The £15M Tea Brand That Said No to Michelin-Star Restaurants | S5 Ep4

0:00Recently someone talked about they'd just been diagnosed with cancer. Little kindness from a team member in our store who had no idea what I got, you know, that they'd just come from the hospital and sort of walking around the city in a little bit of a daze and just went in and had a nice interaction with someone. That was so meaningful for them in a low point. We used to say no to everybody and then we said no to two Michelin star restaurants in the space of a week and that was the moment when I thought, no, this is probably stupid. Maybe we should start saying yes. And what's your turnover? This year we'll do about 14, 15 million.

0:32That's amazing. One of the differences which people don't notice when you look at really well done brands.

0:43Today's guest has reimagined the world of tea, bringing creativity, community and sustainability to every cup. Mike Turner, the co-founder of Bird & Blend, has built a tea brand that's anything but traditional, infusing unique flavours, sustainable practices and a whole lot of personality into each blend. Bird and Blend isn't just about tea, it's about creating experiences and building community around something as simple yet powerful as a cup of tea. Before we get into today's episode, I want to give a shout out to a special sponsor, Sam Lawrence Recruitment. We all know that finding the right people or the right job can feel really overwhelming and that's exactly where Sam comes in.

1:23He really just gets it. It's not just about ticking boxes, it's about connecting the right people with the right opportunities. He takes the time to understand you and exactly what you're looking for, whether you're building a team or taking that next career leap. So definitely get in touch. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. At Getting to Grow, I believe that growth starts with connection. And that's where our sponsor, We Are All Marketing comes in. I'm super excited to be partnering with Vic and the team over at We Are All Marketing. They're not just a marketing agency, they're storytellers, strategists and your biggest advocates.

1:56Whether you're building a brand, launching a product or strengthening your digital presence, We Are All Marketing helps you turn ideas into impact. With a personalized results driven approach, they ensure your vision reaches the right audience in the right way. Ready to grow your business? Visit weareallmarketing.com and see how they can help you thrive. Getting to Grow is also brought to you by the Coconut Collab. And full disclosure, as I'm sure most of you are aware, I work there. So I know how much love goes into everything that we make. We're all about creating delicious, dairy-free, plant-based treats that do not compromise on taste.

2:29From our creamy yogurts to our indulgent desserts, everything's made with coconuts and a whole lot of care. If you're looking for something naturally good but seriously tasty, and my favourite is just our natural coconut yoghurt, I have it most mornings with granola and lots of honey. Trust me, you're going to absolutely love it. Welcome back to another that episode of getting to grow on this week's episode i am joined by mike turner who is the co-founder of bird and blend tea super excited to have you on and thank you very much for coming all the way up from worthing no problem excited to be here thank you so um as i was just saying before we went live i um i haven't done a massive amount of research on you guys because i'm on purpose actually because i wanted to for you to tell the story because i have a slight affiliation with Bird and Blend pre knowing you, meeting you and obviously being introduced to you by Peter was in lockdown as everybody knows that listens to my podcast because I stopped going on about it I work for my day job as Coconut Collaborative and we had a massive overproduction of our chocpots because obviously all out of home shut and then we were like right we've got all these samples and luckily they can be ambient we need to contact like subscription boxes to basically like we don't want the stock to go to waste the NHS had had enough at this point how can we get it into more people's hands in a way that I guess was beneficial to us because new people were trying it but also a nice little freebie for people that were already buying at home.

3:52I got in touch with one of your colleagues, Georgia. Yeah, Georgina. Georgina, sorry. And yeah, Bird & Blend was, our Chocpots ended up in Bird & Blend tea boxes and I am now also a consumer of them myself. These will come out my cupboard, I promise. You haven't, because I wasn't organized enough to bring it in. No, but it's quite good because it shows that I really do buy it. lovely um so mike what's the inspiration behind burn and blend and how did you start that's a great question so we started um back in 2011 2012 um the inspiration was myself and and chrissy who's my co-founder we'd met at uni and we kind of always wanted to start something together both of us had worked lots and lots of shit jobs i'm assuming i can swear yeah yeah um had worked lots lots of shit jobs and had kind of realized that was the impact that where you worked had on your whole life um and so it kind of clicked the impact that a business can have but it wasn't necessarily about tea we'd had loads of different ideas we'd kind of tried to get started on a couple of them but nothing had kind of bitten we'd never got passionate about it so eventually we thought we've not got any ideas let's go skiing so we moved to canada what okay that's quite dramatic yeah went skiing there I worked the skiing structure in the day and worked in bars in the evening and over that winter this kind of idea for Bird and Blend formed or Bluebird as we used to be called actually formed the extra bit of Chrissy was here that she says she did say we should do this before I went to Canada and I was like no it's it's a daft idea and when we got there I came around to it so we we decided we needed there was no work where we were in the spring the olympics were happening in london i wanted to be at them so we said let's come back for the spring um give it a whirl and see what happens and but where why tea where did the tea aspect come from where did the tea so chrissy had kind of fallen it so i was in customer service and hospitality chrissy just kind of fallen into the tea industry um so she was interested in it um and saw that there was a wave coming and had all of these ideas for doing something new but it it wasn't the same story that I think most tea company fans have.

6:06They went to China and they tried the most amazing cup of tea and they wanted to bring this to the masses. For us, we wanted to create great experiences for people, both customers and team members. And we were kind of looking for something which you could build that excitement and that experience around. And it was the ideas that Chrissy had around what you could do with tea and turning that into an experience which was the exciting point rather than this is really good quality, we should show this to the world. Oh, okay, interesting. Yeah. Because actually, like, I think it's really important for customers to go into a store and have that experimental side of it.

6:42Yeah. I studied retail, like fashion kind of retail at university. Yeah. And theatre in the store was one of, like, it was such an important aspect of why you enter stores and, like, what you gain from it versus just, you know, buying the product online. Yeah. So that's really interesting, but that was kind of, like, even then, when I guess it was kind of sort of in its infancy at the time. Yeah. you were kind of pre-thinking and being like, this is where it's going to go. Yeah, I think because I'd come from, you know, bars, restaurants, that's sort of, that's, well, teaching skiing is giving people an experience.

7:12You're not really, you're not teaching an Olympic gold medalist. You're teaching someone to have a smile on their face, right? So I think because I'd come from that attitude, and neither of us had come from pure retail, it meant that we'd started with that, how do we create a smile? if you create a smile people come back they'll buy the product actually as a souvenir which is what I still think people do um rather necessary for it in particular um so yeah I think it was just inbuilt into kind of our beliefs about the business from the very start that that theatre thing and then the world's kind of moved in that direction which is a good good way to go yeah for sure so did you always have the kind of initial idea to have stores versus a product that would end up on a supermarket shelf yeah so I think because it was about that experience um we we wanted to have direct relationship with customers and we started we didn't have any money so we started on market stores Chrissy built a website and I went and did market stores basically for probably a couple of years 18 months a couple of years before we opened stores so I think it was that interaction with the customer which we were we were quite obsessive about what was interesting was in really early days because we also hit you know we hit on a wave of TV coming and now there's so many tea companies about right um and we were early in that in that journey so right at the start we actually had approaches from waitrose and tesco and you're going to these food markets and everyone you talk to as a little food business that's what their that's their dream right um and i can remember sitting there being like oh do we want to do that we sort of a crossroads here of do we go down that grocery route or do we keep plugging away at doing markets and selling online um and and stuck with with the route which we've stuck down down to that that interaction because two things one was the interaction with customers we really enjoyed the second was we thought well actually if you're supplying grocery really you're just managing cash flow sitting in a sitting behind a desk i don't want a job where i'm sat behind a desk now i sit behind a desk quite a lot of the time yeah that's to manage cash flow but it's a little bit different um yeah it was it was that people bit which we were really interested in yeah which is so lovely to hear because i think a lot of people I mean I don't I founded the podcast but I don't have a product that's up to more of a service and I think making sure that you know you're going in with the idea that actually it's not to make loads of money it was more to really bring something different yeah to people that were walking by and saying oh that's a really cool store what's in there yeah yeah yeah and how do you go about sorry going backwards so you've got your market stall yeah how did you kind of go about even like if I'm just thinking if I wanted to start a tea brand I don't know where I'd source tea leaves yeah and did you decide that it was going to be english breakfast or did you go right we need to obviously do something different so we're going to do loads of flavors and where do you go about getting tea so flavors it was always about flavors um and it was kind of this was the piece which chris had had and which we'd seen in north america but you know at the time you'd go to mcdonald's and say can you get a cup of tea i made lists seven different flavors so we saw that there was a movement towards having different blends and things.

10:17So we already had that in mind. And then the second part was actually the initial concept for Burden Blend was more about drinks. So if you've been into one of our stores, we do the takeaway drinks. We thought that would be our business. You sort of looked at what Starbucks have done with coffee. Right now, if you look at Canoops and what they're doing with hot chocolate, they're good, hey? Yeah, they're a really interesting company. and so the blends which we created really initially really they were ingredients to make drinks so because we wanted a strawberry lemonade iced tea which was really fruity and sweet and looked nice we had to create a strawberry lemonade fruit blend so it was kind of taken backwards which is why kind of English breakfast and that sort of thing although we have, have never had that much attention from us we then kind of pivoted across to it being all about the blends we realised pretty quickly that one that seemed to be the bit which people were actually more interested in.

11:10Two, far cleverer people than us had, with far more money, had tried to do the Starbucks but with tea thing and failed and there was no reason we were going to do it. Three, we didn't have the money to actually do it properly. Dry tea you can sell online pretty easily, it's much harder to sell, especially now ready to drink is a huge thing but at that time a bit less. Everything made the blends an easier channel and so we've kind of pursued that. yeah that's really interesting actually because i yeah you know starbucks you're right they have all pivoted and they do have now tea blends versus just going in and grabbing a americano it's a real you know drinks to go is a really interesting category so many like you've got blank street now with their kind of theater of their blueberry this that and whatever yeah and also the you know the canned canned and bottled drinks that now i don't think there's a brand we've a few times over the years thought well actually all the time we're wondering whether to do it um and but right now it feels like we're the only brand who aren't bringing one one out at the moment quite saturated market yeah and we've spoken about your original vision for bird and blend would you say that is still where you guys want to be you still want to be retail sites being experiential versus as you said maybe bringing out a can or yeah well whenever we go back to kind of you know whenever you've got a big question on what the direction of a business should be going back to kind of the why you exist um it's normally we have found a way to kind of unblock that that question and now why right from the beginning was about experience the first actually the first thing we did the day we said you know what let's do this is we went to the pub and we we've still got this sheet of paper which of a top said about building a business about people rather than just profit or proving you could build a business about people rather than just profit the two of us wanted to show show the world what we had um and and it kind of had different rules and you know some of the rules were about customer experience some were about eco you know eco zero waste and this sort of thing um but although we've evolved that a little bit and actually i'm going for an exercise at the moment of doing a kind of latest evolution on all of this ultimately it all comes back to experience and that sort of thing and so whenever we think should we talk to a grocer it comes back to how can we deliver a fantastic experience to a customer just through packaging on a shelf yeah I'm not I'm sure there's a way I'm not clever enough to to do it figure out whereas you know doing it in the stores we have found a way that it works so you don't you're not listed in any supermarkets not in any supermarkets there are a couple of um b2b partners that we have so about so I think it's about two or three percent of the business at the moment is b2b um and they're kind of for specific reasons so like selfridges because it is a little bit of a badge to be in selfridge years yes um there's some kind of brilliant indie partners coffee shops and brilliant restaurants we used to say no to everybody and then we said no to two mission style restaurants in the space of a week and that was the moment when i thought yeah this is probably stupid maybe we should maybe we should start saying yes but um yeah it's kind of always tipped along in the background and we've never but but the big guys we've we've never carried on down the track we talk to the buyers every now and then never gone for it I mean it's a great position to be in because you're getting contacted by the supply by the supermarkets whereas usually it's brands hounding supermarkets to get in touch with the buyers but the fact that the buyers are coming to you they clearly see that you guys have got something special I mean your tea is delicious like it is really lovely and it's it's strong I don't need to brew it for hours to get any sort of like flavour out of it unlike other brands out there than thinking of one big one tea that you know because it's obviously mass produced yeah yeah i don't get the flavor that i want to be like i'm other than being ginger in the hair i love ginger yeah i'm obsessed with that like really strong hit the back of your throat kind of like really really really like zingy flavor and some of the brands out there i'm like you're not giving me what i want like i am that extreme though as a consumer like when i have i have like moju their ginger shots and i always get the extra extra ginger ones for avocado because i i can down a bottle.

15:17Where everyone else is choking. While everyone else is like, that's so hot. I'm sure, is it? It's down to ingredient quality, right? Same as anything. If you have fresh ingredients, they taste better than dull ones which have sat around for a long time. So it's not rocket science, but it does have a price attached to it. Yeah, definitely. But then I think now the way the world is going is I'd rather have less of what is really good yeah um than getting loads at a cheap price because that's exactly the same yeah yeah so how many resale sites do you have now we have 19 open at the moment there's five going through legals at the moment so we're opening quite a few right now so i'm not sure when this goes out but when this goes out we'll have somewhere between 19 and 24 25 26 by the end of this year i should think and what's your turnover uh this year we'll do about 14 15 million that's amazing yeah god it's like yeah it's so good and from that's for what's about like just over 10 years yes yeah yeah it's our 12th birthday um from the kind of very first time that we we served a customer was a couple of weeks ago um and i guess from uh our first store down in brighton's now been open nine years nine ten years which is kind of a proper kickoff when we started employing people yeah sort of thing yeah yeah it's funny helen was obviously as you said earlier helen from montezuma's have also had on the podcast she is based in brighton and had her first shop down there yes and her factory is in chichester chichester yeah that's right yeah i actually drove past it oh do you yeah actually we've just uh had their ops director she's just joined us as an ops manager recently yes yeah cool and she was there from the start yeah it's a cool business as well they've done like phenomenally well um as well and she oh helen's obviously super lovely she's great to chat to about how yeah so much go listen to that go listen to that episode as well talk me through as a customer if i was a customer going into your store what would i experience sure so um the first point is that you're probably not looking for us you know we're selling rhubarb and custard tea and cherry bakewell tea and all these sorts of things there's not many people go to the high street and thinking i need some rhubarb and custard tea yes unless they already know us so the first thing is hopefully, all being well, you'll be offered a sample outside and those people are out there with a tray, annoying persons by saying, give this a try, just as we were on market stores.

17:42You'll come in and the idea is it's kind of like going into an old sweet shop with all the jars up on the wall. We've got a big wall of tea with different coloured tins, different labels, different bases of the teas. There's about 100 teas on sale at any one time. There'll be loads of samples in there for you to try um we do take away drinks so the team depending how busy they are should be happy to make up demos of things like you know matcha at the moment is huge um matcha is huge for us and again we've got the biggest range of of flavored matches i think in the world now it was just in europe i think we're worldwide now amazing yeah yeah and the team will be making drinks and showing how to how to do what we do at home um so it should be a whole experience the idea is that you're in there for ages chatting having a nice time um if you buy you buy if you don't that's fine because really the stores are there as acquisition pieces um and but we hope that people have a good enough time they buy something yeah and actually even if they don't buy that time they might then do exactly what i did was see you in borough but actually go into a store in bristol and go oh i've said that so you know what so many the stores are deliberately placed in places I get asked every now and then how do you choose where to put your stores, what data are you using that sort of thing and I'll be like it's just places I'd like to go, places I enjoy going and visiting the stores because we want to be where you're going and having fun and exactly like that, you know, you were in Bristol just visiting right?

19:11But you tie it into that visit and then we hope that we as a brand are tied in with the positive experience that you've had of whether that's going down to Brighton and being down by the seaside, oh and I've got this tea rather than it being on you know I'm not going to name a town but some commuter town high street where you're going to get you whatever it is you go to the shops to get these days yeah exactly yeah well yeah you're right not very much um and tell me the process of like creating new blends how do you go about you know finding the new trends that are coming up and thinking well okay I'm gonna make I don't know what's a trend will match as a trend but what's going to be the what's the next matcher Yes, yeah.

19:52So it totally varies. And one of the amazing things, as we've grown, we have about 200 people around the business. And they're such a creative, passionate, incredible bunch of people that they will just be suggesting ideas. early days it was Chrissy and I and you know it started out with looking for different things customers might be asking for different ideas we'd had sometimes you'd eat something we're both quite foodie you'd eat something and think that's a really interesting flavour combination can we turn that into a tea over time we've kind of done different collections so we might do a I mentioned Reuben Custard that was part of the sweets collection of lemon sherbet and cherry lips and a few other ones so we might do different collections or increasingly now collabs with people and some of them are just random ones you asked about how we kind of foresee trends we don't actively lead our our mpd through a kind of what's going to be next year's trends and actually sometimes we miss it like right now matcha has amazing things going on it um i normally ignore what all the competitors are doing um and this is the first time where i've kind of said to our team i think given we you know have the biggest range of it probably i would say we do the best you you know, matcha latte, ice matcha latte on the high street.

21:07We've kind of missed the, this summer is sort of a summer of matcha and we've not bothered to do anything. We're talking about cold brew. Possibly because we're not being really scientific and really clever about it, we're just kind of doing, this is cool, let's talk about it. Sometimes, you know, people in that kind of creative world are talking about the trends the year before, aren't they? That's what they're excited by, so it kind of naturally comes out. And I would say as we grow, as well as having more and more passionate people around the business we do also have more people who are you know from a marketing background have that expertise and are slightly more looking at google searches yeah up and coming trends yeah yeah yeah of course and what's been your most successful blend to date and why do you think that is depends how you measure success um okay i'm gonna watch it who's your favorite child what it's one of those questions hey yeah it's always my brother um i okay revenue then revenue let's just go revenue we have one you're saying you love ginger gingerbread chai um is consistently our highest revenue generator gosh how do i not know that one well it's one we use the base if you've had a chai latte or an ice chai yeah that's the base of it okay but it's a really interesting one because it's one we created for christmas gingerbread um it was one of my christmas range then it was really popular so we swapped it into our main range then it became we have a we have like a top 12 which we did teabags as well as loose it overtook the chai which was in that group so it became one of those and then it now sells steadily the whole time the reason why it's the top seller is because it also is still a Christmas blend so it sells well all year round peak is really really key for us yeah as you can imagine yeah and it slots in as a Christmas blend as well so gets some of a boost.

22:54Yeah. So I saw our Christmas, it's all ready for, well, it's all blended just to be packed now for Christmas the other day and I had to go and get our office director and I was like, is this what we should have or have you overordered? Because it was like a good chunk of one corner of our warehouse needs to be pallets of the stuff. Really? Yeah. And do you see, is gifting and seasonality like massive? Christmas is enormous. Yeah. Christmas is enormous generally across retail, isn't it? It is, yeah. And I think we're quite a safe bet, aren't we? everyone has an aunt or someone who likes tea you don't know much about them but they like tea yeah so it's a or you know secret santa that sort of thing we're at that sort of price point so we're quite alongside you know chocolate and those sorts of things we're quite a safe bet so yeah we do and that's it we do really well and then also you know increasingly um we have an advent calendar that we do which actually you know that fits into your last question about trends so absolutely a huge trend these kind of premium advent calendars that wasn't us being clever and actually it was it was a um apprentice with us who suggested it and she was just assessing she thought it's a cool idea we were the first to look not the first to launch a premium advent calendar but first tea advent calendar and very early on in the premium advent calendar time and that's just exploded for us and been so so useful it's a nice thing like tea is a lovely thing to buy for somebody because it's not something you buy for yourself like you're very like basic with your tea when you're going to Sainsbury's aren't you or wherever you're purchasing from like you know i'm generally going down the aisle and getting an english breakfast and lemon and ginger or something along those lines and that's kind of it whereas actually to be able to try new blends and stuff is something that you're able to ask a bit of a pinch price point like i probably won't get it for myself but actually if you're gifted it oh how lovely and if you like it you generally are you know it's such a habit yes so actually you probably would then go and seek it and be like well i really liked it it's an extra two quid yeah i want it because it makes my morning happy like people are happy to spend on coffee yep so and i think that's it people have shifted from a few years ago just comparing it to you know a teabag price in in sainsbury's to comparing it to a coffee from starbucks or wherever or even to a glass of wine or something like that you know there's been a shift recently away from alcohol and and you know all of the all of the different drinks brands are doing really well out of that i think actually we sort of slot into that as well and suddenly when you're comparing glass of wine to to our prices suddenly we're very cheap yes that's um works works as well yeah everybody has such a warped view on alcohol i always find this so funny like i will not pay the 2.99 delivery on zara but i will happily go and spend 15 quid on the gin and tonic and it's like how is the psychology of that like like what like that's london for 15 quid on a gin and tonic yeah sorry i mean that's that's enough that's i'd be quite happy to pay that like 1750 is where you're really looking for like nice places to go and sit it's extortionate you mentioned earlier that net zero and paying people fast is like a big part of your kind of brand and your ethics behind it so how do you ensure sustainability within the supply chain um great question because the supply chain in tea and you know tea is only actually a small amount of what we buy because it's all herbs spices fruits that sort of thing but within that kind of dried products supply chain supply chain is a very complex supply chain with multi-levels there are it's opaque in places there's different rules in different countries for how you buy and there's very little that we're at a scale that we can buy directly so we're adding another level having to work with brokers so with a huge amount of difficulty i think is the answer um and with acknowledgement that we can't go and get you know the the expectation levels i might if i bought a carrot from a farmer's market down the road from me which has been grown you know two miles from me um that isn't going to the same level of visibility and the answer changes every year as we grow we get one of the reasons i talk about us growing and i'm keen for us to grow is because it gives us more potential to have impact so right at the start it was totally on trust the people we worked with seemed like good people seemed like they would work with good people um over time we now do a certain level of auditing we don't yet go out to audit places particularly as that would contrast with the net zero if we had people flying around the world yeah of course um but we will audit first tier suppliers um we expect them to have certain pieces in in place and we'll have questionnaires and that sort of thing which go out the whole way people can lie on questionnaires but equally it gets them thinking um i think the final bit is that um the end of the market that we're at a lot of the challenges aren't actually the challenges which are necessarily um the obvious ones for people that people are thinking about you know we're we're not dealing with farms which are trying to push their price down as hard as possible and and so things like child labor whilst it's something we need to be aware of and we need to be doing our due diligence we're working you know generally for someone to produce a good good product they care about things if they care about their product they probably care about their people they probably care about their soil they probably care about what machines they're using which does give a certain level of as soon as you talk to people about quality there's a little bit which is covered already there um so yeah i think the biggest one is being aware not pretending that we're greener than green and not thinking we're greener than green um yeah using using scale to to up expectations on these sorts of things and ask questions and has there been any significant challenges that you've experienced with trying to keep towards your goals um in terms of ethics in the supply chain in particular yeah yeah actually the biggest challenge would be china so we have wondered on a couple of occasions about can we take china out of our supply chain completely um for various reasons china is super opaque um even when you think it's not um so when we've but realistically it's nigh on impossible your green tea you're you're kind of reliant on china or are the place but again quality that sort of similar to kind of me at coconut collaborative i've got indonesia and barley and sri lanka that sell like make coconuts we don't have the climate i mean today we have the climate yeah but generally like this is a one-off right yes yeah um i'm the same like similar supply chain issues because i can't go to tesco and get my ingredients yes yeah for sure for sure although sri lanka we find so most of our black teas from sri lanka and actually the conditions and things out there it's pretty strong at least in the tea industry i think because a whole economy has been built around it they've got some stuff in place but yeah the big one in china actually is our tea wear so you know if we're making infusions and that sort of thing even if you try and move away from china um it ends up being subcontracted there anyway interestingly we're hiring for a buyer at the moment and my my ops director was saying the the day that he interviewed someone from a i won't name a brand but a well-known high street ethical brand who was talking about we moved everything away from china when when they talk about the ethics part of the interview and we were really proud to do this at least the next person interviewed had been from a supplier to said retailer um who said we did really well because this retailer wanted to move everything from china so they came to us and we ended up just getting it from china and selling it to them god it's hard when i guess china are the only places that are growing it in quantity and you know yeah and you know the the people power in factories to to make certain things um you just can't compete on on cost and ultimately a consumer will say you know i'd love for this stainless steel infuser to be made in sheffield when we do things like that and we attach the price point they don't sell because people don't want to pay you know four or five times as much yeah absolutely and your branding and your name how did you how did you come up with um like you're quite strong brand on the high street i see it and i'm like it's recognizably bird and blend so how did you come up with the name and then yeah the whole everything around yeah so we started out being called bluebird which is a a skiing term it's a term for a an amazing day um and we we rebranded to bird and blend um we rebranded partially because chrissy's my co-founder and i felt that the word bluebird as we've grown didn't mean so much to our team as it did to us at the start um and then we had a trademark challenge which we kind of thought do we fight it if we're not that attached to it restaurant on the king's road uh i'm probably not allowed to say who it is i've got a feeling with the agreement um but yes um okay they when we opened in london they weren't happy with us using it um i don't know any other bluebird yeah i mean there are a lot of companies called bluebird which was one of the ways we could have got off but i I think the legal advice was it's 50-50 whether you'll win, but it'll cost you 100K.

31:43They can afford it. Can you? You're saying you don't care about a name. Maybe change it. Yeah, exactly. What's that saying? Reward versus like risk and that. Yeah, versus reward. Yeah, yeah. So, but that gave us an opportunity to, we were kind of forced to rethink it. And we did all sorts of clever bits. So I'm not a big fan of consultants. We brought in a consultant who, after about three hours, I think he was meant to be doing a day with us. I was like, you can go now. You're of no use at all. We did sessions with different members of a team. We did focus groups with customers. We did all sorts.

32:16Me and Chrissy sat for ages, still own. In fact, we've sold most of them now because we've got added digital, but we had so many domains of random names for black dog tea. We got two black dogs. We were like, what a cool name, until someone said, you know, that's a phrase for depression. Probably not what you're going for. But all of this sort of thing. Oh, gosh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, black dog. If you've got your black dog at your side, you're depressed. um the um but bird and blend actually came from we were gone through all these different bits we sent out a survey to our whole customer database i think about 3 000 responses and we and one of the questions it had all sorts of things for us to try and help us figure out a name and the one of the questions was um describe what we do or something um and we word clouded all of the words in all of the answers and the two biggest words were bird and blend and we'd already kind of thought we want something with an ampersand there's something cool in something and something and it also kind of gets our thing of we're blending like having the stuff together and we thought we're all about community, we're all about people actually this kind of crowdsource name of Bird and Blend works really well and it is what our customers are saying about us it wasn't really noticed for rebrand by our customers which is one of the aims that we had for it it says what we do a lot more we're about blending there's a whole load of clever stuff within it which if you had Chrissy here instead of me she could talk you through and then the second part of your question the branding generally has come from Chrissy so neither of us have whilst now we're relatively qualified in what we do we weren't doing it before we didn't do degrees in it or anything like that so she just kind of learnt how to do stuff and worked with her team to produce this use it as an opportunity to refresh all of our branding did that and it looks a lot stronger and you know it's kind of I think one of the differences which people don't notice when you look at really well done brands is is that someone can show you all the different you know like fever tree where the label is actually has a meaning on where the label is on bottle I forget what the meaning is but it does for us there's things like you look at a bird and one of the uh one of its wings is a tea leaf one of its wings is a palette because we're about blending oh sorry no it's tail is a palette because we're all about blending there's all of these kind of bits hidden in it yeah what brings it out um yeah and that all just came from from a kind of process with with our team yeah that's mainly a guy called g who started off packing tea for us and now does all of our crm but the time he was our designer he's been with us forever and chrissy were the two who who did it all amazing i've just seen here it says make all the big smiles and sides i like that that's a good warning yeah um i just as you said that about like the small things hidden in branding roses have come have you seen all over like socials in a roses box you know or in any roses product actually not just a box the other things that is well but you know the rose yeah right in the center is the cadbury's logo oh really but you know i've never noticed it yeah that much attention in detail but somebody noticed it put it on instagram it's like blown up and yeah it may it's those bits hidden there i think you you know you don't have to notice them when you're just grabbing something off the shelf but it i think it's those layers which do actually add some level of authenticity to it and you can tell can't you when when sometimes you look at really bad branding and it's just missing yeah sort of cleverness definitely it's nice as well because it adds like as you know your uniqueness your usp why people are looking at the packaging why they're picking up, they're reading about it there's a lot that can be said from what this product is by the look and feel of it as well and how important do you think brand identity is within the tea market?

36:01Sorry I just asked you a question No no that's alright How important is brand identity in the tea market? It is really important we're fortunate that I rarely talk about being in the tea market which is why I'm not too bothered with what our competitors are doing because I think people are going to Sainsbury's and we're not on that aisle. And so they don't see us as in competition. A lot of our customers will have their go-to breakfast tea and then be having us at different times of the day. Yeah, it's a different occasion. Yeah. So I would say ultimately it's a commoditized market. So it's really important to have the branding for the reason that every other commoditized market is right.

36:40For where we are, I would say the branding is really, really important, but for a different reason. and I think it's because it's kind of tying people into that whole world of what we do, getting them to have that emotional, you know, some of our customers, we've got a private Facebook group, which I think has about 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 people in there. They are so passionate about what we do. And things like those cute little messages, you know, if we launch a hat with something cute on it, they love for that reason. But possibly Yorkshire Tea, the reason for their branding to be so strong, which it is, is a little bit different because that it's about saying the quality of this product is in line with what we're doing.

37:19That was my next question, actually. Have you ever had a customer like right in or like a really memorable experience that you remember that's like changed the direction of the business or made you have a think about something or brought out a new flavour? New flavours all the time. Today I will go and see a couple of our stores and I'll serve a couple of customers. and just in those conversations you think, going back to your trend question as well, actually, it comes from that as well. So yeah, there's loads of those. Customer experiences, which really make, you know, are really meaningful. Again, we're fortunate enough that, I'm not exaggerating when I say every single day, we will get emails into our CX team saying, I went to your store and I had such a fantastic experience.

38:01And the reasons, because you don't just write things because you've had a good time. Who writes things because I've had a nice time? Yeah, you're always writing complaints. Yes. so if you've had such a good time you're going to write in there's a reason for that and some of those reasons do make you think god what we're doing really has value here so recently someone talked about they'd just been diagnosed with cancer um and the you know little kindness from a team member in our store who had no idea what i got you know that they'd just come from the hospital and sort of walking around i was about to say the city but maybe that'll be a bit personal but walking around the city and you know a little bit of a daze and just went in and had a nice interaction with someone that was so meaningful for them yeah in a low point likewise I read one the other day from a couple of weeks ago which was um someone who was who was quite far on the autistic spectrum and again just having a team member who I think also had an understanding of what that that customer needed was able to offer it to them and that's so meaningful for them because it's just that little bit of kindness so yes has it changed the business direction no but it's probably reinforced for actually what we're doing works going down the commercial let's talk to Tesco um isn't for us because we don't get those moments no yeah definitely it's it's a real point of difference actually to most brands that I've had on and obviously with having such a strong physical presence and that being kind of the premise of burn and blend how do you take the physical into the digital so how do you work with kind of your social media platforms and how do you make sure that you're bringing that excitement to people that unfortunately haven't been able to get to your store or for various reasons haven't can't whatever it is how do you make that excitement come through great question digital which I don't think we necessarily have the answer to I think when we started we really inherently had this omni thing built into us because Chrissy was building a website and I was going to talk to people fundamentally it was a bit of crossover but um so from the very start we were taking email addresses in the stores and that sort of thing and I think we were ahead of the curve now frankly I think we're I don't know if we're behind it but win i don't think we're doing groundbreaking enough stuff in that um how do we do it well we we have passionate team members all around the country who we try and bring into the socials as much as we can um but you work in that sort of world it's a frantic busy world that kind of brand and marketing and all of that sort of stuff right so getting out and actually doing that bit yeah it's another matter um within there are certain bits you know within the website there's stuff like the tins on the table are represented on the website we're putting more video onto the website i was gonna say video yeah video content is so key isn't it like that is where you capture people's attention it's via video content for sure one bit which we're which we've been looking at recently is chatbots and we've had um if you're going to say like next week i might not want all of our competitors knowing but we've got a chatbot ready to go um but by then we'll have decided if we're launching it or killing it um but when you go into the stores i was talking about that conversational piece you have i've always the dream has always been how can we do that and we've tried it with you know live video but we're not selling cars no people don't actually want to have a live video with with our team yeah um but if it's an interaction with with a computer not computer pretending to be a you know we'll say with a teapot or whatever it is i'm really excited of that but that'll be a step into it yeah the other big one is i said as we were coming up i'm going to one of our events in one of our stores this evening we do a lot of events in store which are pushed through digital so we kind of get this crossover there to try and make it very yeah omni um there's a little we're trying to build that into the products a lot more than you might get something shipped to you but it might contain a qr which if you scan and store gets you a free drinks yeah there's a lot of trying to get crossover in there yeah it is really hard because i'm assuming the people that come into your store and it being a tea brand might not be the most digitally savvy consumer generally yeah so then trying to engage the digitally savvy it's quite conflicting for the brand i think it's also where what people are looking for in that moment so you mentioned you you go past the borough store all the time but you went in when you're in bristol in Bristol you were there for pleasure so you didn't go in to buy, if you were buying you'd go into a convenient borough one you went in because you wanted something to do does anyone go and scroll through a website when they're just looking for something to do no, they do on Instagram so part of your thing is your answer is pulling stuff into the socials which we're alright at what we do do is if it's authentic it's team members who have been promoted out of the stores who are doing the Instagram but having stuff on there so it does mean there's always going to be someone who lands on our website it's transactional someone who comes into the store it's not and there's always going to be a little bit of that difference i think so it's about building into the crm building into the socials building into everything and diversifying now down the financial side of things where are the early start at the early stages was it just family and friends backed yourself backed how did you kind of get the initial money to go and do the research and the founding and the first order and that kind of thing uh we didn't do research about something uh so initially that the town we were in didn't have work in spring so you'd spend winter and summer saving so we had a couple of thousand pound that we'd saved we had credit cards um my folks said we could live with them rent free for six months and then chrissy's mum said likewise i think there we contributed a bit to be fair my folks i think we didn't contribute yeah um i think at chrissy's mum so we really did bootstrap it when we opened the first store we got a start-up loan you mentioned Virgin Startup we actually didn't use them we used Smarter who I don't think exists anymore and we had a loan which allowed us to open the first store but that wouldn't have paid for it to have a fancy fit out so we have scathboards and that sort of thing in the stores which is really cool and trendy now the reason we did it is because we drove up to Leicester and bought a load of scathboards off a bloke for like a quid each or something that was all we could afford i drilled in our shop looked crap for years it's now been i mean store it's a bit rough around the edges it's been refitted brighton it was a brighton yeah um because now i'm all right at doi at the time i wasn't and i had to do it the only bit we could afford to get someone in for was the plumbing and the electrics which the electrics was two sockets and the plumbing was a little bit more complex um when we first raised money which was a few years after that um yeah family friends um we've been very fortunate i think because we were pretty young you know used to get referred to as as a young couple who started a business it started to hurt when people stopped saying that suddenly overnight they stopped saying young um but i think that inspired some people and we were approached really early doors by lots of people who wanted to invest so our biggest investor before we were even a limited company he said i could put enough in but we can roll this out nationwide next year are you in?

45:07And we kind of said no, but let's stay in touch he's, they're a couple but they've gone on to be our biggest investors, huge supporters all of our we've done two rounds of investment now, both through Crowd, but with Crowd there are certain key investors whilst some of them have put in significant amounts of money, all of them are people we've met through the business, one of them was a mentor to me at uni actually but they've um they've kind of want to get on board with what we're doing and it works really well because it's not strict governance was none of you know actually turned down a big check recently from someone because they were like and what will the shareholder agreement look like and i said it won't you're not having one yeah um and we took it you know several million pound i was like no one else has one why i have no need for one um i really love your like authenticness like approach it's so real it's like you're very down to earth with the turner of 15 million credit like it's it you're almost like no no i will not divert divert yeah that's right i won't like ever diversify from the reason i started this yeah and i can only imagine how many people you know see a shiny five million pound investment and go yeah i'll have it and then end up diluting their business and and giving bits away and not having the control and then maybe regretting it later on whereas you've built a business so sustainably and organically that it is really It's a solid foundation of you guys going into the future and your next five to ten years.

46:35Yeah. I find the kind of psychology and the reasons why founders in particular do it really, really interesting. They're like Ferraris. But I think for less of them, less of them than you think. Estate agents like Ferraris. Yeah, I did this. My dentist has such a nice car and I'm like, yeah, because it's 80 quid for our genius appointment. This is it. I mean, they're 15 minutes. Whereas the reality is with a founder, you don't have money for it. I still live in a tiny little flat. It has damp, all of this sort of thing. Drive a rubbish car. I could have... We could have solved the business if we wanted to.

47:11I could not be working, to be blunt. Probably not of a never work again level. Yeah. Maybe on my spending. But not the yachts level. Are you quite frugal? But I'm quite frugal. And I think it's down to what drives you. And I genuinely think that all founders probably need therapy. There's something wrong with them in their head. willing to do the like 100 hour weeks for no payout for you know being you know 95 chance whatever you're going to fail for as you hire people you know you are consistent we've got incredible people but doesn't mean i'm not consistently let down you know we launch a new perk any new perk you launch within three days there's a reason why you're a bad person for how dare you've given a sick leave or whatever it is something which is like so you've got to be sort of happy to take that battering and still be chirping be like we are doing the right thing um yeah and i just find it really i find it really interesting i think one of the bits is that some founders um it is an ego thing and they start to kind of believe their own bullshit of oh we're 20 million that's because i'm amazing they don't recognize it's luck the people around you who you've been lucky to get around you happen to be really passionate and better than you and be able to tell you you happen to be steering it in the right direction it's a growing market anyway yeah And that's when I think they're like, oh, amazing.

48:26I deserve a Ferrari. But I think staying grounded and realising actually the bits which has an impact for us is the teams who are having conversations right now in our stores with customers. Like this isn't this podcast and medium thing to fit into it in the longer term. But I'm not earning anything today from doing this for business, am I? I think remembering that is really, really important. and we're perhaps a little bit closer to that transaction so perhaps it's easier to remember than if there's 10 of you in a fancy London office selling into 20 ,000 service points or whatever yeah true yeah so so so true what advice would you give to aspiring aspiring entrepreneurs kind of facing their own current challenges at the moment uh I think the first is just moving forward it's so easy to get lost in you touched on you know how to do the research and all that sort of thing you can you know you can get lost in so much detail where you just need to make decisions and the bit which i think founders often do have which which less people have is they'll just make a decision um get some information make decision move forward some of it will be right some of it will be wrong um but at least keep on moving um i always think that's the biggest thing you know you talk to people who said i've got this idea about how i'm going to do this and i did the same when we started i can remember saying to a guy who i've been introduced to who started a business how can we be compliant with this and this and this and this and he said you can't there's two of you um yeah what you can do is as you grow you become increasingly compliant and you do what you need to do at that point um so that and ask lots of people questions as i just said that we did getting getting advice from people is brilliant but also know you know when it's right to nod along smile agree and then ignore ultimately it's you who needs to needs to make those decisions yeah for sure definitely I think yeah you're in charge of your own kind of like future and destiny and if you're gut saying yes or no you've got to stick to it and know and know what you want to do um can you share like a big significant kind of mistake you've made along the way and how you overcame it oh gosh the biggest mistakes that I think we've made have been around people um and they have been where we've not addressed things quickly enough they're where we've thought we're a kind supportive employer so we're just going to let's try you know someone's not perhaps someone's been promoted they're not performing in that role that they're in um and rather than just addressing that i mean straight up with them we sort of don't want to upset them so we just tweak their role a little bit so we give them a bit of extra support and what happens is over a couple of years we keep on doing that everyone loves them because they're a great person and then eventually it catches up with you actually the conversation you have to have is a lot tougher than the kind of one which you could have had initially yeah you you have got stuff wrong it is on you ultimately that you know the person likely ends up losing their employment um or possibly moving on to more fitting employment um and and you have got stuff wrong in terms of getting them there so i think that costs you their money and time it does yeah and emotionally it's really really to sit and you know to and there's I don't want to say countless examples of where this happened but this has been a repeating piece for us that we're we're really nice or we think we're being really nice but it's not nice it's like the same situation it's like if you had spinach in your teeth right now I obviously I don't know you that well and I would be conflicted internally do I tell this man he's talking to me with this big green thing in his mouth it will make it better if I tell him but it's going to hurt his feelings so it's that kind of funny one but I'm a bit harsh not hardly harsh but I would always say yesterday on the tube and this guy had his tag hanging out his t-shirt and I was just like I'm just going to have to tell him and then I tapped on the shoulder and bless him I think I scared him because he was like what have I done where am I going and I was like no I'm just letting you know your tag's hanging out and he was like gosh thank you so much someone's told me my flies have been undone and I'm like this is really great to keep doing this and in the UK we're bad at it because we're sort of told told us kids you know do this stand in line don't step out but kindness is being honest with people absolutely even when it's hard to do it um so yeah those are the biggest ones and they're they're the biggest ones because i find them kind of emotionally very very and you can't also you can't sit there and go this is really hard on me you need you need to feel sorry on me you also have to be there and be like i'm gonna you know i'm just going to be a bastard here like yeah sorry you're allowed to think that i've i've fucked up yeah i don't think i'm actually a bastard i think i fucked up and yeah but it's probably better that you think i'm the first one and the second yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely um what are the plans for bird and blend in the future keep on growing so as long as i think that we will keep on growing as long as um we can grow our impact through the growth because that's the bit which drives me and we can keep being authentic.

53:31So the bit which has always scared me has been we're all about customer experience. Can you scale that? I actually didn't think you could get it to this number of stores, but we seem to still be hanging on. So that will be the kind of constraint. So I think we'll keep on building for as long as we can do that. We may diversify, but it's not on the new to-do list. Over the next few years, open more stores um do more do more cool things yeah and to wrap up the interview what it what inspires you on a daily basis i think i've got a pretty good idea from how passionate you are about people but i was gonna say what are you gonna say yeah the team i mean my favorite bit of my my job is i work with incredible people um i'm one of a few kind of grumpy slightly introverted maybe not shown it here but not at all people on our team and yet you go to you know one of our in portobello where i'm going tonight one of the teams that are like really successful opera singer there's an actor there you have these amazing creative passionate people um yeah so i love getting out if you're ever feeling low you know looking at spreadsheets and that's a look at cash flow there's a way to feel low yeah that's going out and talking to the team and and you know seeing what they're doing, what they're enjoying, yeah, is my favourite thing.

54:54And actually, I've got one more question before we say goodbye. How do you enjoy Bird and Blend, and what's your favourite blend? How do I enjoy, as in how do I enjoy the product? Yeah, hot or cold. How do I enjoy my life in Bird and Blend? Oh, oh. I'm assuming you enjoy it if you're still doing it today. Yeah, well, I enjoy the variety of my drugs. Fine, okay. That's a different question. That is a different question. Do you know what? I often don't specify. Okay. So we have within the office where I am a couple of days a week, that's where our warehouse and our production and all of that is, and we have a shop there.

55:27So I'm quite fortunate within the office I have tea mixologists, we call them baristas who can make up for different drinks. So I'll normally just say I want a hot drink or a cold drink, and we'll just have whatever I'm given because it's a good way of seeing. Yeah, trying, consistent seeing the product. Yeah. When I'm at home, what have I had recently? because it's been so hot I have been having cold brew which I don't have as much as people would assume I did I had cold weather warrior the other week when I was ill although that wasn't what the illness was but it seemed like it would help it's quite fresh yeah so I not in a clever passionate way but as you've probably gathered through this the product isn't I think people are often surprised how little I know about the products and things because it's always at the start it was both of us I mean it became Chrissy Chrissy's not actually in my business day today anymore but the whole team are so passionate about the product it sort of needs me banging the drum on it's just for it's just for the vessel for us to communicate what we're doing yeah I've got so many more questions but we're going to wrap up there so thank you so much Mike for coming on Getting to Grow it's been great to chat thanks Zoe

56:47Thank you.