This weekend, “Spudman” came to Wrexham. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s a jacket potato seller from Tamworth who built a following of millions on TikTok simply by being himself, filling spuds, having a laugh, and treating every customer like they matter.
I’ll admit, my first reaction to the size of the queue was to find that a bit strange. Wrexham has two brilliant independent jacket potato shops already, run by people who’ve been serving this town for years. Why would people queue for two hours for a spud from a van when they could walk into a local shop and be served in five minutes?
But the more I watched, the more it made sense
What struck me wasn’t the queue. It was Spudman himself. He had time for everyone. He posed for photo after photo with kids. He wasn’t just there to sling potatoes and leave, he was present, generous with his time, and genuinely enjoying the people in front of him. That’s not an accident. That’s the product. The potato is almost secondary.
Here’s the part that impressed me most. Rather than simply hoovering up trade for the weekend and moving on, Spudman spent time with the two local jacket potato shops in town, helping them think about how to drive long-term custom off the back of his visit. That’s a level of generosity and business sense you don’t see very often. He could have treated the local shops as competition. Instead, he treated them as collaborators.
The real lesson: personal brand is business infrastructure now
Is Spudmans potatoes that much better than anyone else’s? I’d argue there is a limit to how good a jacket potato can actually be. But the clear lesson for us all that I took away was the power of his personal branding and his Social media Prescence. It was something as a business owner that I took away from seeing the queues and the hype he created in town. It is something that maybe is becoming essential in modern business?
Fair play, Spudman. Wrexham enjoyed having you.