Nicole Timmerman – Film Production graduate
“I liked the idea of studying next door to ITV, the BBC.”
Rick Carroll – Owner of Beigel
Beigel’s Rick Carroll had to reach a crisis point to find his true creative calling
Sometimes the life we are living doesn’t quite suit our nature and usually, if we are lucky, we eventually find our true path to our happy place. Since our work is where we spend most of our time, it is a significant piece of the jigsaw and if it’s not going well, then our whole life is affected.
For Rick it was a series of life changing events, starting with the death of his beloved grandmother, that started a chain reaction towards his starting a brand new business baking bagels.
“Ever since school, my life was all about fitting in, I worked in corporate sales for 20 years and suffered under the pressure of performing and this led to my having a breakdown due to exhaustion. I had a new family and I didn’t know how to bond with my new son, I was so far removed from my true self and caught up in a depressive cycle which ultimately led to my losing my job.
It took this crisis point for Rick to re-assess his life and to accept that the corporate life was not for him.
It was the most challenging time of my life, recognising that I had not been living my true self, that the life I had constructed was making me unhappy. After spending time at home with my family I started to feel like my love of cooking could be the answer, and at the heart of it was my desire to make other people happy through food. After some research, it was connection to family that gave me the answer – bagels, or beigels which is the Jewish spelling we have adopted for our brand. My wife’s mother is Jewish and it was through exploring the tradition of the bagel in Jewish history that I felt a personal connection to its story – of pulling through hard times.
We started making bagels during the pandemic, and despite how I was feeling inside, it made me happy to help others, in fact it felt like we were making much needed hugs for people during the pandemic.
“On our first day we received 130 bagel orders and before we knew it, we were delivering our bagels every Friday to households across Greater Manchester, we were bombarded with orders from our website and Facebook and had to increase our deliveries to two days a week and then gradually more.
“The business really took off when the owner of Manchester coffee company, ManCoCo loved our bagels so much he asked us to supply their coffee house in Manchester. It was at this point Rick realised he could no longer run his business from home and decided to sign up for a lease on a shipping container at Mediacity.
“This coincided with the Van Gogh Alive exhibition, which brought us many more mouths to feed, and as they say the rest is history. I still make all my bagels at home every morning and supply wholesale to ManCoCo as well as running Beigel here at Mediacity.
I am a people person so this job enables me to connect with people from all walks of life, it’s diverse, non-judgemental and I call it my home from home. Every day is a blessing, everyday Beigel is open and I am serving customers and living my dream.
Related Tales from the City
Gary Hilton – CEO of Gas Music
“The people here are ambitious and inspiring for content-based businesses.”
Vishal Mistry – tech student
“The intersection of technology and other fields: that’s how we’re going to fix the world.”