🫧 OLLY DIXON // SOMETHING & NOTHING CO-FOUNDER

0:00I'm Sam Rose, and you're tuning in to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. there's a lot when you start drinking at 8 a.m it's really different than when you start drinking at 4 p.m yeah um let's talk about let's talk about you and your soda as a mixer did you use your premium soda as a mixer at any world cup event um it does make a good mixer they sort of came into the world with my kind of idea was that it would be a mixer as much as it would be a soft drink but actually you know it happens a bit and we've done a really interesting project with some great drinks consultants and made some amazing mixed drinks but really it's used more by people who have stopped drinking alcohol it's a great alcohol replacement because it's premium and tastes good and still have that treat feel so no we did toy with the idea of like creating a drink because we've got eight flavors the flavors are inspired by travel well let's do world cup theme and then we've got a sicilian lemon and italy aren't in the world cup and it all began to fall apart quite quickly so we decided we'll think about it for another year you've got four more years to figure this out but well yeah and there's we have uh there's the euros which is all the european team so we could do that in in two years time but yeah we got thai basil that thailand didn't compete anyway we'll work on it maybe we've got four years to get thailand and italy qualified for the world cup so that's the bigger undertaking i feel like you could figure out the marketing shtick if they could just figure out how to play in the world cup yeah yeah you know just calibrate it um just just before we started you and i were chatting about the difference between calling this a seltzer and calling it a soda or premium soda uh i'd love to hear the story behind that and where you landed and and why and by the way cheers oh cheers um what is that using it as a mixer um it depends how far back you want to go but when we launched the brand it was just rupert and i my co-founder and it was just in the uk at that point our aspiration was pretty small i i had a pub as well as a branding agency and I thought oh I'll make some grown-up sodas or grown-up drinks for the pub and maybe a few friends and at the time seltzer wasn't a word in the like vernacular of a UK consumer so we it was a flavored soft drink we didn't like you know soft drink kind of sounds like it's for kids at the time we weren't sure about soda it had more flavor than a flavored water and we thought seltzer was kind of an unusual name and it would work well in the uk uh which it did and initially to a kind of small audience um and then the challenge really came when hard seltzers white claw in particular came over from the us to the uk and obviously had big marketing budgets and then everyone was like oh hang on so your seltzer is alcoholic and we made things even more confusing because we did a rather unsuccessful although delicious RTD which was wine-based that we called a spritz so then we were calling it seltzer plus like cucumber seltzer plus Sauvignon Blanc equals spritz was this sort of equation we came up with we partnered with this big party in this co-working space called Second Home and we supplied sodas and spritz and people were messaging us for our website going i don't drink like which one can i drink sorry i've got that back to front we supplied seltzer and spritz or not back to front i said soda instead of seltzer i'm indoctrinated by my own change but yeah it's working yeah we were supplying seltzers and spritz and people thought the spritz was non-alcoholic and the seltzers were alcoholic and we were like oh damn we kind of made this really confusing and at the same time the u.s was just beginning to develop for us and it was a different challenge there where people were saying hey this this has got way more flavor than a seltzer a it's quite expensive for flavored water and b this tastes way better than a flavored water so seltzer doesn't seem quite right so that's you know all those things kind of came together and i guess at the time it felt like a huge deal in you know retrospect you think actually that's quite a good time for that to have happened because we still weren't that big so yeah we we changed it to we felt like soda was an interesting area to go into which actually was a way smarter than we realized because obviously the premium soda category is now enormous and kind of helping drive us forward so So we went with premium soda because we only use natural ingredients.

5:36It's a premium positioning, all this stuff. And I worked a lot with alcohol before this. So the name you put on the label, no one's ashamed to say this is a premium vodka or this is a premium beer or whatever it is. So we thought premium soda described the liquid better. and we stopped the spritz. So then we were just doing the soda and everything kind of began to fall into place at that time. So buyers are like, okay, okay, I get this. Yeah, it's definitely more flavor than a seltzer, flavored water, definitely not any connection to alcohol. And suddenly, yeah, premium soda, as I said, particularly in this modern soda category, is now where we're at.

6:26Time means everything. yeah but i mean you're making your own fortune um i've had my own minor anecdotal version of this which is that uh i lived in new york for quite a while and we all we call it seltzer like just sparkling water is seltzer and their variety seltzer is like the you know legendary you can find it in most drugstores and i'm a huge sparkling water drinker of all i like i'm a you know a connoisseur if you will of bubbles so for years so I just ordered seltzer because you know like that's what it's called and that's what we all call it and I was on an airplane and it was like nine in the morning at one point and same like the seltzer thing the hard seltzer thing's kind of starting to take off and I ordered a seltzer and they're and they kind of checked me They're like, you know, it's alcoholic.

7:20I'm like, can I have a club soda, please? So I have rebranded to club soda. However, I feel like I would feel a lot better about myself if I was just ordering premium sodas all the time. I think that's the change you need to make. That's the change I need to see in the world. um what what about this other other than the kind of naming um you know i i guess that tightrope to walk were there other things about the spritz that encouraged you to kind of take it out of out of the mix no pun intended it didn't sell very well that was the biggest thing give me a better reason yeah i mean i the the whole sort of brand and the idea came out of the hospitality world as I said I had a branding agency I kind of built brands for a long time and I started this pub bar as a sort of kind of midlife crisis side project hustle fun thing and it wasn't it was great fun but I drank a lot which is when I was like oh I want to stop drinking um why aren't there any grown-up soft drinks which is how something and nothing came in and the idea you know the name the scales the kind of positioning everything was about this should work in a kind of convivial hospitality boozy environment as well as it can work you know by the pool with your lunch at your laptop or whatever um and yeah the kind of alcohol element was always going to be floating around and the rtd thing a i guess because we sort of saw ourselves as a kind of healthier antidote to traditional sodas we were then like oh we can be the healthier antidote to hard seltzers which you know not very nice really um so we used wine and we used but yeah really good quality wine wine from provence um rosé wine from provence uh sauvignon Blanc from the south of France as well.

9:25I can't remember which region now. And we used sake from Japan from a really good brewer sake maker to mix with the yuzu. So they were great drinks. But I think they were 4%. So they were at the strength the alcohol was intended to be mixed at. So they tasted real. They were like bar quality drinks. We worked with really good people to make them. But the route to market we hadn't figured out i think at that point yeah everything had sort of happened a bit organically and a bit sort of like i wouldn't say it was easy but things were kind of happening and we were like okay we'll just do this rtd it'll be great we'll use the same route to market and it was just very different and as i said we were kind of early in the u.s at that point not established at all but then launching an alcohol drink and the complexity in the US with the state laws and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

10:25Like after, we kind of knew quite early on, but he kind of made a bunch of drinks. So we sort of kept it going. Yeah, we, I don't know, we did like$150 ,000 worth of sales in the US, which, you know, was kind of something, but pretty much nothing. So at the same time, the other big change was people were drinking less, which is obviously growing more and more so the moderation um and actually we did this piece of research with our d2c customers and worked out that between 80 and 90 percent of them were either had stopped drinking were moderating and were replacing their evening beer or wine with our soda so we were like well actually that's a way bigger opportunity than like trying to do another alcoholic drink that the world doesn't need.

11:19That alcohol replacement, it's still the same occasion, but it's now without alcohol. So we scrapped it and focused fully on the premium sodas, which on our five-year business plan, there is no diversity in terms of other products or ranges coming into play. There'll be other flavors, but it'll all be soda. We won't be. interesting changing uh yeah we won't be doing any sachets of energy powders and we won't be doing any mixed drinks and all that kind of stuff we'll just make really good soda and as you said at the beginning people can mix it with alcohol it tastes great but right yeah but you don't do it on your own time well i do yeah since we've done this booklet we did this great booklet and we've done a mixed drink for each uh product one in particular which is really good so simple which is our sicilian lemon iced tea with like a light beer like a modello beer just half and half like a radler or a yeah panache or radler you get the lemon you get the black tea acerbicness you get the warmth of the rooibos and then you get the beer and it's just so refreshing and delicious so yeah that's a good one wow be right back i gotta go yeah that sounds great.

12:39It's like a perfect summer drink. Do you have a favorite flavor? I know it might be like asking if you have a favorite child, which is a no-no. Well, it was always the cucumber soda because that was the one that sort of started it. And I think it's still really unique. We use really high quality cucumber extract, which the flavor house we work with said that this is like the Rolls Royce of cucumber extract. And at the time I was like, sure, I bet everybody says that, but we have tried a lot of different ones because ours is really expensive and they're just no way good like you get that you know people have said you open the can and it's like cracking a fresh cucumber like so that that yeah that will always like your first child not that you'd ever tell your other children you know your first child always has a slightly deeper place in your heart uh but i really like the mango and thai basil is a crazy flavor trip like the aniseed basil like i've said this before but a friend of mine's a thai chef really good thai chef i think he won a miscellin star this year but um he used to do those supper clubs and this thing he just like as a sort of palate cleanser have slices of mango torn up thai basil and then like crispy onions obviously crispy onions aren't so good in a drink but i mean someone's gotta try it let's be real yeah but yeah just always stuck in my head of like that aniseed that it's a really unusual flavor the thai basil because you've got the herbaceous kind of basil stuff that you get in like a normal italian basil or whatever but you've got this really nice aniseed flavor i don't think you get aniseed drinks in france uh you are obviously alcoholic ones um but you there is a kids drink that's aniseed flavor which i used to have as a kid weirdly had a french pen friend just have it with milk which sounds gross but i sort of liked it back then but anyway maybe that's what's resonated in my head but i like the tropical freshness of the mango and then this aniseed flavor i think it's really unique and then yeah the the sicilian lemon iced tea that the blend like we wanted to do a nice tea we wanted to make it sparkling and it yeah i spent a lot of hours looking at flavors and talking with our flavor house and trying loads of stuff and it was really when we started putting together the black tea and the rooibos tea so you get the dryness of the black tea and then the kind of malty warmth on the rooibos tea that was like ah okay this is i've not tried this combination together uh and that was like a real kind of like you know i think there's a real elegance to that drink that's like my wife said it's a bit like a uh it's kind of like a kombucha but without the sugar and without the the kind of scoby kind of um vinegar thing but you get the tea like it's just it's a great drink like that in a wine glass really good yeah you're you're having your own party yeah always you've so i'd love to talk to you about sort of the difference in feeling of being creative around your own brand versus being creative in service of other people's brands, which I know you spent a lot of your earlier career doing.

15:56What are your biggest takeaways from like flipping it into, and I know this isn't your first rodeo either of kind of like working on your own thing, but how is running an agency for others been different for you from kind of inflicting creative services on yourself? Yeah, well, it's sort of, I think the beginning of it is why you do it. Like, I think I got, you're constantly for clients, you know, if you're kind of into what you're doing, you get really into their brand and you go really deep on it and might spend weeks or months creating a campaign or a deck or a brand direction strategy yeah hopefully they're really excited about it and they're into it and maybe you tweak it a bit based on their feedback and then you know if they're good clients and i don't mean this in an arrogant way about my own work but if they're good and they've kind of hired you for the right reasons then they sort of let your idea go come through and you can hold on to the essence whatever it was that you're all excited about at the beginning that comes through and that's when you create great great campaigns and great brands but quite often I don't I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it but quite a high percentage certainly over 50 percent things start to get cut back or like ah so and so has seen this and like actually the head of this wants to do this and then slowly things get watered down and watered down and you end up with you know essentially death by a thousand cuts of like something quite average and vanilla and and i think that's why i wanted to do my own thing and i didn't know what it was going to be it could have been a trainer brand or a cups or gardening or i've got no idea but then i did this pub and then had this like oh what what what do you drink when you're not drinking and there's a lot a grown-up soda could be interesting um uh but but yeah so that that i guess that's the difference is you can then do what you want so yeah i spent a year developing the brand with my designers who i worked in-house with and we you know didn't look at soft drinks once like my whole thing when you're developing a brand is never look at the category that you want to go into because otherwise you just end up the same as everybody else like look at the modern soda category in the u.s now like 30 or 40 of the drinks have got pop in their name somewhere everything's bright everything's nostalgic everything looks the same if you go into an era one there's 100 sodas and they all kind of got the same color scheme and the same fonts and yeah one of the reasons we're doing well is because we look so different and we don't particularly have much of a marketing budget we don't really have a big sales team at this point although that's changing um uh so yeah that that kind of ability to do what you want and for me doing this with Rupert was a bit having some naivety as well of not really knowing what we were doing um I think if we'd done too much research or you know looked at the category too much we probably would have done something different and it wouldn't have been so successful um the you know creating a drinks brand that doesn't look like a drinks brand but it looks like a piece of art a bit fashion or david hocney picture whatever reference you want to pick it is the thing that's made this work obviously the liquid then has to be really good and back that up but that's that's sort of almost a different part of it right it's like the difference between the first sale and the second sale basically yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly but that initial like you know to a degree yeah I've got good taste in both sense but I'm sort of lucky I don't know why but I can taste loads of different flavors and I have a sort of thing in my head of kind of how I want it to taste and once you've sort of got a bit of a direction then you kind of keep on going in that way and I guess because of my background both from a music perspective and a and a branding and creative perspective i can kind of pull i know i know how to pull references that might sound a bit arrogant but like i know like the salad example kind of taste the salad i like it just sort of stays in my head like i want a little bit of this maybe that would work as a drink and you almost uh yeah you almost don't want to try too hard you You just have to be in that state where you're pulling in ideas and references and then they kind of have to spit out in the right way.

20:44It reminds me a lot of what it must be like to remix a song as a DJ where you're grabbing references. Yeah, making the drinks is a lot like when I go into the flavor house. It's like when I go into the studio. So I was an okay DJ, but I loved music. it i wasn't technically good at producing but i made an album on you know that was on a decent record label didn't sell very well but anyway um the and did good you know remixes for good artists and stuff but being in the studio so i'd be in the studio with a producer who knew how to use the studio and i'd bring in references old records and then we kind of worked together to you know create a track and be like oh maybe the let's try a different snare snare sound or like you know are the bass line and this track's really interesting let's try that and it's a bit like that making a drink you're like maybe this has got too much acidity we need some sweetness but you know we can't do that so like you're kind of working within parameters and you're dialing up and dialing down different elements and sometimes you're like actually this this isn't ever going to work it's not a great drink um and then other times you're like i don't know why this works but it really does so yeah so we have to put it into the world like you know the hibiscus some rose drink we're just like this tastes crazy it has to be in the world people have to try this drink so you just do it and at that point no one's going to tell you no so she's still not um i i love what you were implying with sort of the the creative discipline to put yourself into to a little bit of a blank page or vacuum state in order to really have like this, this empty palette to start to, to build on.

22:35Because I think that the inclination of even a lot of, you know, many creatives, let alone, you know, founder entrepreneurs that have a product idea is like, let me go diagnose the competition. I'm going to build a graph that tells me like where the white space is and I'm going to know everything about, you know, every, every other player in the space. And I think that there's like, you sort of hit an emotional trigger for me as you were describing that of like, almost like a delayed gratification of letting the idea form itself and like, and letting it come and kind of manifest. And how practiced are you in that?

23:17Does that come to you naturally to sort of like ignore outside inputs and go into this like zone where you've got your blank palette? Or did you have to really hone that skill over time of like, I'm doing soda now, so I'm not looking at soda. Cards on the table. Your tech stack is held together with duct tape and prayers. If you're a brand founder or COO juggling Shopify, your 3PL portal, three different inventory trackers, and yes, that one crucial Google sheet, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Orders get lost, inventory counts are fiction, and your seamless integrations break every other Tuesday.

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24:36I think I've honed it. It's interesting. Like when I go in now and make a new drink, you can have, you know, the sales team might say, oh, I think we really need this flavor. And I'll be like, okay, I'll give that a go. And you can, there'll be moments where I like overthink it. I'm like, oh, I hope this does well in Atlanta or whatever. And then you're like, you can't think like that. You just have to make a drink that you like. And I think actually, yeah, we're really beginning to grow really well. The business is doing well. We're kind of at this point of growth rather than building and on the precipice of disaster.

25:18And I think that's partly because of how you're describing it. We kind of just created something we really loved in terms of the brand and the product. and to a degree we probably found it quite hard to explain to people and probably couldn't say well look here's the big opportunity this is the white space we see bang we're here give us 10 million dollars we're gonna like take over the world we kind of just said yeah look it's and i would from an investor perspective most people were like i just really love the drink like i I kind of, as long as you're not fracking this up, so I can, as long as you're not messing this up, then I probably just want to put in some money.

26:00And whereas now they're going, okay, I can kind of see what you're doing. Let's put in more money. And I would say the white space has always been there, but it's grown. And particularly, you know, like I said, when we started the business, the US was not on our radar at all. The US is now be close to 70 % of the business this year. it's growing like 90 % year on year. That was something that happened through a strange combination of factors. It wasn't a strategy particularly. The modern soda category, when we launched in the US, Olipop was sort of around, but not as big. And Olipop and Poppy have obviously like bulldozed this huge modern soda category.

26:41And we're in that slipstream. And within that category, we sit in a white space. And now we can very clearly identify the white space we can very clearly articulate our consumer who hasn't changed like that's always been there but now that there's probably more of that consumer the understanding of wanting to drink healthier probably people are less focused on calories than they were six years ago it's now about better quality ingredients so to a degree we've just done our own thing and i think that's coming at it from a more emotional creative direction perhaps than a commercial strategic direction now as we've become more articulate experienced the successes there we've brought in people who help us create that structure and that focus and the white space has become very clear to us now but it probably wasn't so much at the beginning so yeah and i and i've definitely you know going back to music i didn't make the perfect album that i wanted to make i kind of made an album that i sort of thought people wanted and then as a result it had some good bits but it had some kind of average bits so i probably failed at that holding on to the clarity and the um bit that was important to you before so now i know to hold on for dear life because that's the bit that makes you take off oh that's so interesting and do and and i almost i'm hearing almost like a regret in that like a creative regret of not having i don't know defended your own tastes at a point in time yeah i think that's true yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah i think you know you can you can see it with art you know with music or with with anything but particularly with music you can see people who've just gone oh this is kind of what i do if you like it great if you don't yeah kind of tough and and then people who go i want to be really good i want to be really successful who almost want it too much that you yeah people can kind of smell it i think they can kind of go i don't sort of authenticity is kind of overused but there's an authenticity to certain things where you just go oh that really resonates with me that that's you know lots of people will say about something and i think i don't know why i love this so much but i just really love it i love the brand i love the flavor yeah all that all that stuff so i think yeah there's i've had regrets in my life before i've had a go at doing something and had some you know a great platform and a great opportunity and i probably haven't quite delivered what i wanted to deliver whereas now currently i have no regrets i'm very no yeah i think it's interesting that partnership coming up next quarter um you i in order to taste make you have to have a really healthy sense of the right disregard for things and the right regard and i and i think that actually that is if taste is to be distilled that that is what it is is choosing what to ignore and choosing what to pay attention to or amplify and curate or remix from from the world and um yeah that's very true and i think there's also you can go to you can go to like you can also hold that on too tightly and go right the next flavor we're gonna do is like nettle and you know something really weird because yeah you want to go you almost like believe your own noise too much that there is a balance as well of like well yeah i want this to be popular and i want yeah yeah there's a kind of sweet spot i think which which at the moment i think we've we're delivering for something and nothing do people make like pop music jokes around you a lot no no not yet you're the first yes just had to get it in i've been sitting on that for a minute all right no no well you know where we actually ran a campaign called not pop tell us about that so well like i said before i kind of had this realization that yeah there's culture pop ollie pop poppy like a million loads of other pops um i just thought that was kind of fun funny and then um i was looking at we were you never want to compare your brand to apple because that's insane but someone else did it for me and i was okay okay and we're i was looking at this ad the first when macintosh launched the colored max and they said sorry not available in beige or not available in i can't quite remember what it was now and i was like oh that's kind of cool and we were doing we were going to run an out of home campaign um in chicago to support whole foods to kind of see how it went i was like let's just have the can really bold really clear and it just says not pop at the top with a full stop and that and that's all we did because it kind of says a lot of stuff you know it's yeah it's not pop it's a premium soda yeah it's all about the can the can looks amazing the flavors are good and it was yeah i'm always a bit skeptical of marketing like yeah i've seen it work really well but having worked in that world i was never quite sure but the the like sales figures we got through whole foods like some of the stores went up 150 i was trying to kind of figure it out and part of it is obviously the vernacular of pop is used around chicago a lot so it kind of had an yeah yeah i feel like chicago and the uk are probably i don't know there's there there are regional charts of what we call these sparkly drinks yeah right right right yeah yeah um the ad was sorry no beige with that yeah yeah sorry no boys sorry not pop i love i love that yeah so the not pop thing will probably do more in the u.s because i think it works really well um yeah we just ran some on some vans around williamsburg and there's a few other trucks i should say so and a few other things you can call them fans we we we understand okay i some time ago so i i've worked in branding um and and had a much smaller than yours but a agency that did a lot of branding for a while we're a little bit of a vertically integrated accelerator and um and i and i tend to you know i just have a lot of ideas i'm like always sitting there kind of trying to curate my own experience and bottle feelings.

33:57And I was, this was a couple summers ago, I was sitting in my backyard and the perfect song, like the perfect mix came on. And I was, I forget what I was drinking, but it was the perfect drink. And I had this idea, which I'm giving to you because you must execute it, please. You have the permission in both ways of the can having like a qr code on it that would link to a mix and the mix would be like and it would be the feeling of the drink and it would kind of have these suggestions for like how to enjoy but but this kind of little you know moment it was what you've done it we've done this yeah yeah so well kind of i don't even need to take credit for it i don't know there's a qr on the can and we've done a playlist on spotify for each of the drinks but i would like to take it a step further and it doesn't work quite well enough like the yeah we're gonna work on the on the ux of it but but i i totally agree it actually there's um an indian restaurant called dashum um which is actually launching in new york soon but where um i think it was those guys anyway during lockdown you'd be able to buy meal kits and there was a qr code you'd scan and there was a playlist that went with the meal kit and I was like that is very cool so we kind of borrowed that idea but ultimately I would like to do that I'd like to do more of a kind of an album for each can made with a different artist maybe from the area like the country that that can is associated that flavor is associated with I think would be really cool but I agree I think there's definitely something really interesting between music sound taste all those things kind of coming together so it is a great idea well you've well you've already done it which is so great well we haven't quite done it but you're close you're going in the right direction yeah there's sort of the you know like the synesthesia of it all of kind of like creating these creating these moments that combine so many tactile sensations including you know taste and the and the literal atmosphere and the humidity of the air and like you know what you're what you're drinking and what you're listening to and um this will be a total tangent but here's another free free idea and this was like i'm just dumping all of my to-do list like giving me kind of uh more kind of belief in my idea so so um back at the at the very very beginning of the iphone and the app store um i had an idea for an app called soundtracks and this is sort of inspired by movies uh and so it was called soundtracks because what it would do is create a playlist for you on the fly that used your geography and what was happening around you was sort of like location aware motion aware to curate like as though you were the star of your own movie what you would be listening to if you were like and these were all my new york experiences like i'm you know it's two in the on a Saturday and I'm running up the West side highway, like, and I'm, and I'm jogging and, and it's sunny.

37:08And so it would be like a sunny jogging mix. And then, you know, it's 4 PM on a October Thursday and I'm going out to a cocktail bar and it's French and like, we're going to do like French, we're going to walk you to the cocktail bar. Um, and so I feel like

37:27the URL is available if anyone wants to. someone take that i would definitely i would definitely sign up for that it's funny when i was in new york recently um we i was like the i don't know eighth ninth time i've been to new york i've weirdly never been to central park and um so i was staying nearby so i was running there every morning except for one i was a bit hungover but um the i kept thinking oh i should really sort of like i've created a playlist for this rather than just my standard stuff and i was like listening a bit to like the woody allen kind of soundtrack for a bit but we're good to run to um but yeah i think that's a great idea i like a yeah geo tagged kind of playlist uh and yeah that kind of sound soundtrack yeah um yeah like it reads your calendar it knows you're going on a date it's kind of cloudy out you know it's gonna rain just it creates the mood for you to move through the world and okay well if both of our startups are boring us at some point in the future we'll do this i'll um i'll code for you and you can you can do all of the mixes um how how much did you uh how much of the learning curve here at the beginning of starting this business was rough?

38:51Or did you sort of just kind of open yourself up to the learning experience of it and say, you know, I've not done CPG before, but I've done taste curation and I've done, you know, kind of, well, in both ways, right? In both senses, literally at the pub and also just for culture. And I know you leaned a lot on those experiences, but were there particular aspects of cpg startup land that kind of hit you hard yeah i think there was a lot um so yeah my my business partner rupert came he worked at red bull and pepsi um before so you know he was had more knowledge but neither of us had ever done a startup before um so yeah it's funny isn't it i think sometimes creating the first run of drinks was kind of okay that wasn't that hot and then it just sort of gets harder as you scale particularly when you're in that middle bit um we we um we sit we launched with just the cucumber seltzer soda and then you know we got some really good small but like good credible listings and then everyone's like hey when are you going to do more flavors and i was like we're just doing cucumber but rupa was like no no we need to do more um so we did we did the yuzu next and hibiscus and rose uh and we had to move production facilities to a slightly bigger production facility i mean we're still talking small numbers comparatively today um and we just won a listing at whole foods in the uk which is not it's seven stores so it's quite a different deal to the u.s on foods but still for us at that moment it was big and uh essentially some micro like the way they produced the hibiscus and rose was wrong they'd like mixed it and then they left it overnight before they produced it so it basically started to turn into kombucha and we had exploding cans and you know you have to tell whole foods oh yeah that delivery is not going to come and yeah they don't care because you're tiny and you're like oh god this is and then we had like this weirdly just randomly the warehouse we were using was right next to the pub that i had and one afternoon they said yeah you need to come like there's these weird sounds and all the cans had like elongated and we were having to like open them and pour away this liquid because it was dangerous they're essentially exploding but literally they were like flying did you just have a really big party that night you're like everybody come we definitely weren't in the party mood but that was pretty brutal we were like we kind of i don't know how long we've been going not even a year really and we were like oh this is probably the end um that that was that was that was painful um getting cans printed like that learning you know the designers i work with are essentially lifestyle designers they can design all sorts of stuff but they've never designed a can before and you kind of start chatting to the first ones you do are like stickers so essentially you can do what you like and then when you go to a can manufacturer they're like oh yeah you've got five channels of ink but like well we want to print onto a white can so like there's no such thing as a white can unless you're ordering like millions and millions and millions so you have to print the white but you're going to have to do two hits of white to get a like a pure white you can't do an image as complex as you've done you have to like you know drag simplify that and then there's all like the font sizings and blah blah blah blah blah and then we convinced them that i could go up to the can printers and it was like a friday before a bank holiday and again yeah these printers are just printing millions and millions of cans and we're in there yeah put all our money in so it's huge to us tiny to them i can't remember how many cans we're having printed let's say a hundred thousand which to us just seemed an insane amount and the first print comes out and it just looks terrible and i can't really explain because i'm you know i don't really know what i'm saying and the guy's like i don't really want to help you because it's friday and i've got monday off so i want to be getting out of here but you kind of have to hold this guy in this room and say right okay this doesn't look like how do we get this like the smudges all over the white like the prints all off like how do we make this color and then he would like moan go off come back an hour later and go what about this i'll be okay well actually that's looking a bit better but then this isn't quite right and it just those you know that happens you know all the time but so much at the beginning where you don't really know what you're doing but you need somebody to deliver to the standard that you know you want to create you don't really understand the the medium so yeah i mean those yeah that was that's really painful all those bits and you're having there's a lot of sleepless nights where you're like is this is this a good idea i've got no idea um but he stayed late for you sorry he stayed late he did relax he stayed late all the worst things happen on a friday afternoon like friday 2 p.m is the witching hour for like i need a service provider to show up to like you know it's the 11th hour literally and i don't know why i don't know why there's something about friday afternoons that for me has just been oh well i think yeah i think it's probably a really good yeah we were the smallest name that week they shove us onto a friday no one really cared so you're like you know if you don't have any clout you're on a friday whatever it is and you have to fight your corner um but yeah a lot of that stuff you know we didn't really know anything about raising money uh i don't know if we do now but we've raised a lot of it you know i always say we spent about a year developing the brand and about five minutes on the business plan at the beginning like we really didn't have a clue i remember at one point And Rupert and I were like, if we raise 150 ,000, we're probably good.

45:24And now we've raised like, you know, 10 million or whatever, or we will have done by the end of this round.

45:34We're a lot more diligent and experienced now. We sound like we don't know what we're doing, but certainly at the beginning, yeah, you're just learning so much. and i you know i think there's an extent to which if you knew everything at the beginning that you know now you might you might not do it right if someone told you at the very beginning hey you're not going to raise 150 you're going to raise 10 million dollars you might be like maybe i don't want to do that or like that sounds intimidating or whatever you know whatever it is yeah i said it's like having kids if you wrote the pros and cons there's no way you'd have kids it's like insane once you know but and like with this yeah totally if you knew everything i was you know ignorance is is a really key part to doing this yeah ignorance is bliss i'll ask one last operational question um before the lightning round how how do you manage domestic uk production versus u.s production and was yeah tell me about production so the the the way we make the drinks the kind of juice bit rather unglamorously called the compound is made and mixed in the uk so users from japan or korea depending on the harvest uh rose i can't remember the roses from um somewhere exciting uh but most of it's from europe and so we blend it in our flavor house and then to so you get consistency and then we ship that out to the different co-packers so we have one in a place called shropshire in england which um has amazing water quality it's like natural springs under the earth we just started working with a production facility in amsterdam where the water's filtered through sand dunes randomly uh and then in the us it's in vermont so again national park green mountains amazing water quality so then they mix their great water with the compound bubbles cans that kind of stuff so the consistency stays the same the cans are produced in each of the countries um so it's relatively easy like some drinks i know they mix all the ingredients in the production facility which obviously uh well there's reasons for doing it but none that's seemed that attractive to us um so yeah it kind of works quite well we've got um uh our production team all based in the uk but we're kind of growing it out in the u in the us because we're producing a lot growing yeah uh did you have to try a lot of bad waters to get to your good water like how many states did you go through before vermont was like that's the one yeah no fun it was kind of again and this is probably yeah you don't need to know about cpg it's more of an experience thing of like you know when you get a good recommendation you're like uh i really trust this person we kind of spoke to quite a few but visited or well rupert visited this one and he was like this place is amazing and they've been fantastic and continue to be fantastic we tend to do you know we'll do a run see how it goes but straight away they kind of nailed it and there's been like minor not i wouldn't even call them issues minor challenges that they've like dealt with so well so um yeah we were i guess a bit of luck but definitely asking the right people and trusting their experience the uk we're probably on about our four fifth facility but that's size scale and then now the place we're at we really love we've got a great relationship with them so did did you go through okay last question i promise on on production uh but i could talk about bubbles all day uh bubble size like to get to the right yes i knew i knew we'd have fun talking about this like where did you land on the spectrum of bubble size how many bubble sizes did you go through how do you think the bubble size is there a menu honestly i wish there was a menu honestly like i would quite like to go and study this because it's so hard to get a good answer from people so we essentially we work with a consultant a long time ago so we have parameters for all the different elements of the ingredients the bricks the acidity the blah blah blah blah and then we have a specific um carbonation level that we want to hit which is right at the top so because we're natural ingredients um we pasteurize the drink because that's the way you get shelf life so about an 18 month shelf life the pasteurization for most people it you just heat it up and cool it down so it basically kills anything that potentially could be living in there uh or it prevents it from happening in the future if you've got like drinks full of sugar all that stuff you don't need it because yeah it's an inhospitable environment which also you probably shouldn't put in your stomach but sure it's funny how yeah so the pasteurization means that when you're carbonating there's a sometimes reluctance from production facilities to push the carbonation right to the limit because they don't want sticky stuff all over their machine because they have to wash it and blah blah blah but so that's a bit of a kind of bit at the beginning where you're like let's push it a bit more let's push it a bit more let's push it a bit more so our carbonation levels in the uk and the us are exactly the same but the bubbles are bigger in the us now i've kind of had it explained to me several times by both sides and neither of them are quite they don't fully make sense but everything's bigger in america we know that but yeah the bubble's slightly bigger like the carbonation level is the same now there's also like different ingredients behave differently like create different environments again for the bubble and what they hang on to and blah blah blah So there's a whole science around it.

52:07We've also discovered, or with some help of the production facilities, we're always like, you know, perfect things, get things more consistent, that actually if you chill everything in the first place, and mix it chilled, and then carbonate it, you get higher carbonation. So it's an ongoing conversation that we always have. And like, you know, we'll do a batch and we're like, this is it. this is like the carbonation's perfect on this one but for example we had a real problem with our ginger drink where the carbonation the ginger eats the the carbon dioxide so now we've we've changed the very slightly changed the ingredients and um make sure the ginger's really chilled before it's carbonated and now it's much better aggressive ginger i'm really glad i asked this question Yeah, I didn't give you a very good answer.

52:59No, that was an excellent answer. Do you have a personal preference? Okay, we'll start the lightning round, and I'm going to start it with UK or US bubbles. What's your pick?

53:10Ah, so I quite, the UK, there's a bit more of a like champagne mousse to the UK bubble, which I really like. The facility that we use actually make table water for high-end restaurants. So they had a bubble sommelier come in. And I think there's something about that that I really like. But my business partner, Rupert, loves American bubbles. He loves the bigger bubbles. All right. Well, there's something for everybody. Being a bubble sommelier might be my actual dream job. I don't know how I missed that calling. Yeah, I'd like to be a nose, like a perfume nose. A perfume nose? You're close. maybe maybe there's room fresheners that you know are an evolution you're talking about uh how we we promised ourselves that we weren't going to do yeah insane product line extensions but we're doing a glade plug-in a glade plug-in and a um well it'll be like a real potpourri for europe and then it'll be a glade plug-in yeah and then we'll have to do a candle naturally yeah well that might be yeah anyway um okay uh you told me your your favorite was um your favorite flavor was uh at the moment i'm going to go sicilian lemon iced tea sicilian lemon iced tea everybody uh dj booth or the boardroom which experience has taught you more about reading a room that is a really good question more about reading a room i would say i don't know if it's taught me but the skill when you're djing it's all about reading the room that's the most important thing that you do so djing djing fair that is the job that is the job yeah yeah um last question can Can you give us a hint about what's next for the brand that hasn't been announced yet?

55:22No.

55:26Well, I don't want to sound boring as though it's kind of more of the same, but it is sort of more of the same. There will be new flavors, not for a little while. There's some being developed, but we've gone from three to eight flavors relatively quickly. So there's still some fun to be had with those. I think what you will see next year is more of the brand personality coming to life. I think there'll be some really, I mean, I would say this, but some really interesting and creative activations that are very unsoft drink. Unsoft drink. Okay, great. I accept your answer. Yeah, thank you. Very badly put.

56:17This has been such a delightful conversation. We both found our new callings. I can't wait to see all of the art and culture that you'll build around the corner here. And it's such a pleasure to chat. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks, Samantha. I really enjoyed it. Cheers. Cheers. Bye. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Commerce is Chaos. If you're listening, I have a feeling you know just how much good at leaving a five-star review can do for a team. Drop us a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to Commerce is Chaos wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe to our sub stack, also called Commerce is Chaos, for more good stuff and actionable tools to build your business.