How to get Steven Bartlett to invest with Bethan Higson, Mother Root

0:02Bethan Higson:You don't see the dragons until you have your opportunity to pitch and we were in there for two hours. They are testing your mettle as an entrepreneur. They're also trying to get some entertaining telly. Last week we sold more bottles of Mother Root in the US than we did in the UK. From here on it's our larger market and we've done that in six months which is unreal. When you spot the right person it's like fundamental to prioritise getting that person in because it makes a huge difference. One of the biggest pieces of advice you'll hear as a founder is to find the gap in the market. But what if the real opportunity isn't filling a gap?

0:37After a decade in the wine industry, Bethan Higson became frustrated by the alcohol-free options available during her first pregnancy. The next few years were spent refining recipes at a kitchen table, combining traditional winemaking techniques with apple cider vinegar. The result eight years ago was Mother Root, a brand that has helped reshape the non-alcoholic category. In this episode, Bethan takes us through her Dragon's Den experience, how she managed to get Stephen Bartlett, among other dragons, to offer her funding, and how Mother Root has continued to scale in the UK and the US. Hi Bethan, thank you so much for coming on How to Start Up today.

1:14Before we get into all things Dragon's Den, I would love it if you could introduce yourself and a bit about the business that you have started.

1:20Bethan Higson:Yes, of course. It's a pleasure to be talking to you, Juliette. I'm the founder of Mother Root, and we make fiery non-alcoholic aperitifs that are made with a base of ginger that gives the real lovely slow burn. But also the secret ingredient is apple cider vinegar, which is where all of the complexity and delicious bite comes from. Oh, I love this because you've gone straight into the goodness of the taste, but you're neglecting to mention that you're in the Times top 100 and I think the fastest growing UK drinks business. Yes, I know. And I guess that sort of just demonstrates where my passion is and how the business started.

1:55Bethan Higson:I didn't say, oh, here's a gap in the market that I can exploit because non-alcoholic drinks are a booming category. I was the customer and I was obsessed with what is the solution? What is the thing that's missing for me? And it started with product and obsession with flavor. And so that's where it began. Whereas I think there's a lot of people who sort of jump on it and say, oh, I want a piece of that category. and then I think often that's where things go wrong because you're not thinking about the end customer and you're not really necessarily experiencing that real gap and that need. But yes, I'm so thrilled and so proud with the progress that we've made.

2:33Bethan Higson:I guess being single-minded on the customer and the product has meant that we are now the UK's fastest growing drinks brand and we were in the Sunday Times top 100 and it's just phenomenal to see where we've come. In the early stages, I got a lot of, well, are you sure? Does it need to have vinegar in it? That sounds unusual. Can you tone it down a bit? It's quite strong. Maybe you should make non-alcoholic mojitos. And I was quite single-minded about it because I could really see that this delivered on so many things I loved about drinks, having had a background in the alcoholic drinks world and that there could be legs in it.

3:09Bethan Higson:But there's a lot that goes into moving that massive rock, the uphill momentum that's required, especially in the early days. And you You get a lot of self-doubt because many people just don't get it. So you hold on to those glimmers of the indicators, the green shoots, the signs that know this is it, to help steer you when a lot of people are giving you lots of advice and you've got to decide which bits you take and which bits you politely ignore. The unsolicited advice is amazing. I was dumbfounded because I left Bond Street Brands behind and I was made redundant and started. And I sent my website to a few friends to break for me.

3:44They said, can you click all the buttons and all the links and break it and tell me where I'm going wrong? I said, why do you want to support startups and scale-ups? You can do big brands and you should do big brands and should and could are very different. I was like, I could, but I don't want to. And it was a real lesson of I now have this liberty to choose the direction I'm going in. But for you doing something new and just going back to your previous points, no one would say to make a margarita less. So why would you make a non-alcoholic drink less?

4:09Bethan Higson:And that's the real challenge, I think, with the non-alcoholic category today. We sit within that category because of where the category is today. People need to know I'm going to shop those shelves in store. But actually, it helps get found. But if I had my way, it wouldn't be called that. It'd be adult beverage and it would be alcohol presented agnostic. It's flavor-led and occasion-led and actually about the non because the non really puts it in something that's lesser than which. A whole other story. And I think truly over time it will get there. but we are so early in the category itself.

4:44Bethan Higson:I mean, it's like five to midnight if you were looking at the category in comparison to the length of time that alcohol has been around. It's super early days and a long way for this to go, but I'm really excited about its future and leading that creation of it. It's real blank canvas. Well, this is it. You can be going into retailers and be like, right, there's a whole new category coming. You can be on the front foot with this. Getting into retailers was something we did only this year and that was after building a big audience online. So we knew the popularity of it. We had so many repeat customers, people sharing it, but we were still a task to convince the retailers who had built their shelves up with non-alcoholic gin, vodka, rum, beers, to say there was space for this type of drink that wasn't a replica that was doing its own thing.

5:34Bethan Higson:And they had to take a bit of a risk on it and then the first ones to move were ricardo and waitrose very food focused very much in line so we had a lot of data to say our customers are shopping with you so all of that stuff went into the pitch deck but it still took a lot of effort despite all of that information but then once we were in and once we started to see the rate of sale and we were climbing to the top of the category not just non-alcoholic spirits but the whole of the no and low category complete that's when things start to sort of the momentum that rock that I was talking about in the very early days slowly pushing up a hill that's where it starts to kind of go more downhill and yeah the wind at your back and that feeling is like learning how to ski or surf or snowball all the things that I've tried and been all right at but when it works it's so dreamy and that feeling this is working but that uphill struggle do you think it's like the harder the uphill is at the beginning the more successful the more reward comes or it's just it's luck and chance you just got to throw everything out and see what happens?

6:32Bethan Higson:It's probably a bit of both because I think if you're truly doing something that's difficult, there will be fewer people who are also as committed to do it and therefore you have the potential to have more of the market when it comes to you. And so yes, I think then it is more yours to own because you've done the hard graft of really opening those doors and you have that first mover advantage. But then it's the flip side of the first mover advantage is that you're the one who's pushing down all the very firmly closed doors but then when they're open they are more yours to take advantage of that's a really nice way of looking at it because i think a lot of people in that beginning bit could be really tired and frustrated and just like is anyone going to get this is anyone going to listen but for you we talk about getting investment on dragon's den but given your background was in the drink sector when did you realize this personal frustration that you thought actually there's a business here Well, the gap I noticed was, as I said, from personal experience, I was pregnant with my eldest son, who's now 10.

7:34Bethan Higson:So this goes back quite a long time. And I really missed that bite and complexity and the wind down moment. And every option just felt like such a kind of compromise and like an afterthought. I wanted to feel part of the whole experience. I'd worked in hospitality even longer than 10 years. It's my first jobs were in restaurants and bars. And it's such a meaningful part of what it is to be human. you invite people around for a drink. And really what you're saying is, come around and have a catch up. I want a conversation with you. It's a moment of connection. And you want something that it's a ritual and you want actually something that is equal to that moment.

8:10Bethan Higson:So it was really from that, that I discovered vinegar is a really intriguing ingredient that had been used in many ancient drinks. It's not, I didn't come up with the concept. People have been including vinegars in their drinks since the Middle Ages and even don't actually tell the ancient Egyptians. So really long history of it, but it was kind of reimagining that history from the modern use case, which was trying to find a decent, proper drink that had loads of flavour. And I love fermentation and how fermentation makes vinegar and fermentation is also what makes alcohol and it's what builds flavour.

8:45Bethan Higson:It's all of those small mini fermentations that happen that actually build something called flavonoids and that's why you have such full flavour with drinks that have a little bit of vinegar in them. I believe it was the chef of Noma who described vinegar as liquid seasoning and you know you think you add salt and pepper as the core seasoning but vinegar is that third seasoning that will just bring a sharpness and an aliveness to flavour. And it's good for your gut as well. It's just aimed for being good all round. It's good all round and I guess I felt so good after drinking it, not just because I finally found something that was delicious and really like moorish, but also the ingredients made me feel good.

9:25Bethan Higson:It's got loads of natural ginger in there that gives you this lovely burn, but also it's very uplifting. It gives you a bit of a pick me up and the apple cider vinegar helps to get that digestive process going. It is all part of feeling good. So the aha moment, turning this into a, from something I made and discovered the gap to turning it into business actually came three years later. We'd been mulling it over and seeing the growth of the category, but no one is doing this. And this still feels like the best solution, in my opinion. I was pregnant for the second time and got a big old group of friends who were like NCT kind of friend.

10:02Bethan Higson:And I took them all down to the pub. We were there with our little babies, you know, our first babies. I put playmats on the floor and we had flipboards and I was doing focus group taste test with them just getting their opinions beyond me beyond my little bubble of now would you drink this when would you drink it do you like this one and this one and like giving them the earliest samples and also like canvassing their thoughts on the name and the format and all sorts and so that was the very early days and then basically I got enough encouragement at that point that I decided if I'm actually going to do this and not just think about it because I was so scared.

10:37Bethan Higson:No one in my family was an entrepreneur. None of my friends were. They all did normal jobs, quote, quote. But scared of what exactly? The risk or the unknown? Like starting a business, all the unknowns. I was like, and also, you know, I am obviously, I wouldn't want it to fail, but I'm more scared of success in a strange way because I knew that this would have the potential to take over my life and my issue is I'm not very good with boundaries like self-imposed boundaries I mean we talk about this all the time even people who are not self employed are like doom scrolling at midnight not doing the meditations or the breath work like we all know but it's very hard but if you knew that going in I want to ask it later maybe if there was anything you put in place to protect your boundaries or because businesses we know can take everything and more and actually Kate Halfpenny from the episode before said this she's it will take everything whatever you offer it and more of that so you have to protect yourself but it's so hard yeah that's probably a whole other episode yeah I'm a very obsessive person and I guess many entrepreneurs are I realize clearly it was a natural part of my personality it helps enormously to keep digging at something or keep going at something when everything's saying sort of maybe no don't do it or to just go deeper in research with having that sort of blind belief but the off switch isn't there and just a nod to the boundaries piece is I guess my family is a self-imposed boundary that is they need me they need me and other people needing me I need that but you're still potentially putting yourself at the bottom of the list um yeah so that is so true but they fill up my cup at the same time but yes I often I'll find up here it goes in peaks and troughs where it's been really intense like I start to realize and I can talk to people my team got very good trusting relationships with my COO and we have really good regular one-to-ones where we're super open and that is a lifesaver but I would say I noticed when my my kids have been away for school holidays like with the grandparents for a week that's happened occasionally and I just don't stop working and so I know how healthy it has been for me as mad as it sounds because obviously it's a lot to juggle a job and run a business and have young kids but I think actually it's been the making of me that forced stop where these two little humans is non-negotiable but it can especially as you're doing your job you've created a job for yourself you're doing something that's never been done before which is also a really key point for listeners to hear that it's one thing to do something so I could have started a PR agency very easily I'd have made my life very much simpler for myself and I went another way and I teach founders how to do their own PR.

13:25And I was like, but why? Why would you do that? It's the best thing for the business. It's a project. It's not a retainer. It's how PR should be done. But you can go and go and go. And sometimes I said to a friend, you just have to shut the laptop. We call it laptop down. Even if you haven't finished the email or emptied your inbox, you have to walk away. And it was Ewan Yong in his episode. He's the founder of Out There magazine. He said, just know when the end of your day is and stick to it. If it's 6pm, if it's 10pm, whatever it is, have structure. I'm like, okay, fine. And we've done a number of episodes on sleep as well.

13:56I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm really not listening to my guests enough. I was going to ask you, after years of building the business, Dragon's Den became the opportunity to put Mother Root in front of millions of people and some of the best known investors. What made you decide to go on Dragon's Den, given you were already succeeding? And what was the process of getting on the show actually like? we're taking a quick 30 second break from this episode to ask are you thinking of starting your own podcast if so this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself this course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it you want to learn how to do it yourself we teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show and so much more just dm us at hello at Fallowfield Mason to book your spot.

14:50Bethan Higson:So I don't know how much you know of the whole process but I'm maybe revealing you know how what goes on behind the scenes. So many people will apply to go on the show and then they've got scouts who will look for interesting businesses or interesting kind of stories that they think they would quite like to get on the show. So they invite you to apply. So I was invited to apply but they still go through the process of then deciding if they weren't you on the show so we decided that it was the right time in the sense of the business was in a good place and we had just been doing a big three-year plan we'd just been raising a round of investments so all of the financials were in a good place I had confidence that I could go in and not be the charity case or the laughing stock which obviously Dragon's Den is an entertainment show and they want highest highs they want big successes or they also want something that you're going to be ridiculous and like digging a hole and being sent out the den with no offers etc but I obviously didn't want that to be my fate so I thought it was a good time to apply because the opportunity of getting that much air time for us you know we were doing well but we're still really young small business that couldn't afford to get that exposure on tv any other way and we'd spoken to a few other founders who'd been on it who just said how transformational it had been So I thought, let's go for it.

16:11Bethan Higson:This is one of those roll the dice moments. It was just a brilliant opportunity that I would have kicked myself if we hadn't said yes. So that was it. So we decided to go for it. We got through to the filming. And then when you go on, it is completely as you would imagine. You don't see the dragons until you step out and you have your opportunity to pitch. weeks of multiple times writing that pitch and getting it checked by BBC who kept doing these small edits and then we had to try and learn it again and then they would chop and change it and we had to learn it again. I was going to say the prep work.

16:41So the prep was obviously knowing your business inside out but if you're raising any way you're pitching for investment but it just happens to be on camera. What other preparation did you do to feel confident?

16:52Bethan Higson:When you're pitching for investment in a normal way, of course you've got your pitch deck and you know your numbers right now you've got files that you confer to or send on you know said yes I'll send you that piece of information afterwards in an email but more encyclopedic it's a bit like you know studying for an exam back at uni or school where you've got to know all the information because you've got to pull out a margin figure from three years ago or what happened why were there those losses and really getting into the nitty-gritty of things that happened quite a long time ago because whilst it was a young business it was still already at that point about five years old so quite a lot of history to go through and we were in there for two hours so they did go through a lot and I think it's because it is a genuine process it's very rigorous they are testing your mettle as an entrepreneur which is part of the process they're also trying to get some good entertaining telly did you watch previous episodes and try and like find patterns yeah I was on there with my COO and we basically we got a bit over the top it comes back to the obsessive nature that we both have we're downloading all of the transcripts from all the episodes and putting it through AI then understand like which of the questions that are the ones that come up the most and like pattern match and so that we could predict what to expect which was really helpful but yeah we definitely we went a bit I think potentially but also when you feel prepared you feel more confident and if you feel more confident you'll do a better pitch and what was it like standing there pitching how did you feel yeah very nerve wrecking I definitely fluffed my initial line to sort of stop and start again it was more that it's such an unusual situation very rarely do you go in and deliver a pitch like that even though I'd pitched hundreds of times my business it's just the kind of formality of them coming in through the doors them staring at you but as soon as that initial pitch was over and it went into the Q &A I was completely at ease because I knew my subject material really well and had done it hundreds of times before.

18:51Bethan Higson:And it just felt like a normal conversation. You almost forgot that the cameras were there, except every so often they'd go, cut! Like, dab the, like, shine on our forehead because we'd obviously were sweating so much under the lights. And we'd occasionally, like, we'd moved too much off our spots and we'd have to shuffle back, which then broke the fourth wall or whatever that's called. And you're, oh, God, yeah, we are filming. But you'd forgotten. That's quite nice. Yeah, because you're building the rapport and obviously you're being asked questions about something you know inside out, which is amazing.

19:20But at what point in that whole two hour period did you realize this wasn't just about getting an investment, you were going to have a choice with who to partner with?

19:27Bethan Higson:They were making good noises and you could see there was at one point where Stephen says, it's gone quiet. That's a good sign. That usually means they're planning their next move. And then you could see a little smile from both Saranavis and Deborah Reedan, who were the ones who ultimately offered alongside Stephen. So yeah, at that point we knew, but we weren't expecting we were going in there with a aim of getting an offer but we weren't expecting to then actually have to go to the war room and sort of choose between three well just very quickly before we move on to the next question i love that you always refer to everyone on there with their full names apart from stephen bartlett who's just stephen he's done an amazing job on his branding but receiving multiple offers in the den meant deciding which investor is the right fit for the next stage of your business and you have a very short period of time to make that decision when you've got more than one dragon wanting to invest how do you actually decide whose money to take did you have a gut feeling had you discussed it before well they were our top three you know absolutely loved and they were very warm all three of them during the whole process we really liked them on the personal level it really made us feel at ease and that's huge the gut feel is a big part of how you make that decision in the end it came down to well we want whoever we choose to feel fully invested and therefore we didn't want to split it so they had real skin in the game and then it therefore came down to what are the additional what's the added value that we could get and given that our business is so driven by digital marketing that made the call yeah to be with Stephen as opposed to Sarah and Deborah because it is a huge part of how we grow our business so it was more about that and what has Stephen Bartlett's involvement been with the business since?

21:06Bethan Higson:So Stephen is a super lovely guy. In terms of the investment, I don't know how much you know about how it works, but it is a very laborious process after the handshake agreement, which is what happens on screen. So it takes a lot of time, a lot of due diligence, et cetera. And the business was changing all the time throughout that process. So in the end, we decided not to progress, but he was amazing throughout and was really supportive and a real mentor so it was an amazing opportunity for brand visibility. I was going to say from a PR comms perspective that sounds like win-win because you're not giving away any equity of the business but you've got the brand exposure just to be completely callous about this.

21:47Bethan Higson:It's incredible for the ability for a small business to be able to get that time I think it ultimately is six minutes on BBC One and be able to speak to the audience about it and our business even before it was aired was growing significantly and I think then you just make a decision as to whether or not it's going to be the right partnership or the partnership that's required in the same way as maybe when we originally filmed it and as any investment conversation goes you have to align on whether it makes sense at the time of investing. I think a good number do go through but also a good number don't when they're going through that process after the show finishes.

22:26Well, that double opportunity shouldn't be underestimated because I know one friend of mine, Dej, he went on and secured investment and then said no to it afterwards. It's actually, this isn't right for me, but had the exposure. So turning that television moment into long-term growth can be a very difficult challenge. A lot of founders go after exposure and it can be through paid marketing or earned media, which is PR, which is you going on a not paid placement. And after the episode air, I believe sales jumped by 2000. Yes. Yeah. Overnight. And from the outside, that sounds incredible. What does that kind of spike actually do for the small businesses?

22:59I presume it fills me with great fear because if you think about stock, fulfillment, packaging, customer service, you're running a business at a certain level. And then for the sales to come in that much higher, what happened next? Your face says it all.

23:12Bethan Higson:Yeah, no, it was actually good. We filmed in June of 2024 and the episode aired in October, 2025. And that's what I mean. In between time, a lot had changed, including we had listings in supermarkets. So we'd had to already scale up production to meet that additional customer base. We had built out the team. We were building brand awareness all every day, which was driving more sales and repeat business. So we'd already been able to build up a bit more of a buffer to prepare for that event. And we were also really focused on making the most of it. So we simplified our offer on the website, just offering people one thing that we then packed all of that ahead of time so that we knew that we could just get the bottles at the door and it was going to be really easy from a fulfillment perspective.

24:10And we would be getting delighted customers getting their bottle

24:14Bethan Higson:within two days and be able to really build and take advantage of that. That was our key focus, but it was weeks and weeks of preparation going up to that date. And the thing is, you're told only by the BBC two or three weeks ahead of when the date is actually going to be. And they always caveat that they might not actually include you because they, you know, it's an edit, it's their program. So we were, I mean, is it going to not, but you have to just go with a hope and a prayer. it is going to be and you have to prepare two things of business I think you have to prepare for failure you have to be like really aware of the risks you also have to prepare for it to go really well and that includes like this focus on making sure the website was perfect they're doing test runs and building that that very singular offer so that spike that we saw onto the website they had a very special offer we were giving away a pourer a mixer some sodas some tonics a stirrer all in one so it was a really lovely offer so people could get the special dragon Afghanistan deal of the day.

25:14Bethan Higson:And yeah, and I think that just really worked. It's that sense of, right, this is just for today. And it really captured people's attention as they were visiting the site. Yeah. This sounds dreamy and it just sounds so well executed. And I've interviewed a number of people that said, oh no, we had no idea that was going to happen. It was a complete disaster and our customer service nearly had a heart attack. But for you, you'd done the prep work, you'd forecast, you'd learned how to scale with a retailer. So did it go out smoothly? Were there any hiccups? There are always hiccups when you're dealing with that many orders.

25:46Bethan Higson:Some will go to the wrong place. There's a customer service kind of levels really goes through the roof. But again, we'd had the opportunity to really plan ahead and our team was very small, but all focused behind this one thing and making it a success. Love this. And then since the den, Mother Root has expanded into like major supermarkets and launched in the US, which is huge. Looking back, how much growth has come from Dragon's Den and how much had already been set in motion before the cameras turned on? Yeah, we were already doing best in class rate of sale in supermarkets. So we were doing really well from that perspective.

26:21Bethan Higson:But Dragon's End was a step change. It is really, you can see it, you can, if you look at your brand on Google Trends, you can see unusual spikes in usually media. Let's say you suddenly get a piece on the TV, or you get this really nice piece in a national paper, or let's say something goes viral So if you're really good at organic viral posts, you'll see these spikes. So ours was this just off the chart spike from the show, which then settled going into the end of the year at twice the awareness levels. And that coincided with us also unlocking Sainsbury's as a new retailer. So it really meant a fantastic Christmas 2025.

27:03Bethan Higson:So all of those things really matter. And it's given us confidence actually to go having those big campaign moments that we might have been nervous about putting some spend behind. It's given us the realization that actually let's try and do something again. Obviously, we can't replicate Dragon's Den, but we can come up with our own moments where we create a bit of a splash and do that at the right time, right before a key trading period like Christmas or summer, for example. So now we're starting to think more in that fashion. And we've got a bit more confidence because we've got some examples of how well that worked in the past.

27:39It's so nice, isn't it, when you can invest in that proactive behaviour because you've got that confidence and gut feeling to go for it. And it's exciting. Well, it may work, it may not work. And there's a couple of things we've done on a very small scale where we've taken a risk. It's really nice to experiment and test and learn, but you need the money in the bank to do all that stuff. Although my accountant accused me year two. He's like, I see that you're saving your corporation tax. it's due in seven months time you do know most people have spent that and reinvested it in the

28:04Bethan Higson:business and try to make it back yeah I was just going to say test and learn is one of the main things that we try and reiterate in across the business it was what really was the first step change from the early days or throwing a lot of stuff at the wall but not in a very like systematic way and just basically trying everything trying to do everything at once and being a bit just like burning out burning myself out as soon as I started to view things as a test it also took so much of the exhausting ruminating should I do this what if it took that pressure away and got focused on okay what's the smallest thing that we can do next to get the learning we need to then maybe do it bigger next time and that test and learn has continued throughout the business and as we've grown the team we're now 18 people we're all trying to make sure that we don't lose that test and learn mindset.