How to: build a truly consumer-led business, Nick Croft-Simon, White Rabbit

0:00Today, I'm joined by Nick Croft-Simon, co-founder and CEO of White Rabbit, the UK's largest gluten-free pizza brand and the number one contributor to growth in the category. What started in a pub in Oxford where Nick and Italian chef Matteo Ferrari were serving sourdough pizzas that became the city's top rated on TripAdvisor has grown into a nationally listed brand stocked in retailers such as Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Ocado. But this conversation is more than pizza. It's about how to build a truly consumer-led business. If you'd like to contact Nick, you can find all of his details in the show notes, along with a recap of the advice he has so kindly shared.

0:37And tune in next week to hear our next guest's answer to his question about how to lead founder-led content without doing the content. Thank you, Nick, for joining How to Start Up.

0:48Nick Croft-Simon:Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat to you about consumer-led brands and businesses. It's something we haven't covered in our show before. So to kick off, I would love it if you could define what a consumer-led brand is. I mean, for a startup brand like ours, I think it's about putting the consumer above your ego, honestly, I think is probably how I define it. And that takes a lot of honesty and looking in the mirror and difficult conversations because it's really hard to challenge your own product. like it sort of feels like criticizing your own child I think in a lot of ways which it's very easy to look at everything else other than your kid if that makes sense yes so I guess for a business like ours I think that would be the shortest way I could summarize it without stating the obvious of like it's being led by the consumer I think that's all very well and good but there'll definitely be junctures where listening to the consumer probably goes against what you always thought was the right thing to do or what you think the product should be like.

1:51Nick Croft-Simon:And I guess that's where you need to lean towards the consumer, not double down on your own opinions, you know? So when did you start White Rabbit? What year? We started in, well, we launched a market in 2016 and we kind of came up with the concept in 2015. So yeah, we signed up to Companies House January 2015. I always get the exact date in January wrong. Taylor always takes the mickey out of me for it. And we launched a market in January 16. so we had a year of kind of developing the product getting investment figuring out how we were going to make it that kind of thing and what point between then and now did you start realizing your customers were the ones to listen to and not your ego i well did you always have that customer in mind pre-launch so you always have an idea of who they were we did the reality is it wasn't always possible so in our example we wanted to make a compromise free gluten-free Italian food, right?

2:44Nick Croft-Simon:And in the very early days when it was literally Teo making them by hand, we could kind of get there. But then scaling that, so launching with the retailers in 2017, there was kind of this drop off of, okay, well now actually we have to get, I mean, it's still very manual, but some semblance of a production line going. And there was a big impact on quality there. And so that's really hard because there are some things technically that we just didn't know how to do then. We didn't know how to scale what is quite a delicate baking products like bakery. Baking is really technical. It's really scientific.

3:19Nick Croft-Simon:Gluten-free baking is even more so like there's less information out there. There's less examples to lean on. And we were also doing something that not really anyone had done before. So it was really hard then because we kind of knew that the product wasn't where it needed to be, but we didn't have the means or the know-how to get there. So I think in the early days, we knew it, we couldn't necessarily act on it straight away. But obviously, we did everything we could. And I guess it's just having that commitment to it because, you know, it might not happen tomorrow, it might not even happen in the next year.

3:51Nick Croft-Simon:But we're never going to stop trying to close that quality gap and get back to how they were when they were handmade. I was going to say, you've made a huge rod for your back in terms of Italian food and gluten-free. But those that love Italian food that cannot have gluten will be thrilled that you're doing this. So you must have had this burning passion to solve that problem right from the get-go. Definitely. So Theo had always had the idea of doing gluten-free pizzas. When we were working at the White Rabbit Pub, we had a lot of requests for gluten-free pizzas. So he had the idea and the kind of passion for the product and the kind of recipe development.

4:27Nick Croft-Simon:And I had the kind of sort of blagging skills, honestly, back then and just the want to start a business. So yeah, that and actually it is a complex product and it is really hard, but it's now our biggest strength because for every hurdle we've gone over, it's one more hurdle for the next person to try and get over. And it is really hard and not everyone can do it. So I think as hard as it's been, it is now our biggest strategic strength. The fact that we've got the best part of 10 years experience making just gluten free dough and just gluten free Italian food. And with gluten-free, so a colleague of mine was deeply gutted when she found out she was celiac.

5:03And she's like, I can't believe I'm now that person. And I said, well, of all the years to find out now is a good year because the world is kind of catching up. But for you back then, how did you know that the gluten-free requests weren't just a passing phase? How did you know that this was going to be a scalable audience?

5:18Nick Croft-Simon:I guess it was pretty anecdotal at the time because, again, we wouldn't have even known how to look at the macro data back then when it was just us talking to consumers in the pub. But I guess the honest answer is we didn't necessarily know, but also it didn't really matter because I guess my thinking has always been if we're making a product that's as good as the real thing, then it kind of doesn't matter. If that's our North Star and we can get there and it doesn't cost more, then let's just keep shooting for that and then the rest will follow. So, you know, we didn't know because no one has a crystal ball, right?

5:52Nick Croft-Simon:But I guess if we set that as our North Star, then it kind of wasn't going to make a difference to anything we actually did tangibly for the foreseeable future. And it still doesn't. So yeah, we just doubled down on product quality and our core proposition, which is people shouldn't have to compromise here. In the pub, you were having requests for this. And is that what kind of thought, right, we can push this and make this bigger and scale this particular food offering? Definitely. Obviously, we did the kind of desktop research. We went around retail. We obviously research what we could. We looked at examples in Italy.

6:23Nick Croft-Simon:Italy was actually further ahead back then. The gap has closed, but in terms of gluten-free, it was a few years ahead back then. So we did some trips to Italy, looked at what was out there. But yeah, a combination of all of that and a bit of a leap of faith, I guess. Which I'd say every single founder has done. And going into that leap a little bit blind is exciting. Definitely. Because if it's a sure thing, everyone would have already done it. you know so it kind of has to be a bit of a leap of faith would you recommend people build around the consumer and not the category definitely definitely it's so easy to over complicate these things but at the end of the day like in food and drink especially like i can't speak for other industries but if you make a product that someone likes enough to buy again at that price you're you're going to win and then your category argument will kind of speak for itself and then the the amount of thought that has to go into your pitch decks and the rest of it like it kind of Again, it writes itself because your performance is there.

7:19Nick Croft-Simon:Like any relationship you can build with the retailer and however good you can make a pitch deck, the foundation is always going to be your performance and your performance is always going to be driven by rate of sale and repeat data. And it comes down to someone who's busy, doesn't want to be charged a premium for the same quality and they need to like the product enough to buy it again. Because yeah, you can have the best sales team in the world and you can, I mean, to a certain extent, you can kind of make the data say what you want it to say. So you can get into fixture, you can win a new retailer, but you can't be at every store persuading consumer to buy it and then to buy it again.

7:54Nick Croft-Simon:That has to be done by the product. So if you're not listening to them and if you're not delivering for them and you're not championing them, you're going to be a flash in the pan. Well, on that, how did you position White Rabbit differently from other free-from brands? Firstly, there aren't that many other dedicated free-from brands out there, especially not in our space. like there's a bit of own label and there's a bit of bigger players kind of doing it as an offshoot so own label you see the same briefs free from shells yeah yeah our unique proposition was we hone in on quality and we're only it's all we do right we're the experts and on top of that we make our own food which a lot of brands don't you know like a nine out of ten challenges outsource and there's good reason for that right and they can invest more in the brand and all the other stuff which completely makes sense for the categories they're in but in a fairly underdeveloped category that doesn't have a lot of innovation and doesn't have a lot of technical know-how the reality is no one was going to make it for us because they couldn't do it the way we wanted to do it so we had to do it ourselves so yeah kind of i guess as a business internally we're unique because we make our own food and then externally that's translated in our values like we're a very food-led brand it's all about the product it's all about quality it's all about authenticity.

9:10Nick Croft-Simon:Like we do actually have an Italian founder. We do actually make our own food. We do actually use Italian ingredients. Like it's just reflecting that in the product and the packaging. And again, I guess our hand was kind of forced because we didn't have, we've never and still don't have a big marketing budget. Like all our money has gone into the bakery and improving our tech and improving our product. So the product has had to speak for itself. Yeah. No, I love this because my background working in consumer PR and I've met some clients going, oh, well, we'll just PR it and that will fix the problem.

9:40It's like, I can lead the horse to water, but if the water is not very nice, I'm not a magician.

9:45Nick Croft-Simon:Yeah, definitely. The horse might drink once, but it's not going to come back. So yeah, for sure. The cost of acquiring a customer versus the repeat of a customer. And that for you, I guess the sense of pride as well in creating something that works, that they genuinely love, it is not compromising because it's gluten-free and pricing wise as well. You get them in and they stay. Definitely. And I think in our space in particular because gluten-free shoppers know how hard it is to you know they have to shop in multiple different stores like they can't like availability is not always great there aren't many brands speaking for them so when they do find a brand that they feel like resonates with them they'll tell everyone else because they want to make everyone else's like they feel their pain so they want to shout about it so you know facebook groups and everything like they're so loyal and they're so communicative and that really helps us as well especially not having a big marketing budget quite literal pain my colleague i feel not sorry for her because that sounds really patronizing but what she's had to educate herself on how to manage life and she's like oh i can't come to that press appointment because they've picked that restaurant and i can't risk it and it's quite literal pain that will flaw her so i'm now far more aware and she's like oh i've got to go to paris for work and it's obviously tricky but you're right once you get that loyalty in and people can trust you yeah and knowing that you are making the food there is no contamination and you can set and forget and just be joyous the fact you can eat italian food and who i mean it's the best food on the planet yeah i have this theory that anything beige and edible is delicious it's not necessarily healthy and most italian food is yeah you can't you can't go wrong yeah speaking about consumers how do you engage with them how do you survey them how do you get their feedback we do a lot of trade events and we kind of tend to avoid the like bigger flashier ones where it's like, who can have the coolest stand?

11:33Nick Croft-Simon:And it's like, it's a bit of a vanity project. It's so expensive as well. Yeah, definitely. We do a lot of the specific free-from ones and we do that for a reason. It's because we want to speak to as many people as possible and have proper, engaged, in-depth conversations. So the value for money for those smaller, specific free-from ones, just from that alone is there. So we do that. We also, we now have our own consumer panel. So there's about 1 ,500 people on it. How does that work? How do you, that's a lot of people to manage. yeah so we started as a kind of reach out to you know please sign up and we get kind of 30 40 of them to the bakery every year on a tour do a little recipe test on them do a load of surveys like what are they finding difficult at the moment how can we help that kind of thing so there's like real qualitative stuff like that that we literally spend half a day with them and just ask them a million questions and then we do questionnaires that we send out boxes of new recipes ask them to give them up their honest feedback.

12:28Nick Croft-Simon:What's great about that is they'll all have partners or sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, whatever, who live with them who aren't necessarily gluten-free and they bring them along to the day. And so we're getting a big breadth of, okay, not only their point of view, but from a product perspective, we're getting judged by kind of like, you know, people who would shop the parent category rather than the free from category, which is super useful. So yeah, we do a very varying amount of like qualitative and quant stuff and we do any events we can kind of get our hands on if they're specifically free from and just talk to as many people as possible.

13:01Are you now always led by the consumer or does your gut feeling override them sometimes if you ever had a moment where you thought the consumer feedback might not be on the money? Not.

13:10Nick Croft-Simon:I think where you need to go back to your brand values is, for example, if the consumer feedback and data was showing you that the consumer wants something that you know you can't make to the quality you need to make it, or it kind of goes against your brand values in another way, I guess you have to bat in the long run, sticking to your values in that instant will ultimately serve the consumer better, if that makes sense. So for example, like, you know, use the classic example of if there was a huge opportunity for a ham and pineapple pizza, like that would kind of betray Teo's Italian heritage.

13:42Nick Croft-Simon:And we always joke about like, oh, Teo, we're going to make you do a ham and pineapple pizza. But like, you know, if part of our brand is, you know, we're going to be the best versions of ourselves if we're authentic. In the long run, it probably wouldn't be right for the consumer to do a ham and pineapple pizza, you know, equally if there was an ingredient that for whatever reason we couldn't make on our line to the right quality. That's where I think you'd go back to your brand and then let your brand be your North Star. That's the only instance I can think of. Otherwise... Well, it's hard, isn't it?

14:09It's chicken and egg because how did you create your brand values? Was it from listening to the consumer and the feedback and building up? Or was it what you started from day one?

14:17Nick Croft-Simon:I think they had to be created in our own image because we're very authentic people. Kind of what you see is what you get both with Teo and I. And it just wasn't going to work if we didn't, we're not marketeers. We didn't have any experience at the time of building a brand. So we had no chance if it wasn't authentic. So we just went back to, okay, we've got a pretty cool story of how we met. It's great that Teo's Italian and he's got all his heritage and background. And then we're both pretty open and honest, transparent people. So let's reflect that in the culture we build for the team. like well i love that because you never have to second guess it's just gut feeling you know and the same for me in comms everyone's like oh pr don't you have to spin the truth it's like well no because i've chosen not to operate like that so i never ever have to think this or that it's just so obvious it's also just exhausting like it's just there's tiring enough without having to like if your brand doesn't reflect you and your values then literally sort of what's the point So yeah, it kind of reflects what we always believed in and that aligns with what the consumer wants as well.

15:15You mentioned the bakery. You chose to build your dedicated gluten-free bakery rather than outsource. How was that decision driven by the end consumer? Or was it just a necessary, you couldn't find out worth doing it?

15:27Nick Croft-Simon:Well, it was driven by the consumer. And the only way we were going to win is by really step changing what good looks like in the category from a quality perspective. because we're never going to be, you know, like if we're just going to the same manufacturer everyone else is going to, we're going to have a percent of the volume. So like we're just on a race to the bottom. So to deliver for the consumer, we had to do it ourselves. At the time, we didn't necessarily know that we'd always have to do it. Part of us was like, you know, maybe the tech will catch up and eventually, you know, but it kind of just hasn't transpired that way.

15:57Nick Croft-Simon:And actually - How nice to bring your community in and your panel in to see different scenes. And don't get me wrong, now we wouldn't change it for the world. Like there's no way we would go back on it. But it was, yeah, it was a daunting task because, again, we didn't know how to build a bakery or how to, you know, like create an artisanal production line. And it's still labor intensive and it still is hand topped, for example. But obviously we needed to scale it. So that was daunting, but it was the only way we were going to get to the end goal. That was ultimately going to. I want to do an offshoot of this podcast of things you now know how to do that you never thought you'd need.

16:27Because when you start on business, you're like, yeah, sure, I'm going to have this idea and it's going to be like this. And then five years in, you're like, what?

16:33Nick Croft-Simon:Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And if you knew all of that at the start, you wouldn't do it. So I think part of it is going in fairly blind and just putting one step in front of the other. And then eventually, it's like 10 years have gone by and actually you're kind of the experts in the space because you've been making it for 10 years and actually not many people have. So it's, yeah, it's a funny one. Well, going back to that panel as well, that amazing feedback, have your panel fed back on stuff that you then thought, right, we're scrapping that completely? Or have they given you an idea that you never even realized you needed?

17:03You can say no.

17:05Nick Croft-Simon:Well, I think there's two things that come to mind. I think the pain around shopping, we didn't necessarily know till we were really talking to consumers in a really meaningful way. Like it's common sense that they're going to want a product that's the same quality that doesn't cost them way more like that. But because we're not celiac ourselves, so we didn't necessarily know what it was like to actually have to shop in five different places every week or shop for your children where one of them is celiac and the other isn't. So we've learned a lot that way and we've done things in that sense, like in terms of bringing out more variety and more formats as well.

17:39Nick Croft-Simon:Yeah, and I guess the other is around pricing. So as much as we want to price match our chilled pizzas, for example, they are still premium. So we're price matching premium parent category, but that's still going to be prohibitive for a lot of the markets. So that drove a lot of our thought around different formats, for example, because we were never going to get to a lower price point by compromising quality, but we can do different formats. So our possessors, for example, are kind of sides or single serves. And that's a way that we could get to a more accessible price point and be less of a barrier to entry and hold true to that inclusivity piece.

18:12Nick Croft-Simon:So I'd say that and the kind of the bringing out the variety and the availability piece were things that we didn't know before we really started talking to consumers. What's been the hardest part of really putting your consumer first all the time? I think, well, the hardest part has definitely been doing that and creating a sustainable business because... Sustainable as in it's open every day because a lot of people think sustainable, I think green, harsh. Yeah, exactly. Because we talk about sustainability and everyone assumes it's the green B Corp stuff. And I was like, no, you can be a sustainable axe murderer.

18:45If you're murdering a person with an axe every day, you're doing it regularly. So yeah.

18:49Nick Croft-Simon:Yeah, definitely. To be a business that's still open tomorrow. Yeah. Exactly. because before we had scale like the reality is we had a more artisanal process so our labor costs are going to be higher we use higher quality ingredients our raw material costs are going to be higher and our logistics costs are going to be higher because we're obviously not doing full pallets in full lorries but equally we had to get to that end price point otherwise we're not delivering like on our promise of being quality and value parity because ultimately to be compromise free it's no good creating a product that's as good quality if it costs 10 quid so there has to be that triangulation between price and quality.

19:21Nick Croft-Simon:So yeah, to deliver that value equation for the consumer and be sustainable from a profitability point of view was definitely the biggest challenge. And it's meant we've had sacrifice. We still today have a really lean team. We still spend like less than 2 % of our revenue on marketing because we've invested in tech in the bakery and getting our product where it needs to be. So yeah, that's the trade-off. Our kind of brand awareness outside of the free-from community is probably not where it would be for a, you know, 10 million pound business in a different space who doesn't make their own food.

19:52Nick Croft-Simon:But I still think in the long term, that's a worthwhile sacrifice to make because it means we're building on really solid foundations. And eventually when we do have, you know, marketing dollars to spend, we're going to be bringing people to a product that they're much more likely to buy again. Well, this is it, isn't it? Going back to that thing you said at the start, if you get the product right, the rest will follow. And I noticed the first couple of years I was in business and I was coming up for six now, which is crazy. A lot of people have a lot of opinions for you and they don't hold back.

20:18It's like, oh, but surely you want to take investment. Surely you want to scale. Surely you must want to employ 20 people. And they were saying, we predominantly focus on independent businesses, startups and scale-ups for podcast production, PR, blah, blah, blah. And friends are like, well, you could do all the big luxury brands. I'm like, I could, but I don't want to. And it was a real moment of going, hang on, and sort of pushing back on what me as a founder wants to give the company and what I was prepared to do and sacrifice. I think when you work for yourself, you've got that autonomy, but it's very hard because you've got so much freedom.

20:50It's sort of almost boundaryless.

20:52Nick Croft-Simon:Yeah, completely agree. And if you ask 10 different people, you probably will get 10 different answers. So yeah. So for you, what does being truly consumer-led mean in daily practice in your business, given that you're probably wearing 100 hats? It means quality being in the forefront of everything we do. And actually, if there has to be a decision to be made between literally anything else or product quality we choose product quality because that's again that's what we need to deliver that's our core proposition if we're not doing that we're not doing anything it's literally functional day by day whether it's big strategic projects that we need to kind of allocate time and resource to or if it's day to day you know every time we're in the bakery we test we try the products every month everyone in our business has to go out and buy one of our products we pay for obviously and try it at home with the household we've got a long list of scores that's not a huge ask no no yeah definitely but it's just like it's built into everything we do so that it just becomes second nature so i think it can't just be like top down or something you just put in a deck it has to be bottom up like lift and breathe at every level and every function of the business and then it yes just becomes second nature and it will flow which is exciting it's what you want the flow state And what is the biggest myth founders believe about being customer first?