Something & Nothing on Building brand through community, not clicks.

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today I'm joined by Olly Dixon, co-founder of Something and Nothing, a premium soda brand that's quietly but confidently become a cult favourite in the UK and now in the US. We talk about how culture and design shape the brand, how they've grown through neighbourhoods, not algorithms, and why the most effective strategy might just be sticking to your instincts. Let's get into it. I'd love to hear more about your background and how you got to where you are now.

0:42My background is very much a combination of culture, design and branding, music and hospitality. I actually started my career, in adverted commerce, at a magazine called Days In Confused back in the early 2000s in London, which was a wild time. I was trying to explain to my kids what I did. And it was pre-internet. internet it involved a lot of couriers like a lot of phoning up bikes and a lot of time on the phone as well that was what kicked it off my interest in how you can connect brands with the right audience using culture and through that I had a sort of musical detour and then I created or set up an agency with two friends and colleagues from days called Margaret was the name of the agency we worked a lot with fashion brands which is actually how I met you first Ruth with Diesel and high-end spirit brands and that cross-section of culture branding marketing that kind of world.

1:46And now you're the founder at Something and Nothing so for anyone who doesn't know can you tell us what it is? Yeah so Something and Nothing is a premium soda brand and that came from a pub that I set up so I had a sort of early midlife crisis and created a pub called The Gun in East London in Hackney and had a great time boozing very heavily and then wanted to stop drinking for a bit. And that was the moment where I took a proper look at the soft drink category, which I think I hadn't really thought very much about and realised that A, everything was full of sugar and actually all the ingredients were getting worse and be like all the flavors were very juvenile and hadn't really changed for decades i was thinking why isn't there a grown-up soft drink you don't suddenly want to stop being refreshed and hydrated but none of the drinks are appealing once your sort of palate changes at a certain point so that was really the jumping off point and although things have become more strategic and that sort of zenith that that moment of thinking why isn't there a grown-up soft drink is essentially what's followed through to this point and then the creation of that brand is really then the basis of where my career started in terms of that kind of branding brand strategy culture how do you create something that people have an emotive connection to want to have in their life and that background in culture how has that shaped the brand There's two elements to it.

3:21One was the ambition of the brand was always quite big. The ambition of the business was really unknown. So it was a kind of slow start. I joined forces with my friend Rupert, who had worked at Red Bull and Pepsi. So he knew that world. But both of us were doing other things. So the kind of ambition of the business really evolved over time. But the ambition of the brand was always to create something global, something interesting and something different. And all through my career in terms of developing brands and design has always been about look out of the category for inspiration. So although we were creating a soft drink brand, we didn't look at soft drinks at all during the kind of ideation and creation of the brand phase.

4:11We looked really design, art, fashion to a degree, and health and wellness and beauty were more the inspiration points. I worked with two designers, Adam and Callum, who have their own studio, but they used to be our in-house designers at my agency, Margaret. So it was a process that we took a lot of time over and a lot of thought over and were very brave because we didn't know enough about the category. I think it's one of those things, the more you know, the less of a risk you take. So that sort of ignorance probably really helped us create something that's very unusual. And an unusual and intriguing name, something and nothing.

4:57How did you come up with that? I knew I wanted to have a name again that was a bit you had to maybe take a second look at that wasn't obvious I quite like naming things whether it's being for clients or other kind of I don't know club nights and records and stuff that I've done something and nothing came from a few different elements but the one that probably solidified it a bit was actually an episode of Seinfeld when And George and Jerry are discussing what they show they're going to sell into NBC. And they're discussing, weirdly, the difference between salsa and seltzer. And it's just one of their kind of nonsense conversations.

5:39And George is like, yeah, this should be the show, right? Everyone's doing something. We should do nothing. And it's just something about those two words and the sort of tension and interest between them that's just really appealing. And people often say, OK, so something is the natural ingredients and nothing is the low calories and no sugar. And there's something about that juxtaposition of those two words, which I just found really fascinating. How have you thought about balancing style and substance? So you talked a little bit just then about rooted in culture, design led, obviously soft drink category, flavor, taste, key sort of decision drivers.

6:17How did you balance those two? Or is that sort of developed over time? The kind of idea to create a grown up soft drink was really key to this. So I don't have a particularly sweet tooth. I don't really like having that much sugar in my diet. So I wanted to create a more refined soft drink experience. And that process of developing that first drink, which was the cucumber, probably took about a year. And I don't know how many different samples going back and forth with our flavor house. And we looked at zero calorie, but that didn't have that satiation that you want from a soft drink. And that kind of the crack of the can is always a really still an emotive exciting thing.

7:03I still like doing it, even though I've probably opened a thousand cans since doing this. But in that first sip, you just want a deeper flavour or I wanted a deeper flavour. And really the kind of eureka moment or whatever was creating this combination of grape juice and lemon juice, which gives it the balance. So the grape juice provides all the sweetness. We don't use any sweeteners or added sugar. The sweetness comes from juice, mainly the grape juice. And then the lemon juice is that kind of acidity. acidity. So any sort of good cocktail generally has sweetness and acidity that gives it depth.

7:38So this is how we do it with our drinks, that gives the depth. And then we have the sort of lead flavours at the top with some other elements. So cucumber, for example, has a tiny bit of mint in it. And then what I was also observing is food was so much more experimental. So the idea then became about being inspired by travel when you travel you tend to go to night markets try food you wouldn't normally try so it was all about looking at interesting combinations of flavors and interesting ingredients yuzu is there's a lot of yuzu around but at the time pretty sure we were the first yuzu drink certainly in the uk and that was an interesting flavor hibiscus and rose actually came from a trip to sri lanka and there was a hibiscus and rose drink but it was like madly sweet so full of sugar but that hibiscus flavor i'd never really tried before and i thought it was really interesting so we took that as a jumping off point to then create our own add more acidity a few and a few other things and then now we're beginning to launch new flavors mango and thai basil is a recent one which was inspired by a salad actually that a friend served at a supper club that was like really fresh mango and then the kind of aniseed herbaceous basil on top so we try and be adventurous and experimental with the flavors because that feels like a kind of unique place to play you've been around for a while now and over that time soft drink category has moved on quite a lot has changed and evolved and it feels like your brand has been really consistent and very flavor-led and it's still very true to how you started have you ever been tempted to go start adding protein into it or some sort of mix a function yeah at the start we were tempted we looked at cbd we could see it becoming a bit of a trend before there was any cbd drinks in the uk we could see it in the us and we spoke to a round table of experts and they were like well once you put it in water it's not going to work so well you probably need to a consumer would need to have five drinks over a period of time and I guess it's partly again going back to that cultural background of wanting to create authentic an authentic brand that people can trust but also you can talk in an honest way about what it does or doesn't do and for us we just couldn't get comfortable with a function that would actually work once sat in water so we decided not to go down that route and to really focus on taste and flavor there's been moments where we've been tempted the uk at the moment the supermarket buyers all seem very obsessed by function so i'm sure we could have won some listings by chucking in hydration or whatever it might be but i it's this kind of evergreen approach to being focused on taste and flavor through with the product and then the brand having that sort of classic but minimal look we want to create a business that's around for decades not for a few years and taste and flavor will always be the main category drivers right it's why you pick up a can yeah yeah totally and I think people misunderstand what's happening with some of those category leaders so I think with Poppy and Olipop they offer this pre and probiotic I don't think they're doing half a billion in sales because everyone's very concerned about their gut health i think they're doing half a billion in sales because people want a dr pepper but they don't want the sugar or the traditional sugar and the traditional formulation they want something better for you and they have managed to create this sort of shortcut that people go okay this is okay i can drink this it's it's an excuse to drink soda again and obviously they've been incredibly successful with that and it works really well we're doing the same thing but rather than recreating flavors that exist we're creating our own flavors and our function which isn't a function is to use natural ingredients and not to use sweeteners or added sugar you collaborated a lot with creative communities as you built the brand how those relationships fed the brand again it's all been quite authentic i think a lot of the creative partnerships and stuff that we've done have really been people that have come to us or have shown some kind of connection with the brand and the products yes a lot of people message us on instagram and say i really love your drink it's very different where's it been something so yes we are a small team and we have limited resources so we don't have huge marketing budget so we tend to be thoughtful in terms of what we do and activate and often it is through those kind of authentic connections of people who are genuinely fans of the brand quite often people get paid in drinks but you know they're very happy to create something for us or push something through because they love the brand which is a wonderful place to be obviously we pay creatives for their hard work when it's when necessary i definitely wouldn't want to be exploiting anyone I think that we're quite focused on community and community building as a brand.

13:00And that kind of exists in different spaces. We're working on replicating and scaling what we call our neighborhood strategy, which is a combination of distribution in the right places, connection with our consumer through whether it's run clubs, yoga studios, events put on by cultural based creatives, workspaces. basis like being in that lifestyle of our consumer and not doing it not we there's an internal phrase of we don't pay to play which is true we're creating kind of authentic partnerships with lots of different brands and creators that's reciprocal and then looking at how that builds a community of like-minded people whether it's people signing up to our newsletter following us on social or attending those events and quite often you know we really get people who want to help the brand in some way so we're saying oh you should be stopped here or my friend's having an event or we're doing this supper club or whatever it is so you create quite a kind of authentic connection with your community of consumers do you think you'll be able to hold on to that as you scale yeah that's an interesting question hope so and i'm i always admire brands that kind of build in a way that feels authentic and doesn't rely on Super Bowl ads or whatever it might be.

14:25For us at the moment, it's a very strategic part of our growth as well. So Amazon in the US has grown by 200 % this year. Shopify, not to that level, but still very healthy growth. And we know that through the data and surveys and stuff, we know that the majority of people are coming through by purchasing it within those neighborhoods that I spoke about. So whether you're buying a salad and you're having it with your lunch, you're buying it, you've seen it in a little boutique hotel you stayed in, then people want it at home. So we're going online to buy it, but they're not. We're not filling the funnel through social advertising or digital advertising.

15:05People are searching us out and finding whichever works for them, Amazon or our store to purchase. And then we've got really high subscription rates. and very high retention rates, because people then love the product and want to keep consuming it. So it's important for us to maintain that as a strategy for the e-com side. But also, I just think it will naturally continue kind of going back to the evergreen approach and being taste and flavor and brand orientated. Yes, food service business is quite a high percentage of the whole of wholesale probably you know most soft drinks are very focused on retail because obviously you get that huge scale not to say we are not we just launched in 260 whole foods in the us which is going incredibly well and our velocities are very healthy and there's a lot of other conversations happening with larger retailers but that neighborhood piece helps feed those larger retailers as well as i said people might be buying it in a food to go place but then they want they'll lend it in their weekly shop so it all becomes a connected ecosystem that is your marketing your social media your distribution and your connection to your consumer in the place where they're working hanging out all that stuff so it is a real kind of vital part that we want to continue when you say neighborhood assume that's like quite a tightly defined area it's not like london that's an interesting point yeah it is a tightly defined area but there are multiple neighborhoods i guess within a geography yeah the us is you've obviously got states you've got cities and then within the cities you've got neighborhoods so we'll look at somewhere like miami and the neighborhoods will slightly be dictated by where we're selling in whole foods but those Whole Foods tend to be in interesting neighborhoods.

17:03So we might pick four areas within a geography that will focus the distribution strategy, but also the marketing element. So we just did a campaign in Chicago that was an out-of-home campaign titled Not Pop. And that was centered around bus stops that were close to Whole Foods. We had three objectives to that campaign. One was to support the account. The other was to pick up some US trade press, which it did really successfully. And then the third was the sort of unknown was like, what sort of uplift will you see in sales? And having worked a lot with media agencies in the past, you're never quite sure how that's going to work out.

17:47But it worked incredibly well, almost scarily well. We saw an uplift in some stores of over 120 % during the period of that campaign. So I think the creative was really strong, but also that targeted positioning of the ads close to those stores worked really well. So that's a kind of good example of the neighborhoods within Chicago. And then taking like a neighborhood in the UK as an example, how do you bed yourself in there? Do you get like boots on the ground, go store to store and make sure you're in the right accounts? or is it how do you make that work so that it feels authentic? It's a combination of factors.

18:28We're very London-centric at the moment, partly because that's where we started. So the boots on the ground were initially Rupert and I, or particularly Rupert, going around, getting in the right account. There's a kind of... We do a sales team in the UK, consists of one person at the moment, so we don't have boots on the ground. as a combination of the fact that the product and the brand works incredibly well for certain accounts so those more elevated conscious accounts that are thinking about design thinking about taste thinking about sustainability they will gravitate towards our product and we tend to not lose accounts as well because our sales are then strong so that there's an awareness thing and the UK feels a bit of an anomaly because this is where we started.

19:19The more interesting bit for us is how do we do it in the States where we're going into areas where we've not been before. Miami is our next focus because we're in those Whole Foods. It's a relatively new location for us. New York, we've been in for three or four years and that's really developed. We do have two salespeople on the ground in New York. So they're going around, they're making the relationships with the bodegas and the cafes and so on and then how we're beginning to take this to the next level is to recruit not financially but connect with people on the ground who who will help us create all those connections that we're talking about which has happened in quite an organic way so far we've got a guy who works for us called tom his focus is this neighborhood and community element of making these connections and now we're looking at how do we scale that and replicate that and our attention will definitely also will replicate the strategy in the UK and Europe the US is just our priority at the moment.

20:26So we've talked about the US you've been in New York you say three or four years now when did the idea first come up what convinced you to go for it it's obviously a big decision that a lot of UK brands toy with I think a lot are very scared by you should be scared I know I think you're so obviously a few people have asked me this from UK brands and my answer is a bit disappointing because it's quite bespoke to us to a certain degree the US came way earlier than it would do normally I think the normal direction of travel is you crack the UK you probably start with Europe and then you're like let's take on the US we've got a budget we've got a team we know our play but we've done the whole thing back to front we're really only just starting out in the UK I was still I hadn't even gone time I'd just gone full-time at something and nothing and it was literally the last one of the last brand consultancy jobs I did for a hotel group and through that I got introduced to a guy in the US who imported us and yeah I really remember the conversation is when I was living in Finsbury Park I was walking to the coffee shop to get my oak flat white or whatever and chatting to this guy and then chatted to Rupert I was like are we gonna do this it seems crazy but it was very much a non-risk for us we didn't have any budget we didn't have any team in the US he just said look I want to import it was a small container let's give it a go and he took over another english drinks brand at the same time so that was quite good for us to have a benchmark and they were a lot more successful than us still are in the uk and within i don't know nine months we'd sold like three containers and they'd still only sold half a container so there's not a kind of diss on them that's more like we realized that our product and brand just connected with the US consumer.

22:23And he's been phoning me and saying, oh, you're the best selling new product in Erwan of all products, not just drinks. And I was like, what's Erwan again? We were really naive. Now we fully know, obviously, and are very proud of our kind of success in there. We still do really well, given it's probably the most competitive drinks fridge on the planet. It's probably like the wildest drinks fridge on the planet. and with enhanced functionality the fact you're winning in that says a lot doesn't it yeah i think it and it is it comes back to again we didn't have a team or marketing budget the can sat in the fridge and it looks interesting it looks different so people pick it up they do the classic twist of the can read that it's all natural ingredients mid calorie low calorie no sugar no sweeteners and you take a risk based on the fact that it feels like it probably fits in your world and then the quality of the liquid then does the next bit of the job and they're like okay yeah i'll keep coming back to this so yeah that is really that's the strength of the brand and the product kind of working working together but yeah the relation that that guy's business kind of fell apart but he had done some deals with some distributors which then we took on and then really I think it was 2023, we started co-packing in the US, in Vermont, and that really was the change then.

23:53Distributors are much more keen to talk to you when you're no longer an imported product, you're made there. And yeah, people in America drink a hell of a lot of soda. Still in the UK, if you really take a step back, we're not a soda culture. I think that's partly why functional is perceived as the way here, because people can't get their head around just drinking a soda for the sake of drinking a soda. It has to do something. Otherwise, why would you do it? I think that's the sort of pet theory. Whereas in the US, people drink sodas all day, every day. Yeah, I was there 10 days ago and still, yeah, I tried.

24:34drinks I've tried before but you're refreshing your memory and beginning reminding yourself of how the what the categories this modern soda category which is so massive there our drink just tastes very different to all the others we're less sweet more refreshing cleaner no kind of sweetener stevia monk fruit thing on your tongue afterwards so it's it with a category within a category now with on our own sort of journey within the modern soda category which I think is why we create this really strong connection with people who like the drink once you're not oh i quite like it people like love it or don't drink what surprised you most about the us is it retailers consumers operations i i think the other big difference between the uk and the us is in the uk as kind of we're in whole foods in in the uk there's seven or whatever and they're just in London.

25:34And then really, there's a big step up to supermarkets. In the US, you've got regional health stores, and they might have 10, 15, 20. You've got a sort of mid-level healthy supermarket might have 500 stores. The kind of progression is a lot easier to a certain degree. and I think conversations with buyers you know it's very challenging in the US but they're they're interested to know how you taste where you think you sit in the category you know which brands are your competitors where are you whereas in the UK it feels quite different it's a lot harder in the or it has been for us that there's a lot more openness to trying things and a lot more of a this tastes great let's let's do this i think the relationship with distributors can become really positive really quickly basically if you're selling well they really like you and then the opportunity to expand your range is is a big thing we have got to where we've got to with essentially three flavors and arguably quite challenging flavors yuzu cucumber and hibiscus and Rose.

26:51Ollipop and Poppy have 20, 25 flavors. We're not going to get to that level, but we now have eight in the US and the appetite once you're selling to grow that range is really strong. And they've got the space. You go into even a small bodega in New York, we'll have a massive drinks fridge. Whereas in the UK, they might have five or six brands. They'll have 30 or 40 in the US way more competitive but the openness to to try things and if it works to help that grow is really refreshing I guess in the UK because you have actually only a handful of gatekeepers for the whole of retail the whole of grocery really if you're talking about sort of the big four that's four years which can either work for you and if that goes well then that's super straightforward or not whereas in the US thousands probably yeah no I think that's exactly right and the UK tends to be if you get your break in one supermarket it goes well then the others will follow pretty quickly and yeah like you say there's four or five opportunities and if you don't make that work then that's it you've got to think of a different way of doing it whereas yeah the US there are loads of opportunities and there are you know allard chains that have 250 restaurants and the as i say again it's just you know we went to this relatively small or mid-size i think they've got two venues like this bippin back place in new york and he's oh yeah we sell two or three cases of your drinks a day because people get them they get their bippin back and they get your soda people don't really do that in the uk they'll probably have water in their office or they might have a couple of things it's just again it's this cultural difference of how you consume and when you consume soda and for us particularly the drink works really well with food so that that lunchtime occasion is also really key for us you because obviously since you've launched the brand not only has soda changed but also lower nose exploded i think here and probably in the us are you really focused on that lunchtime mid-afternoon occasion or is that an area because I think I first when the brand first came out you were in quite a few bars and restaurants if I recall as well yeah I think it's yeah I'm always wary of not sounding focused my advice to a brand would always be just focus on one or two occasions and we do authentically fit into a few.

29:27And I think that alcohol replacement is massive for us, particularly for that home consumption. So when we launched, as I said, it came out of the entree, it came out of a bar, we were very much thinking of ourselves as we'll be a soft drink and we'll be a mixer, be great with alcohol. And that is happening a little bit, but it's not the opportunity we thought it was. Actually, the bigger opportunity is the alcohol replacement. So it really came about probably two years ago, I did some one to one interviews with subscribers, both in the UK and US. And I would say 80 to 90 % of them were either moderating or not drinking alcohol.

30:07And we're using our drinks as wine replacement with dinner or like end of the day where I used to have a beer and now have your Yuzu soda. And so that was that kind of triggered that moment for us where we're like okay that's what's happening so it doesn't really change our strategy as such because we were still trying to gain distribution in the entree but instead of pushing it as a mixer we pushed it as an alcohol replacement and that's definitely that's a kind of consumer driven change as you say big in the uk it's really beginning to gather momentum in the us i think dry january will be really big there for the first time and there's another interesting side I know, but the US is, there's a lot of people taking weed gummies and not wanting to drink alcohol, which is a hard one to add into your marketing mix.

30:59You just keep on doing what you're doing. And it's very sort of US specific at this stage. It is. Any standout lessons or maybe mistakes that any other founders could learn from when it's come to the US, launching in the US? With launching in the, yeah, the one mistake we made as an entire brand was launching an alcohol range and trying to do that in the US alongside a soda at that point in the business was a big mistake and took a lot of kind of time and energy and focus away as I said what we realized alongside that it was very hard to sell alcohol was that actually the alcohol replacement was a far bigger opportunity for us so we got rid of that there's a few things that you don't really know until you're there when we before we started co-packing in the us and we were sending over cans like most of them froze when they were being driven across the country at one point over the winter it was like minus 20 in minnesota and an entire truck of soda froze and once soda freezes then that's that so you know ask a lot of questions i think the freight people were like yeah of course you can have a climate controlled truck you just didn't ask all right oh thanks but yeah there's all sorts of idiosyncrasies if you can get a kind of u.s expert that you can just talk to now and again about a few things it's that's pretty useful and yeah i'll ask too many questions i would focus on one or two locations to begin with yeah we were basically california and new york we were New York really for 18 months, two years, then a bit of California and really just those two places.

32:44And then now, as we've taken on Whole Foods or Whole Foods have taken on us, that distribution is growing. I think we've now sold drinks over e-com in every state. We definitely have. That kind of gives you that wider spread. But yeah, don't try too much too soon. there's a lot to be had in each geography huge amounts of opportunity we're in I was talking to our sales team in New York I think they reckon there's about 4 ,000 kind of bodega style places that would sell our drink they reckon we're in about a quarter of them and we've been there for a while and the New York's and New York's really successful for us but that's we know we can keep on growing that footprint the kind of ceiling is incredibly high over there and it's expensive to launched in the US right it's high risk high reward is it expensive maybe it's not that's that that I would say is the accepted wisdom yeah it is and it isn't like I said we launched in a way that where we didn't spend any money on anything for quite a while for quite a while if you've got good distribution partners and good people on the ground whatever their role is and i think it's very expensive if you are having to push really hard we were lucky that our product really resonated with the u.s consumer so yes there we spend we you know we spend about 12 of our revenue on marketing and the majority of that is trade but that is low like i've heard olipop is like 40 and i also know some of these brands do crazy deals we aren't doing that we're gonna begin to increase our marketing spend but if you're getting traction then obviously it costs you less if you're not getting traction or you're winning loads of accounts but it's not moving on shelf then yeah you're gonna have to spend a hell of a lot of money at the moment uh pretty we're very focused on who our consumer is we're very focused on where our distribution goes we're not just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks we're not getting pulled into what sound like good opportunities but cost you a load of money and then they don't work we're being cautious but also ambitious at the same time that's the balance there's much bigger retail conversations happening but the potential is so huge you just want to just be careful of when you press go on that and make sure you've got everything in a line so yes it can be madly expensive but if you do it right or if you're lucky it doesn't have to be so let's talk a bit about the future of the category where you think soft drinks is heading or the better for you or the sort of elevated soft drink or modern soda as they call it in the US what do you think's next I think it will continue to grow consumers are only going to get healthier I think there's people want function to work personally I don't think it works in a drink I think there's a bit like I was saying with the weed gummies I think there's probably a point where drinks and a functional intake whatever that looks like, whether it's a gummy or a powder or something, they work together.

36:11I can imagine going into a bar and instead of buying a cocktail, you get a gummy or you get a whatever it is, and then you're looking for a drink to sit next to that. Now that's not necessarily soft drinks, but it is soft drinks, whether that's in a can or whatever the delivery method. I think people, particularly in the US, want this alcohol alternative and the alcohol alternative from the functional element needs to work. And I think that's quite a mad, exciting opportunity. I don't think it's a soluble in a liquid format. I think it's a supplement. So if you can be a drink that sits next to that, I think that's quite interesting.

36:51I think that the category tends to just create these whirlpools of copycats. So you're seeing Olipop and Poppy become enormous. And then there's like a huge slew of pre and probiotics As I said, I don't think that's why they're popular. And I think people have misunderstood it. What the next sort of thing is within the category, I'm not sure I would say this, obviously, but I believe that sort of clean, cleaner tasting, cleaner ingredients, and five ingredients rather than 15 or 20 ingredients, it is where we're headed. And I think there's a lot of growth potential within that. There's a lot of nostalgia in the US with the flavors, I think this new Stiller, Ben Stiller's soda, I think will be interesting.

37:38I don't think it's a competitor to us at all. But they're essentially doing what Poppy and Ollipop are doing, but just making it soda with no function. I think they've got monk fruit, stevia and sugar in there to give the sweetness, but not the calories. And again, they've gone down the nostalgic flavor route. So it'll be interesting. I think I'm sure they've got big budgets and they've certainly got a big star behind it. So how that goes, the battle between Poppy and Ollipop will be interesting to see what happens. I think obviously Pepsi will put a lot of money behind this. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before launching, what would it be?

38:14Don't launch an alcohol range. I love the alcohol range. It was good. Yeah, it was good. Tasted great. Tasted great. Didn't sell so well. I think the one piece of advice, and I think it's, I guess this is founder related, but also quite brand related, which is obviously specific to my background. But hold on to what your, the thing that you got you excited is the thing that will get other people excited. And you get so much advice, so much well-intentioned advice, and you learn so much that actually it can corrupt the thing that was the spark. And once that goes, you end up being a bit sort of vanilla and bland.

38:55and it's almost happened a few times and actually at the moment what's coming out or the fruition of it all is the difference our difference and our sort of weirdness the name the design the flavors is the thing that's like propelling us forward in the us in particular the difference on shelf the difference in taste the difference in ingredients like that is all the stuff that's working really well for us there are moments when like you said we could have added a functional ingredient because that sort of felt like the right thing to do and might have won us some listings we could have changed the name because something and nothing's a bit weird we could have put on the front in big letters low calorie and natural ingredients and these are all conversations we've had but we've stuck to what we were excited about and that's the thing that's keeping the momentum going yes advice is a tricky thing isn't it it's like you say you can get so much of it and it's all well intentioned but the reality is that there isn't a fixed right way to do this otherwise everyone would be millionaires and so everybody is right and nobody is right something and nothing perfect yes exactly okay i'll do quick fire favorite flavor in the range it changes a lot but at the moment I really like Sicilian lemon iced tea.

40:17One that consumers don't quite get yet. Sicilian lemon iced tea. We combine like rooibos tea and black tea so it gives this really interesting, it's basically, someone described it which I think it's quite a good description. It's like kombucha without the sugar and the vinegar. So it's quite grown up, it's quite refined, it's very subtle but I think it's really delicious. A brand in any category you think is doing brilliantly right now? I talk about it a lot and it's a really obvious one to say, but Grazza, the olive oil brand, just in terms of, I think someone posted this on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, I can't quote them, but yeah, he said if they were in the UK, they'd be doing a million in revenue.

41:01They're in the US, they're doing 150 million in revenue. That connection to that consumer, it's a very similar journey to us in terms of creating a really good product not not changing things as you grow I think yeah I'm a big fan of hers me too and I always want them to launch in the UK for obvious reasons but you've just explained why they probably won't be bothered yeah yeah reality we have a an investor who has a very a successful yogurt brand in the US healthier yogurt brand and And he said, people always say to me, I should launch in Belgium. He's do one more skew in Whole Foods and that's Belgium.

41:45I did see that yogurt brand on the shelves in France. So maybe they got bought. So I guess I'll explain that. Hardest lesson you've learned as a founder? I think the hardest lesson you learn is it just keeps going. I guess it stops at some point. either you totally mess it up or you sell or whatever it is but the sort of energy level is really it is a marathon you just got to keep going you've got to have quite a high level of resilience to to maintain that which i think people say quite a lot but that is a kind of you know it's a bit of a sisyphus kind of pushing the rock up the hill and then it falling back down and pushing it up hopefully we get to the point where the rock's falling down a bit less now it's just up but yeah you need resilience and a rare amount of energy to keep it going and finally a question we ask everyone in your opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow in my opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow is i can only really talk about my brand and i think again like i said earlier it comes to the purity of the idea and holding on really tightly to that idea and not letting it be corrupted or changed by other people however positive their intentions if you've got an idea and you believe in it stick with it because it'll be right for that moment for tomorrow in a month in 10 years time just keep going nice thanks so much for coming on Oli thanks for having me hope you enjoyed this episode of the tomorrow brands podcast if you did i'd love it if you could rate or leave a quick review it really helps other people find the show and if you're curious for more check out the other episodes