Festive meal kits, a broken oven and a very necessary lesson in making it work.

My second campaign with Woolworths came around Christmas, this time as part of their #WooliesChristmas campaign.

The brief was much more straightforward than my first campaign. Woolworths sent me three of their festive-inspired meal kits, and my job was to make each one step by step, document the process and create content around the finished meals.

Simple enough.

Except there was one fairly major problem.

I was still living with my parents at the time, and our oven had packed up.

Which, when you have been sent baking kits and food that very much requires an oven, is not exactly ideal.

What followed was probably one of my earliest lessons in content creation: sometimes the plan falls apart completely, and you still have to find a way to deliver.

THE KITS

GARLIC & HERB BEER BREAD

The first kit was a garlic and herb beer bread.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been the easy one. Mix it, bake it, photograph it, done.

Instead, I had to somehow finesse a loaf of bread out of an oven that had decided it was no longer interested in doing its actual job.

To this day, I am not entirely convinced that bread was edible — or fully cooked.

But did it look good?

Absolutely.

And at the time, that was half the battle.

BROWNIE KIT

Next came the brownies.

With my own oven officially out of the running, I packed everything up and headed to my cousin’s house to use theirs.

Surely this would solve the problem.

It did not.

The brownies were an epic fail.

Whatever could go wrong, seemed determined to go wrong during this campaign, and by this point I was starting to realise I needed to stop chasing perfection and start focusing on what I could control.

The styling. The composition. The light. The story the image told.

Sometimes the thing you see in the final photograph and the thing happening just outside the frame are two completely different realities.

BRAAI SMOKING KIT

The final kit was a braai smoking kit, which I used to make chicken thighs with garlic butter potatoes.

This should probably be the part where I tell you everything finally came together.

It did not.

The chicken and potatoes were undercooked.

Very undercooked.

But the pictures?

BOMB.

Somehow, despite everything that had gone wrong behind the scenes, I had managed to create content I was genuinely proud of.

And strangely, that became the most important part of the campaign for me.

WHEN THE PLAN STOPS PLANNING

Looking back, this campaign taught me something I would use over and over again throughout my creative career.

Things go wrong.

Equipment breaks. Recipes flop. Timings change. The weather does what it wants. The light disappears. Food refuses to cooperate.

And you still need to create.

This was one of the first times I had to become genuinely resourceful instead of relying on everything going according to plan.

I moved kitchens. Changed approach. Styled around imperfections. Found angles that worked. Focused on what I could save instead of obsessing over what had already gone wrong.

It wasn’t glamorous behind the scenes, but it made me better.

THE TAKEAWAY

The final campaign content looked festive, polished and delicious.

The reality involved a broken oven, questionable bread, failed brownies and chicken that definitely needed a little more time on the heat.

And I actually love that.

Because this campaign became an early reminder that creative work is rarely as seamless as the finished product makes it look.

A huge part of the job is problem-solving.

It is knowing when to pivot, when to improvise and when to stop mourning the original plan and make the new one work.

Not everything has to go according to plan for the end result to be good.

Sometimes you just need the right light, a little resourcefulness and a very convincing photograph.