While social media is not always the most nurturing place for a new parent, there are a few accounts that offer their own little corner of joy. LadBaby, the social media brand created by Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, is one such account that has become a reliable source of fun and humour for millions of parents.
If you’re familiar with Mark and Roxanne, you may have sat chuckling at one of their videos during a night feed or felt comforted by their authenticity and honesty after a particularly stressful school drop off. You may have even perked yourself up on a long journey by listening to their podcast, Live, Laugh, Love - LadBaby. We know we have.
Aside from amassing over 13 million social media followers, the couple have achieved incredible things - from raising millions of pounds for charity, enjoying five Christmas number one singles, publishing children’s books, and launching a podcast, it’s clear the Hoyle’s are a force to be reckoned with.
We spoke to them days before their next venture: the release of their new autobiography, Our LadBaby Journey: Success, Sacrifice & Sausage Rolls to find out what life is like as a social media phenomenon and the challenges they’ve faced along the way.
The birth of LadBaby
The launch of LadBaby was in many ways an accident. When Roxanne was pregnant with their first baby, Mark was looking for social media accounts and blogs that were talking about life as a first-time dad but he didn’t quite find what he was looking for.
“I had no idea what it meant to become a dad. I didn’t have a clue what was going on,” he says. “All my closest friends still lived in shared houses playing video games. I was becoming a dad, and I didn’t have anyone that I could ask for advice”.
While Roxanne suggested some amazing mummy and daddy bloggers to follow, Mark felt that he couldn’t fully relate to them. So he decided to create his own blog in hope that it would connect him to like minded parents.
Mark started simply by taking a photo, writing a caption and posting it on Facebook or Instagram.**“**I started taking photos of Rox when she was pregnant and the first year after Phoenix was born,” Mark explains. “I talked about how I was finding it and tried to make it funny, because for me becoming a dad gave me a chance to be a big kid. I did that for about a year, but no-one really cared. No-one was that engaged. I had about a thousand followers, but my posts would only get four or five likes,” he continues. At the time, Mark and Roxanne were also working and commuting into London so any work on the blog had to be done at the weekends and in his spare time.
At first, Mark was hesitant about continuing as he says it made him focus on how much he disliked things like his voice and his teeth. But one day, he lost his son’s lunchbox and in signature Hoyle spirit, replaced it with a £4 toolbox. Seeing this as a funny opportunity to create some content, he filmed a short video on his iPhone and edited it on a free app.
“I posted it on Facebook on Saturday night and I went to a birthday party on Sunday morning, having not looked at Facebook since,” he says. It wasn’t until a fellow dad told him the video was now at 500,000 views that he knew anyone had watched it at all. “I went on Facebook and every time I refreshed the page, the views jumped up by 10,000”.
After being shared on websites such as LadBible, the video hit one million views in 24 hours, reaching 50 million views in a week. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Overcoming hardship
In the seven years since that first video went viral, Mark and Roxanne have made LadBaby into a household name. But that journey has not been without its challenges. In a rare serious moment last summer, the couple posted a reflective video where they spoke openly and emotionally about how far they had come. Sitting on the bench where, seven years ago, they had discussed how they were just three months away from losing their home, they reflect on how much life has changed for the better.
"It was really hard to make that video,” says Roxanne. “Me and Mark wear our hearts on our sleeves. At that time, we both worked in London. I was a career-woman and the main breadwinner before we had kids. When we got pregnant, we were paying our bills and our mortgage and working but we didn’t have enough left after everything went out. I remember having 20 quid left per week to get nappies, baby wipes and formula. I thought, we can’t afford this. We had to go to a supermarket, calculate everything and put back pasta because we wanted our baby to be okay. We didn’t have the money coming in after everything. We’re just a normal working-class family doing our jobs, but we never had enough left. It was quite hard”.
It’s this personal experience of hardship that makes Mark and Roxanne so relatable to millions of parents. In the midst of these tough times, the couple always found a way to get through it with laughter. “Our circumstances changed when we had kids, and I think it’s the same for a lot of families,” admits Mark. “Mark made the video at the time because he was hacking,” Roxanne adds. “The toolbox he used in that first viral video was £4 whereas the lunchbox was £15”. Roxanne also mentions another video where Mark comedically cuts their door in half. “It was funny to everyone, but the reality was we couldn’t afford a baby gate,” she says.
“The things Mark was doing on LadBaby were helping other parents around the world. We never in a million years thought we’d have this amazing platform of parents and people who follow us. Our followers say to us, thank you for getting us through Covid. Thank you for making us laugh and getting us through a bad parenting day. We have amazing followers”.
Giving back
If you aren’t familiar with Mark and Roxanne’s social media videos, chances are you’ve heard their Christmas number one singles on the radio. With five number ones under their belt including ‘We Built This City’, and ‘I Love Sausage Rolls’, this particular project has not only raised millions of pounds for the foodbank charity, The Trussell Trust, but also led them to collaborate with superstars such as Ed Sheeran and Elton John. The couple say that they’ve raised over £1.4 million through these singles and their children’s books where a proportion of all sales goes to charity.
"We always find ways to help people donate and be aware of their communities and giving back,” says Roxanne. Mark adds that they try and encourage people to not just donate money but also donate their time where possible. “The local food banks in your area really benefit from volunteering,” he says. “When you shop at Tesco or Asda and see the trolleys at the end of checkouts, they really make a difference”.
Sausage rolls
Sausage rolls have always been a key theme within LadBaby’s content and as Mark’s favourite savoury snack, the couple have always found fun new ways to incorporate them into their work. Their line of children’s books, for instance, are all based upon Greg the Sausage Roll, and their charity Christmas singles have also followed the same theme. Who can forget the line, ‘We Built This City on Sausage Rolls’? But where do they get their ideas from and find the courage to bring them to fruition?
"Trying to sell a sausage roll that goes on a Christmas adventure to a publisher is borderline impossible,” Roxanne says laughing. “But kids love sausage rolls. We wanted to make it visual so children who can’t read, can visualise the story”.
Mark adds, "We just try and have fun and do the silliest ideas we can. As a kid, I used to make sausage rolls on Christmas day with my mum and dad as a tradition. My love of sausage rolls had come through online. Someone said ‘LadBaby loves sausage rolls so much he should release a song’. So, I started Googling songs with sausage rolls. I realised, ‘We built this city’ was a song that everyone changed the lyrics of. Let’s just release it and see how much fun we can have”.
Trolls and online privacy
Making a viral video that has overnight success is of course exciting and, in the case of Roxanne and Mark, life changing. But being thrust into the public eye does not come without its challenges and it’s these kinds of lessons that the couple say they had to learn the hard way.
“In the beginning we weren’t always aware of our privacy online and how much we shared,” says Mark “When we first started we were very naïve and we’d film the front of our house and the cars we drove. Then somebody listed our house address on Google Maps. If you searched LadBaby on Google Maps it brought you to our front door”. Mark says that while 99% of the people that turned up were lovely and wanted a photo, they had a couple of other incidents that weren’t so nice.
“For a few months a lot of people were knocking on our front door,” Mark continues. “People would turn up late at night or wanted to come in the house and see where videos were filmed. That was scary because we had two little kids. It’s been a learning curve as we’ve grown online”.
Roxanne stresses that while they have a huge online presence, what we see is just 7-10 minutes a week of their actual life. That’s why they wanted to write more about the truth and reality of having such a big platform in their autobiography - from online trolling to fake news stories. **“**So many people want success online,” says Mark. “But we wanted our book to be really honest about what it’s like”.
Deciding to write an autobiography
It’s only natural that when a brand becomes as successful as Mark and Roxanne’s, the more their followers want to know about them. This, they say, is why an autobiography that goes into the more personal elements of their lives would be not only interesting but help them connect even more with their audience.
"People stop us in Asda when we’re doing the food shop and ask, ‘what is it like writing a children’s book? What is it like eating a sausage roll with Ed Sheeran? Is Elton John nice? What is it like being online? What is your job?’ There is so much that people want to talk to us about,” says Mark. “It made us think that we do have quite a lot to say. We wanted to do the book to let everyone see who Mark and Rox are - outside of LadBaby. A lot of people know LadBaby and LadBabyMum, but not Mark and Rox. We wanted the book to be like you were listening in on a chat between me and Rox”.
The style of the book is also written in a Q and A style so you hear both Mark and Roxanne’s point of view. The pair also wanted the book to be easy to read for everyone. “Both Mark and I are hugely dyslexic, and we don’t necessarily feel that confident reading huge books,” explains Roxanne. “Mark listens to audio books and I can process chapters, but it can be hard. We wanted to write it in sections to make it feel like it’s a conversation, so whoever is reading it is in the room with us, like an interview. We didn’t want it to be massive blocks of copy because that can be off-putting for lots of people”.
Rob SmalleyThe secret to their success
So what’s the secret to the couple’s success who turn everything they touch to gold while remaining happily married? “We work and live together every day and we’re best mates. But it has brought us closer,” says Roxanne. “We’ve got each other through it. It can be so hard, but how lucky are we to get to do the school run and create videos together?” Mark adds that they’re often asked how they put up with living, parenting and working together. “It brought us together as a couple and brought us closer to a lot of people online,” he says. “I think it has made us better parents. We became more of a unit. We helped each other out through those really difficult times”.
Our LadBaby Journey: Success, Sacrifice & Sausage Rolls, published by Sphere £22 RRP, is out now.
Cat Hufton is a freelance lifestyle journalist based in London. She has two sons aged five and two and during this time has tested hundreds of products designed to make parents' lives easier. She has also written about parenting in a number of national publications covering topics such as overcoming postnatal anxiety, intrusive thoughts, pregnancy during the pandemic, and the childcare crisis. She also writes a regular newsletter called The Freelance Parent which is designed to offer support to parents that work for themselves. You can follow Cat on Instagram and Twitter @CatHufton and sign up to The Freelance Parent.