A quirky greengrocer in East Sussex was a joyful place to spend a few hours. The chain of mid-market restaurants that it spawned, not so much. David Williams considers how beloved independent brands get distorted through scale

I’ve been mildly obsessed with the middle-market restaurant brand Bill’s for some time now. It’s not that I go there very often or have strong feelings about what it offers and represents as a brand. Indeed, I can’t imagine that Bill’s in its current form inspires strong feelings in anyone. 

It’s the sort of place you end up in by default for lack of somewhere else to be, where you’ll have a perfectly reasonable time eating perfectly competent food from its perfectly generic modern American diner-ish brunch-and-burger menu, at slightly, but not outrageously, inflated prices – and which you’ll forget all about the moment you walk out the door. 

The thing is, though, I actually do remember my first time at a Bill’s, which must have been almost 20 years ago. Back then, Bill’s wasn’t a nationwide chain. It was a single-outlet independent founded by the eponymous founder Bill Collison in Lewes. It had a slightly eco-eccentric streak that fitted right in with the Sussex town’s mildly bohemian atmosphere, and it had hit on its unusual café-in-a-greengrocer’s model pretty much by accident, the café bit arriving only after floods had prompted a refit. 

I loved it. It was a place full of personality and quirks that had grown, like its produce, organically in a very defined local patch – the polar opposite, indeed, of what it would become. 

And it’s this disconnect between the original Bill’s and the version we see in high streets today that is the source of my interest in the business. 

There are three things I don’t understand. First, what was it about Bill’s back in 2008 that made Richard Caring, the at-that-point relatively new owner of restaurant group Le Caprice Holdings, want to buy it over any number of similarly wholesome and/or organic cafes in other similarly sized towns around the UK? 

Secondly, what did Caring see in Bill’s that he thought would make it the perfect brand to roll out as a casual dining brand in what would, at its peak, run to 80 outlets in the UK? (After a tough time post-Covid, it’s currently around half that.) 

And finally, why, if his plan was to create a chain of restaurants that were all-but-indistinguishable from the original, did he not simply start from scratch with a similar concept and name? After all, it’s not as if many people outside of East Sussex had any knowledge of Bill’s the place or the brand. So, what value did the name have over, say, an ersatz version called Bob’s in Manchester, York or Norwich, all places where Bill’s went on to open? 

Really, though, my interest in Bill’s is as a vivid and, given my attachment to the original, very personal example of just how difficult it is to retain the precious something that makes a small, independent business special when you try to turn it into something bigger. 

There are examples of this process everywhere in retail, including wine retail, of which the most extreme in recent times is probably Vagabond. In retrospect, the excitingly spontaneous, creative, open-mindedly wine-loving mood of early Vagabond was remarkably resilient at first. It was certainly still intact in the first few new outlets of its expansion in the 2010s, and even, arguably, in its urban winery. 

By the time of its administration and subsequent purchase by Majestic earlier this year, however, the company had long since lost touch with its roots. And it would have been very hard to connect the business responsible for Vagabond’s garish airport outlets with that first Fulham store back in 2009, which was, of course, one of the first of the new breed of wine shops making use of Enomatic-type sampling machines. 

Wine production, too, has more than its fair share of brands that have been “Bill’s-ed”: have the likes of Petaluma and Bonny Doon, for example, ever been the same since they were acquired from their charismatic founders by big businesses that didn’t fully understand their appeal? 

I’m not saying it’s impossible to turn a small brand into a big brand. That, after all, is the story of all successful brands. Neither am I saying that a brand can’t or shouldn’t evolve, even if that evolution takes it far from its original form. 

But there’s a reason why I get nervous whenever a business I love is sold or its owners start talking about their ambitious growth plans. No matter the sector, there is always a point in a brand’s expansion when something of the original spirit is lost. It’s just a matter of when, and how much.