us to bring the baking to the next level and turn it into a business, but we knew that if we were to make a living out of it we’d need to open our own place.

“At this stage every cent we were making, we were investing back in the business. We have never been afraid of hard work but when we look back now it’s so funny to think the only ‘wage’ we took from the bakery in those first few months was the price of two pairs of purple Crocs – that we got on sale – that we could wear while we were baking,” laughs Aoife.

The young entrepreneurs are keen to stress that the past five years haven’t been totally plain sailing and they acknowledge the hard road they’ve travelled as women in business.

“I’m the one who brings harsh realism to the table, I need spreadsheets and data and plans whereas Rachel is the creative genius who spreads her fairy dust and calms me down when things seem crazy,” adds Aoife.

“It is really hard being young women in business and we have much tougher skin now than we had at the start. It was hard being overlooked, by both tradespeople and state agencies when we went looking for support. We found it baffling. I’m not sure, had we known what we do now, that we would have gone into business but as Rachel said, we were so naive. and that stood to us as we just faced every obstacle head-on.”

’Forge your own path’

The decision to set up their own café was an obvious next step, given the success of the bakery business, but living in Galway city and working from an apartment kitchen meant Aoife and Rachel had a big decision to make.

“We needed more space and we knew the risk of taking on a unit in the city was far too great,” explains Aoife.

“I went to school in Tuam and my mother lives in the town so I knew the area. When I was chatting to the letting agent about a different property he suggested Garvey’s Bakery, which was an iconic building in the town but had been empty for 12 years.

“There’s a different support level in a small town to a city and the welcome we had and the help we got from so many people was phenomenal.

“When we first started the renovation work we had so many people call in to the shop to tell us their stories of buying bread when they were kids and the queues down the street and the smell of fresh bread. We had a lovely card from the former owners, Anne and Neil Garvey, whose daughter also called in to take photos and to share her own memories,” says Aoife.

While the Instagram stories showed the glamour of painting windows and installing coffee machines, the girls both admit the reality of restoring a derelict building was a job neither were prepared for.

“We thought we’d have the place open in a month, ignoring the fact there was no water, electricity, ceilings and the floors all had to be dug up. So eight months later when we opened the doors of Down the Lane, we were so excited to have brought life back to such a historic building, that meant so much to the local community. And that same community has been a huge support to us in the three years we’ve been open.”

We thought we’d have the place open in a month, ignoring the fact there was no water, electricity, ceilings and the floors all had to be dug up

Aoife and Rachel advise those who are trying to figure out their next move now that school is behind them need only to believe in themselves to make the right decisions.

“There is so much pressure on young people, as there was when we left school, but it is so important to forge your own path,” says Rachel.,

“Trying to fit a mould someone else decides for you is never going to work and my one piece of advice is to stick to your guns and do what is right for you. Try things, if they don’t work you try something else, but the most important thing you need is a good support system around you.”

Aoife says she feels very lucky and privileged to have her own business and adds that with the right people in your camp, and a willingness to work hard and back yourself, anything is possible.

See @downthelanetuam on Instagram