How Candy Kittens won listings at Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Tesco and ASDA by doing One. Thing. Well. – Ed Williams

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brand looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started.

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3:22Thank you so much. Hello there, people and listeners of The Hungry Podcast. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome back Ed Williams on the podcast. Ed is the co-founder of Candy Kittens who make gourmet sweets. Candy Kittens has won listings at Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Morrison's, Tesco, Ocado, Co-op, Asda. I think you've kind of got a full house in these British distribution. And yeah, second time on the podcast for Ed And look, man, I'm so happy doing this face-to-face this time in your wonderful abode. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. No worries. No, it's a pleasure. And yeah, good. We really enjoyed chatting the first time around.

3:57It's nice to, as you say, the more and more things coming face-to-face now, right? So it's good to be busy. You just don't get that same connection. It's much better like if I'm trying to interview someone in a different country, but you just don't get that same kind of conversation. So I know there's so much we can talk about and explore. But what I wanted to start with is this notion of the power of doing one thing well, because that speaks deeply to my soul and deeply to my sort of scatty brain that tries to do a gazillion things all at once. And one of my favorite quotes that I've been kind of like just trying to almost program into my brain is a quote by Steve Jobs, which is focus is saying no.

4:45Yeah. And it's really hard to say no. But I suppose what I'd like to start with is why for you personally and the Candy Kittens journey is doing one thing well such a superpower. I'd love to kind of explore that. I would say it probably hasn't always been our superpower, but it's becoming one of them. And all of us, I think, have a kind of disposition to, as all of us as kind of founders or business kind of leaders can see things perhaps a bit quicker. and therefore you see all these different opportunities and all these different ideas and you want to go for it all and speaking for myself I'm pretty I'm quite impatient so I kind of see these things and I want to make them all happen at once and when you start there's a million different ways in which you can take the business and actually we learned over time that a focus is probably the most important thing and actually being able to go and say okay that's what we really want to be and really kind of single-mindedly go after that thing i think can can get you there much quicker it's a harder route but actually it's um the thing that that drives us sort of examples of that when we started we would make uh we had lots of pop-up shops so we did merchandise alongside our suites and we sell lots of different bits we do some events some of this and that and we say okay well if we want to have this clear vision which is we want to make gourmet suites and we want to make the best suite possible.

6:12But then on the side of that, we're going to sell you a t-shirt for 20 quid that's got a logo printed on it. Is that the best t-shirt possible? No. So how can you say you're a company that sells the best suites, but then you're also happy to sell cheap t-shirts on the side? You either do, you know, it's hard to do everything at that gourmet level, but you can focus just in on suites and say, okay, sack everything else off. Let's just really put all of our energy into that one thing. and I think it's been the kind of making of the brand over the last maybe four or five years where we've gone okay nothing else matters we're going to put double down all energy into the suites and let's really really focus and get obsessive about that thing and it's hard to be obsessive about 50 things you can only really do it on one I mean yeah you're speaking to preaching to the choir here or preaching to the new needs I mean before we hit the record button I was like I've got you I've just set up this business.

7:05I don't know what it really is at the minute. I mean, that sort of... But I think you also have to be at that stage, right? Yeah. How else do you figure it? Yeah. I mean, it's great saying, I interviewed a guy who does a lot of strategy and he basically said the first two years of serendipity. Yeah. Where you've got to throw a lot of shit in the wall, find out what it is, and then you focus. Yeah. So I think anyone listening to this is it's like, you've got to have that period of like, okay, maybe I do want to do pop-ups. Maybe I do want to do t-shirts. Yeah. To allow you to focus. Because if you focus on the wrong thing straight away...

7:33Absolutely. you know if you were to focus on say t-shirts straight away then you wouldn't be here so it's like you do you sort of have to then back the winner right and you go yeah that's the thing that's got the most potential that's saying that's working best or where we've carved a niche or whatever it is and then you can kind of go in on it and also because i think people there's we almost have kind of different sets of listeners to this we've got people who write super early yeah and then people are a bit further on and i think the people further on need to focus yeah but the people early it's like that's when you've got opportunity to be kind of be carte blanch and do different things try different things um but i want to go like talk talk about this kind of the ability to say no to opportunities because it's it's it's so hard to do and i'd love to know what's the hardest thing you as founder ceo have had to say no to um i think one of the biggest learning for me was sort of around the range in our product range so really trying to slim that down has been a sorry yeah no worries mate start again if you like yeah no worries so i think the biggest learning probably for me has been around the the range you might sit a little bit closer yeah yeah of course i can yeah yeah yeah perfect yeah um so i think the biggest learning for me has been around the product range yeah and actually trying to slim that down over time so again when you start you throw everything against the wall and kind of see what works and the temptation particularly when you're dealing with retailers is always to sell them a new thing so how can i increase my sales at waitrose okay well what i'll do is add three new skews and there's a sort of big easy trap to fall into there that that's the way the way to grow whereas actually smart people will work out how to sell more of the thing they've already got and the easy perhaps stupid thing to do which is where we we definitely were is let's think about Let's sell more things.

9:30And actually, if you can think about selling more of the thing you already have, it's obviously a better way to do business. So that was a big, big learning. And forcing ourselves then to say no to products that perhaps we liked personally. Got rid of apple and elderflower, which was my wife's favorite flavor. You do these things and you'll, actually, I love it, but the rate of sale is just not there. So let's can that. And you always can convince yourself that, oh, it will work when we get to this point or it's going to work when we get there. um so not being too emotional or too attached to product products or ideas or campaigns whatever it might be um i think it's quite a important way to do that just stick to what works and be less emotional about it i think it's this whole brand bubble thing is it's like a fish doesn't know it's in water yeah i think that's there's a brand bubble where a brand gets so obsessed with the team in say like the office yeah see the first hand like oh my god this is going to be amazing this piece of mpd the consumer is going to love it because we love it and then it goes out into the big bad world yeah of retail and people just don't buy it and i think there's you've got to almost be like a fish out of water and be like just because you know the yeah sorry just because you love it in your office and the board meetings yeah and obviously our industry is everyone's pally so everyone's talking to each other batch of consumer in the you know wherever arson and nowhere doesn't really care but i think what you said there about selling more of the thing you've got is a really good point because you see so many brands probably once they've done the focus bit yeah uh they actually try and go go across with their range and do more mpd to bring more people into the category you keep this um retailer suite etc how how do you how are you doing that how are you selling more of the same thing to be honest just purely by not offering more at breadth you actually then can focus more on what you have so if you give the consumer too much choice it's like the netflix effect right where you sit there all night scrolling through the menu and end up probably not watching anything yeah yeah yeah whereas if i just stick bbc one on i'm gonna i'll sit there and just enjoy whatever's on bbc one so i think if you're giving the consumer at shelf less choice then automatically the sales start to come through the products that are there and through focusing on that with the retailers obviously we're not then offering okay we've got this new product let's put that on the secondary site or no let's just put the core product that's already selling quite well on the secondary site so in order to boost the core kind of rate of sale later on so that's been a kind of automatic win without really much clever thinking behind it the hard bit is okay which products are we going to sell and then once you've got those just putting those products in the right places um so that's that's been a bit of a lesson for me and another real obvious one is this thing around backing the winners so looking at the range you're going okay which products sell the best let's make sure the best selling products are in the best distribution and again temptation i think from somebody like myself who's started and really proud always of the new idea is that you go we've got this new product i'd love you to put our latest product shocks in more stores or i'd love you to put loves on your product in in secondary site or shippers around all your stores and it would be nice to have but actually we know now that there's much more value to us and continuing to build sour watermelon sales which have been a product we've had since day one and if we can just put that product in secondary site on that product in more stores that builds longer term value and loves will come later and so so with the shocks and the loves are you so so that to me sort of like i don't know your full range but that appears like you're doing a bit of breadth yeah what how come you're doing that is that just is that to use so how are you using that npd is basically what i'm trying to get at yeah so that does now support course we have a range of four core flavors right and then we introduce these kind of singular um we call them internally packs with purpose so loves is about supporting the lgbtq plus community uh shocks is a message within that around climate change and how you can make a change it doesn't have to be shocking to you personally um to make a difference um and these will kind of maybe come and go but they're kind of singular products that allow us to celebrate a moment in time talk to the audience about something they care about but ultimately it sort of feeds back into building the brand and 80 of our sales will probably still come from that core four flavors yeah make that make sense so it's almost like you're almost it's it's a product but it's also bigger marketing it's kind of a marketing piece yeah and it's another way to another excuse to introduce some back into the main brand and then they perhaps they try that thing once it's also something where we can test um sort of technical innovations so shocks is a slightly different texture it's a new sour coating something that's a bit different that we wouldn't probably be willing to drop straight into the core range that's up and running but if it works really well over there then maybe over time we can start to sprinkle that kind of magic back into the core as well hey i love that because one of the questions i always i've been trying to get to for i've done my eight of these now that's how it's almost the mpd paradox it's like if you don't innovate you die which is really the american way of saying yeah it's true yeah innovate too much and you spread yourself super thin yeah but i think i suppose what i'm getting from you is you're basically saying like we've got our four we're going to push them like hell that's our 70 percent almost yeah but we're going to allow an extra 30 percent with a and i see it's a marketing play with the shocks and the loves and if but that allows us to keep the magic alive there yeah and i think i interviewed camilla um barnard from rude health yeah okay cool and she was saying they and this was an example of where it does just work i mean they threw everything at the more i mean they were doing launching kombuchas um uh like all sorts milk alternatives milk alternatives and then they found their superhero their super product and then focused yep so i think there's it's just interesting kind of pulling at that like and there's always i mean there's an exception right to every rule yeah but i think about the brands like oatly like okay you've gone oat milk and you've just gone skyrocketed in that category yeah yeah yeah why because you've just done one thing yes okay they have varieties of that one thing you could sort of rip it apart a bit but fundamentally they're they're an oat milk yeah everybody knows that so if you say to people on the street you know name an oat milk or what's oatly they are synonymous with that category very difficult to do that i think if you are a brand that's in multiple categories and there's obviously lots of people that somehow manage to make that work but for us we really really believe in that focus and being kind of singular in the approach and i want to go to those early days because these are the bits i'm in now and um one of the i actually was writing about writing about one of the things you told me last time in my newsletter which is this so what i don't even remember that yeah i'm just like you're listening so what yeah you something goes wrong so what like the world's going to keep spinning mate it's basically stoicism in a sentence yeah it's such a good point um i didn't feel that smart when i said it but it's nice nice to someone else it was i took a lot of value from it and uh but it actually works both ways because uh rebecca from the co-op came on and was like always asked so what says yeah we've got a great product so what and then it's like well you so so you make a high cash margin so it's great for sales as well yeah but um you know right now i feel like i'm sort of rowing through sort of sees uncertainty like just winds of just it's just it's just intense at the minute yeah scary in those first two to three years like what was how did you keep just keep on keeping on and were there any like kind of cataclysmic setbacks when you're like how is this going to work because you know we're like 10 years down the line now um yeah i mean i think you know all the usual challenges around hiring around hash because we never ever have enough and um all the product challenges are trying to persuade big manufacturing machines to take a gamble on a small idea but i think the thing that always has to keep you going is then that that fundamental belief that you're kind of onto something and it's it's gonna get there and again coming back to this one thing well you know if you're if you can articulate that belief in a in a sentence and that old sort of trope about if you can explain your business to a four-year-old then you're on to something good and i think that that's the thing that we knew it's okay if we can make sweets better there is a opportunity there there is this kind of massive massive white space or whatever you want to kind of call it so and and even though we maybe we're not nailing it today there's still nobody else even looking at this space of talking about it so we know that we're kind of ahead of the pack so it was that idea of being able to believe it being able to continue to see the opportunity and just not losing sight of that i think at times where it doesn't work that would have been where we could say well actually we just sold 10 000 t-shirts last quarter yeah we should be a t-shirt brand yeah and if we'd taken that path you know how many million t-shirt brands are there out there already it's nothing new it's nothing exciting so when the opportunities came to sort of veer off course.

18:54I think that's where we were quite good at saying, no, let's stick to, let's carry on doing the job we started. And yeah, I guess that's probably what kept us going. I don't know. We don't probably think about it too much at the time, but yeah. Yeah, no, no. It's just because there'll be people listening right now who, you know, they may have just, you'd be in the trade show in Germany. Yeah, yeah. They haven't had much, you know, success or whatever. They're thinking, oh, how do I continue? yeah it's i suppose i'm just trying to go into that like was there a it's more of a sort of a specific day that was like sticks out was like that was rough yeah i mean there were there were a couple i mean there was a moment that jamie and i probably talk about uh quite often that is we we ran out of cash we had sort of two or three hours to find i think it was about 30 25 to 30 grand which time was like well still is a lot of money but at the time was like more money than we could dream of and we literally had to sit down either side of a table in a meeting room in our office calling everybody that we could think of that maybe could scrape together 500 quid a thousand but whatever it might be and and give us that money um and we managed to get the money in in sort of yeah a few hours with family and friends that were very generous and believed us um and that afternoon we're able to pay our way the wage bill and carry on going for another month and it was just enough until the next sale came in or whatever it was so there were there were a few really hairy moments like that but we were so blindly optimistic about the future yeah and and also probably quite naive um i listened to your podcast with the guys from uh biome and and and um he was talking about the ages of whether when to be a good entrepreneur maybe when it's when you're young which we were we had nothing to lose i've now got a house and we've got i've got a little boy and married you know those things the decisions probably weigh on you a little bit heavier and at that time we had nothing to lose so we you know jamie and i said if we have to you know sleep on the floor um somewhere and keep this going then we will and that was the kind of attitude maybe stupidity more than wisdom but it was able to kind of go kind of carefree i suppose bohemi our beloved sponsor are helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale bohemi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger bohemi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollie's ollie's been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 uplift in sales when using boemy to check major malt listings availability insane 29 uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy aaron duff is coming to podcast in a couple of weeks weeks he uses it to manage the team of 30 people and they've lucky to have unlocked 500 draft listings by using boemy look you've got to get involved with this stuff it's absolutely insane and it will categorically change your life it's just the sickest platform i use it all the time at ireland something you've you guys told me is is naivety is a superpower yeah and the more i've read about that it's it's so true like james dyson if i say who yeah i think that he um his whole thing is he high he doesn't hire anyone with he wants but you've got to stay naive as you get older yeah as you get older um i think i mean i've stumbled across your instagram last night man and i was like you've done all the research for me because that thing on the wall yeah yeah some of those aphorisms i just yeah it was amazing but i think one of them was um if the idea is already i mean they're gonna have to help me if the idea is already done then it's like it's not a new yeah i can't remember that word for word but something like you know new ideas sorry old ideas don't open new doors that was that is one of them that we have and i think that it's so so true and probably one of the scariest things of as the business grows is how do we keep that naivety like the dyson example um how are you doing that because that was one of my questions like i think it's just making a real conscious effort not to be like them and by them i mean these the kind of big corporations the big businesses that rule fmcg world um jamie and i spoke recently on stage at the grocer conference and get invited down there and then you sit in the audience watch the first couple of kind of keynotes before we went on and we were both looking at each other like we're really out of our depth this time it's like marketing director of pepsico the team from m &s the team from tesco whatever and you're sat there like oh my god we're absolute idiots compared to these people because we real imposter syndrome and then you get up on stage and actually we just told our story and went through the ways that we do things without really any sophisticated slides zero data to back it up you know just kind of spoke from the heart and the amount of messages and kind of nice comments that we received after that event were really really humbling and i think it's just you it's easy to forget how differently we are doing things and that room of 300 people or whatever are kind of bored of that old way of doing things we were impressed because we're like oh wow that's the gold standard that's how the real grown-ups in the room are doing it but actually all those grown-ups were more interested in listening sort of how to unlearn that stuff so yeah how do we do it i guess making a being really deliberate about not becoming that um we do now hire people from companies that you know they've been there and done that at bigger businesses but trying to train that out of them is something we focus on as well so we don't go for the gap training for negotiating or the this or that kind of industry standard stuff we try and keep it a bit more interesting and take reference more when we're thinking about mpd or thinking about marketing campaigns from perhaps a fashion brand or a musician or a how's how is canny west launching his next album how is nike launching the next pair of trainers not thinking about how yakult launched the next yogurt so it's so true i was talking about this with the guest last week about same inputs equals same outputs yeah so it's like if everyone goes on that gap course ultimately they're all negotiating the same you put the buyers on the course you put the the sales people in the course it's like getting nowhere um gap a winning but nobody else exactly and it's like and and then actually you know if every founder is um you know the kind of in the zeitgeist now and i actually do this i'm probably part of part of it but you know the cold bath all that yeah i don't do a cold bath but cold shower yeah meditation everyone's doing that now and it I think that does have a net positive, but ultimately with, when you're a challenger brand, you're trying to find that one to 2 % edge.

25:46If you're doing what everyone else is doing, then you're going to end up in the same place as everyone else. And you, you're a bit of an outlier, I think in terms of, because you're one of the only brands that hasn't had, from my eyes, real competition in terms of a challenger brand coming in, you know, oat milk, somebody talked about loads. I mean, that is just a mental category, peanut butter mental category chocolate that i'm in now mental category yeah and uh peter thiel's got this uh he's got a book that i love called zero to one and he's got a quote in there let me just find this where is it uh yeah aim for creative monopoly escape competition yeah and i kind of do think you guys have done that and i want the first question he says in that book is what is one truth that you believe that everyone else disagrees with and it's really going back to that point of when you and jamie were at the gross rewards and you're like oh god well guess what you were thinking feeling insecure and imposter syndrome well guess what everyone was looking at you yeah so i'd love to know yeah what is like maybe one truth or something you really believe in that most people would disagree with you on i think there's a couple right and it's yeah it's nice to to hear all those nice things said about you but i but i think we still can't quite believe that we're in that position we we're so clear that there's an opportunity here that we're we're also surprised that nobody else is kind of coming toe for toe with us to have a go at that um so we're sort of always sort of looking over our shoulder a little bit but i think the truths probably are there's a place for premium within confectionery and there's definitely definitely the consumer wants a better product um whether that's within the brand where we kind of started that was really really the kind of um the sort of very very key insight for us was that there could be a better brand here people don't know everybody enjoys sweets it's a fun thing but there's only sweets for kids or the sweets for your grandma nothing in between and that's where it started and then when we realized that was sort of working it was then about a product for that person as well so plant-based is is the biggest innovation in our category and i think we're kind of leading the charge in terms of a plant-based product that not only tastes kind of as good as a gelatin product but better so that's really important but i think overall we are absolutely confident that there's a place for better sweets however you want to package that up whatever words you want to put on it when we started we spoke to factories all over the world to be honest and we've said okay we want a plant-based ah plant-based is not a that's just a fad that's never going to take off you know that's just for holland and barrett and some health farms don't worry about it um okay we want natural ingredients nafnak natural flavors natural colors oh don't worry about that that's just a bit of a fad maybe for london but you know it's never going to be a big thing in supermarkets and again and again and again all these kind of things that we talked about stand-up pouches oh you shouldn't do that they're going to be too expensive or whatever whatever and i think that's the thing that we still believe now and you still see the biggest players in in the category trying to sell higher weight bags for a lower price and just race to the bottom right everybody's trying to go for this one pound magic price point and they get so fixated on the price point that everything else actually becomes quite secondary so you have mpd teams at these big organizations developing to get to a pound not developing to create a product that people like um and i think they really take their eye off the ball there you know uh hfss is another massive kind of speed bump that's come and hit the industry and so many conversations we've had over the last 12 months whether it's with retailers or whoever else sort of say what are you going to do about hfss and our answer has just been nothing we we're a sweets company we're delivering a really worthwhile indulgent treat for our consumer and until the consumer decides they want something different then we're not going to change and and lots of the big guys you know the haribos nestles the round trees whoever of the world ran around like headless chickens creating all these new products that are sugar-free and whatever else just to get to that score that meant that they were compliant within hfss legislation and from what i can see now that's really seems to be working it's just a product that was created for legislation and if you ask a consumer what hfss is they don't even know what that that means yet so being focused on the consumer and really believing that this space for something better i think is the bit that has allowed us to win and just not letting any of those outside influences sort of creep in particularly the ones that are the kind of industry in inverted commas experienced opinions they're the ones i think can really kill a good idea man i love that that's literally what james dyson says is don't listen to people who are experienced and it goes back to this fish in the water thing it's like as brands you i remember everyone going fucking hell hfss it's gonna be like the end of the world yeah because i go to the pub with my mates i like mate what the fuck what is that yeah i mean only only us as brands recognize when you see a twix that's a great secret in the bar yeah and it's i think there's there's a point in there of you know you've clearly got deep roots i believe business is like actually like a tree like you actually flip upside down that is the organizational chart yeah once you got deep roots you can kind of um uh an unshakable belief you can uh you know stay strong when those winds are strong yeah and it's i think there's so much in that for people listening to that it's like staying true to who you are yeah amidst the adversity trying our best but one one thing you said in talking about how you stay naive as you grow is is untraining corporate beliefs like that was delicious like so so what was is there not a specific example of some of the things you do to say a new person starts say tomorrow tomorrow but like for their first three six months how are you making them think more like a challenger so i think there's kind of you know the basic things of kind of literally signposting stuff around the office we've kind of got ideas and things written on the wall in places and this disruptive attitude that was printed out on the stairs outside that you referenced.

32:04Those kind of things that try and hopefully sort of, sounds a bit culty when you say it out loud, but kind of drumming those ideas into people's minds just to get people thinking a bit differently. I think one of the most successful things we've done is that we have a guest come and join the team once a week. So for an hour every week on a Wednesday or Thursday morning, a guest comes in and talks to us about their story and we call it Sweet Talks and it'll be Sweet Talks with whoever. And that person comes in and they just talk about their experience, what they've built or created. And it might be a founder of a business.

32:33It might be someone that's a senior role in a business. It might be a sports person, a musician, whatever. Just to give us a different perspective, because I think the problem is if you spend all your time talking about your thing and getting so wrapped up in your world and your problems, everything else can sort of fade away into the background. So trying to bring other people's problems, other people's ideas and ways of thinking to the foreground. every single time we have someone come and speak to us that you you have another idea another different perspective another thing um and it might be something simple yeah it's a debt this morning actually we had a guest in the office and it was rob who's one of the founders at tribe oh i mean on the podcast yeah yeah amazing story and the way they've kind of founded that that business is comes from a real kind of authentic experience around running um i mean he told this told stories the team and everybody's talking about it still at lunchtime everyone's talking about i might go and do this run i might go and do my challenge myself to do this thing and it just opens you know rips the blinkers off and opens your eyes to a different way of doing things um so also i suppose not getting to as much as we do try and create our own culture and create our own messaging around things and the candy kittens way of doing xyz i think it's really important to make sure you've got lots of outside influence and you're changing the influence all the time as well.

33:58So it's not just me banging the same old drum. It's someone else coming and saying, well, we did it this way or we did it that way. And sometimes they're doing it better than us. Sometimes they're not doing it as good. And you can get inspiration from both. 100%. And I think it goes back to changing the inputs. You change the outputs. And it's like getting different people coming into the organisation. And it's so easy for people listening to this. It's brilliant. It's just like, well, people want to talk. People love that, right? I mean, yeah. I suppose the flip side of that, is you're 10 years down the line and i know for a fact that systems work like i had a big piece this year with the podcast about putting systems in place yeah i was like oh my god i wish i'd done that yeah you know especially for my sort of break yeah i'd like what what are some of the if you could only pick one or two systems you'd wish you'd as a brand focused on uh you know in those in those early years which you now have in place you know 10 years on um i mean i'm really not the systems guy okay but i think that i'm learning to love systems as well and and it's not my natural state but absolutely see the value and i think that there's a couple of things i think finance is one you just can't you can't mess with and pretend so the numbers are the numbers and you better know what they are and i think that's the the one thing that we we've always done quite well having a really good structure in terms of how you're accounting how you're managing that, how you're forecasting, budgeting, etc.

35:21allows you to be ready for the next stage, whatever that next stage might be. And having that for us in place early on meant that by the time we spoke to investors, by the time we spoke to retailers or whoever it was, we were prepared and we had quite a slick understanding of what we were talking about and probably over-invested in that early on. So we were able to kind of present ourselves like a much bigger company than we were from day one. So that's really important. I think another thing that we spend quite a lot of time talking about is meetings. So how do you work as a team? What are your meetings like?

35:55So every meeting now, the aim, and we're not nailing it every time, so we're absolutely not perfect, but the aim is that every meeting you go into has an agenda, has clear actions afterwards, has an objective that you know what you're all going in to get out of that meeting. it's so easy just to waste time and that old kind of meme of another meeting that could have been an email trying to get out of that so every meeting should have a real have some real value at candy kittens and and try and keep them all less than an hour you know if we can keep them to 30 minutes that's that's the goal um less number of people in that meeting you know how many meetings do you sit in at your within your company that are 10 people around a table and actually two or three of them are having the conversation and everyone else is there just tapping away on their laptop or whatever and i think that's such a time drain in so many businesses so trying to be quicker trying to get things to happen quicker and also maybe without meetings so if we're in the office face-to-face we're talking let's just grab a quick call yeah i've been doing really much yeah much quicker so trying to delete those as much as possible we had a chat last week with um a german company that we work with a partner of ours and they have one or two face-to-face meetings a week and that's it.

37:07They're in the office five days a week and all they have is one or two scheduled meetings a week. So everything else that happens in that company is all just conversations around the office. If you want something, walk up to someone's desk and ask them. And if you get into that meeting culture, everything becomes, oh, can we talk about this? Oh yeah, put some time in my diary tomorrow. And then you've just wasted 24 hours waiting for the time in the diary to then talk about the thing and you catch up and you talk about everything else. Then that one thing is fine. Easy to see where you can save time.

37:35Perry was, I think I told you actually the other week and he was like, meetings for the sake of meetings for the sake of meetings, it's like, Jesus no, completely, and I think there's a lot of sorry it's a delicate art, isn't it, getting the right systems and magic are two things you need to kind of get to dance together and I think ultimately brands go too far one way and you don't need to find that sort of sweet middle ground Where I want to go now, mate, is I don't know where I read, but I know you're Welsh. Are you from Brecon? No, no, no. So I'm from a town called Cofili, which is about eight, nine miles outside of Cardiff.

38:19Right. Okay. Because I used to work, weirdly, pre-manly life in Brecon for a business called Beacon Foods. Okay, yeah. So they used to put me up in the Castle Hotel. I used to drive down there. we basically were trying to create the lovely family vision. Trying to create the equivalent of like Moju. Anyway. Okay. Crash band wallop didn't work. Right. Okay. I was like outside Liverpool streets train station at 5am trying to sell juice. Yeah. It just didn't get going. But I'd love to talk about your, your kind of your Welsh roots and, and actually your obsession with brands. Cause Rory Sutherland is, I think he's from the Y Valley and he's obviously obsessed with brands.

38:57Yeah. I think it's just kind of interesting. um place to explore that i've never kind of explored before so how did kind of like growing up in wales or or near i know near cardiff but how did that give you a sort of poor kind of gasoline on your obsession with brands and business oh that's a good question i think um what do i think i think that we grew up in a very kind of um let's start the answer again um interesting question and i think for me what wales is a very different culture as just the community the people it's very community driven where i grew up in kafili and it's very very down to earth so there's no kind of ears and graces so is kafili like is is that out on the sticks like brecon or is it no so more of a it's a uh quite a big town but it's outside of Cardiff and if you spoke to people in Cardiff they'd think it's sort of right up in the valley somewhere and it is in the sticks but it's not really so it's it's quite a decent sized town but actually everybody knows everyone and and you know the the community everybody's neighbors are kind of in and out of each other's houses and that kind of thing is all pretty normal right which I was shocked that that doesn't happen elsewhere yeah and what um you family, friends, everybody is always, always taking the mick out of each other.

40:21That's one thing that's kind of like my biggest memory of kind of growing up and how it still is now if I go home. So nobody ever really inflates each other's egos or that kind of thing. And if you've suddenly you've got a good idea, someone's going to bring you crash back down to earth pretty quick. Yeah. And that's such an amazing thing. I think, you know, even, you know, 10 years into Candy kittens now nobody within my family or kind of friends at home is kind of giving me a slap on the back and telling me how well I've done I know they're all really proud of it but nobody's kind of inflating my ego and letting me get run away with that idea no matter what you go on and achieve so that's a really nice thing I think that kind of keeps you firmly on the ground and I guess then when I went off to uni so into uni in Loughborough suddenly had my eyes kind of really really peeled back open to this much wider world and lots of different cultures and people and the way people work I think that was a moment where I kind of got more interested in brand and more interested in what it means to different types of people um but I don't know I guess the coming from Wales and having that in my upbringing gave me much more sort of solid roots and foundations that perhaps I wouldn't get elsewhere I don't know yeah I mean I find it I find it fascinating because one of the things i think rory was saying is back in his back in his day it's like he was nowhere near you wanted to access a brand yeah then yet go to fucking town's it was a long way whereas now everyone can get amazon wherever you are yeah but i think i was i remember so i was working for the business i'm lovely lovely business and i went in after england had um lost to wales and the six nations i mean this is 2016 2015 and got absolutely rollered but they were all but they were so lovely and what I kind of took from that was a it's probably down there for about eight months yeah just a warmthness yeah and a humbleness and humility about doing things and I think yeah it's just interesting speaking to you now yeah I think there's a lot of I think within you know where I grew up there's a lot of heart a lot of honesty and I think I think that's something that you can apply to brand quite quite effectively um you know people really are passionate right That's kind of a cliche about the passion of Welsh people or whatever, or Celtic people.

42:41But it's really, really true. And whether that's about the rugby or more recently around Welsh football, that brand of Welsh football is now so, so strong around the world. Yeah, okay, they've had some success at the Euros and different things, but really that's come down to people believing in the story. and I think we're quite good at that as Welsh people as storytellers or or whatever it may be but but really that honest heart I think is probably something that I maybe subconsciously have put into it honest heart and I think what you just said said there about believe the story and tell the story because I think one of your um points is is stick to the story consistency is king and believe the story yeah um so you've sort of teamed up there nicely son um but i'd love to go go into that so also what would you say and we've talked about the heart coming from from your kind of your roots if you want to call that in wales what would you say sort of the candy kitten story is and why is consistency so king because i think i think with values if you look at the opposite you understand where they came from so right at the beginning we were saying focuses as value if you look at the opposite it's because you weren't focused at the beginning yeah um same with me right so the reason i say focus say no is because my brain's like that so if we look at the opposite of why stick to the story consistency king was there like a moment time where you didn't believe in the story or you were unsure of the short story um no i don't think so i think it's more remembering that you probably get bored of your own ideas quicker than other people have even caught on so if we have a new marketing campaign and perhaps you know a phrase so for example mcdonald's have i'm loving it i can guarantee you that every single marketing director at mcdonald's for the last 10 years has probably said oh it's time to change this now we need something new let's freshen it up let's go for something new but whoever it is at mcdonald's has gone no we're sticking with it let's stick to the story let's keep it consistent is is the one that's kind of keeping that on track and actually that that line has probably been in circulation for maybe 25, 30 years.

44:57Maybe how long have you known it? Maybe you've been aware of it for 10 or 5 or whatever. And it's so, so easy, I think, to kind of try and reinvent the wheel and fix things when they don't need fixing. So that's one of the things. It's actually gourmet sweets is still the opportunity. That hasn't changed since day one, but it's very easy to go, okay, maybe we should come up with something new now. Maybe we should, let's rebrand that. Let's re-skin that. let's let's put some more kind of glitter on it whatever and and actually keeping it consistent i think is it takes a long long time i think you know we're 10 years in and people still have a lot to learn i think about what we offer um so that's that's where that comes from really is just keep hammering the same old thing even if you're bored of it yourself it's such a good point and it's um i think which guests i interviewed i think it may have been a hub from tenzing and he's like the best marketing campaign is the one you're bored of yeah and david olga he's got a quote which i love which is now you you advertise into a marching army yeah uh sorry a marching band not standing army yeah and i've learned that with a podcast so i've started repurposing videos from ages ago people are oh my god you had him on yeah yeah and you think oh my got everyone's seen this now i was like everyone's seen this so i'm just like just keep going with the same message yeah and just and it it is goes back to what we've come at the beginning this new shiny um new shiny toy syndrome yeah that's kind of pervasive is is just yeah just lock in just keep keep it yeah there's something about there's a clever statistic about tv advertising which i'm going to completely butcher and get wrong but it's something like you have to see a tv ad something like five times before you even notice it so it'll come up and you'll be on your first or whatever and you won't even know it's there then the sixth time you actually recognize that oh hang on a minute let's see what they're selling and then you watch it and you have to watch it another three times before you then get to the point of consideration so a tv ad maybe has to play for a minimum of 10 times before they've even got you to think about buying that product and it's kind of similar with a buyer right the first time i go to a buyer and say hey we've got this idea for gourmet sweets it's just in one ear out the other they don't even they don't even hear you so the next time i have to say the same thing again again again and then they go actually sorry what are gourmet sweets oh right okay now we're having a conversation then i have to then i've got the opportunity to sell it and i think that's that's sort of how we're trying to view it with the team and the way we're talking you kind of otherwise you can oh well i told them about gourmet sweets last week and they know us you know so actually keep going keep going keep going and and eventually they're gonna they're hopefully gonna listen and also it's like if you can't hold of the buyer right via email you could plug that same message i.e gourmet sweets on linkedin on instagram yeah and so you as a brand can actually accelerate that the 10 times they've heard about it yeah i think that's a really like good piece of wisdom for listeners it's like just because they haven't heard it the first time yeah and got to go a good 10 and even maybe if they didn't get it the first time it could also be you know you've managed to get a face-to-face meeting and the meetings you know you come out thinking oh they really didn't understand that but actually putting it on their radar and then going again they maybe don't understand it because they aren't thinking about that opportunity at the moment or they aren't looking at that particular segment of the category or whatever and they're not in the right frame of mind maybe they've had a bad morning or whatever's going on right and actually going back in and if you if the if that is obviously if you think the idea is is good enough so you've got to stress test that yourself in the background but um once you're on to something just consistency yeah and i want i I want to talk about like creator packaged goods.

48:41Yeah. Obviously you listen to the podcast with John and Megan. So obviously Jamie's got a huge following. A huge quote unquote following in that it is a big following, but actually there's like 67 million people in the UK. Yeah. So like a million following, whatever it is, it's still quite small. Yeah. And I'd love to know kind of what has actually been, despite Jamie's following what have been sort of the unforeseen challenges building a brand because I think I know it's big in America but this whole sort of creative package good things I think it's surface level it sounds like a banging idea the reality is very different do you know what I mean yes it really interests this space I think we're we're miles behind at the moment in the UK and Europe in terms of what that could start to look like um i think there's a few different ways that you can go about that and in our case authenticity at the heart of what we've done with candy kittens and jamie's really really important so we've created posh sweets and we've got a posh bloke on the face of it right so that's but there's what what is jamie well he's posh he's fun he's energetic and he's also that kind of um a bit of a spark in the room right he's there comes in lights up the place goes again that and that is also kind of what exactly what we want to create with sweets we want to create a posh product we're better than the rest with gourmet product we want it to be be fun and have like that energy about it and it's also got to be that kind of lift in your day and those two things then married up kind of literally kind of put join the dots perfectly other people are launching things that for me just don't make sense so i think it's got to be it's got to be right it's got to be you know you can't have a sportsman that's face of a burger chain that for me that doesn't really work so how do you how do you make that fit make sense and then stretch it for a much longer period potentially than that individual's moment in the spotlight so we we absolutely use jamie and we use jamie more and more for different kind of marketing things that we're doing particularly particularly jamie's particularly strong now within the podcast world so how do we lean into that as a brand um but one of the things we haven't done is put his face on the bag or his name on the packaging or really kind of marry product and ambassador together kind of hand in hand so there's an audience that definitely buy candy kittens because of jamie there's an audience that buy candy kittens because they see it on the shelf at waitrose or tesco or sainsbury's and it serves a purpose for them there's an audience that meet the brand for the first time because of jamie but then can buy it without having to admit that they knew it through jamie there's all these different kind of things working together but i think the brands that take the really literal approach of okay so i'm a i don't know fitness influencer so here's my protein shake and it's called the edwards protein yeah like it's a bit too obvious a bit too literal and i think that starts to struggle, right?

51:49You've got people like Joe Wicks, who's super influential and love what he's done, but he launched a frying pan or whatever and it doesn't work because who wants to have a Joe Wicks frying pan in their nice new kitchen or these kind of things? It can be a little bit too literal sometimes. And also I think the stench of inauthenticity is consumers are so savvy now. Yeah, it just doesn't feel... Yeah, it just doesn't work. But what I think is interesting is how, as you say, you can sort of Jamie's profile brings shoppers in, but equally so does distribution. So I'd love to know what have been some of those challenges of building a gourmet sweet brand and driving that rate of sale in areas that may not know Jamie, may be more privy to buying kind of a pack of Haribo.

52:46Like, how have you done that? What's the challenge that's been there? So I think that's a lot of our work is around that. Sorry, getting consumers to try the product for the first time is super important. So we have something like a trial to conversion rate of something like 80%. So 80 % of people that try our product will go on to buy it, which is huge. So we know that. So all we've got to do is get you to try it for the first time. And then you realize that kind of light bulb moment of, ah, okay, so it's worth spending a little bit more on this because it's so much better. um so that's that's a lot of sampling a lot of kind of trial driving activities um i think distribution has been massive for that as well so the more times we can be toe-to-toe on the shelf with the haribo and give the consumer a choice that i think is one of the things we're most excited about that for so long there's not been a choice in this category if you wanted sweets you have to keep eating the sweets that you've been eating your whole life all of a sudden bang there's kind of a new kid on the block and we can give you a choice and disrupt that thought process a little bit so that's that's important and obviously doing that through things like secondary space in store trying to disrupt the you walk around the store etc helps um but i think standing firm on price is another one so yes we're gourmet that means we are more expensive because we've got better ingredients better packaging and all the rest of it we have to charge more for that so there's been so many times where lots of different buyers would have loved us to lower the price and promise you the world, you know, we can give you all of our stores if you can just get it to a pound.

54:23And I'll be honest, we've had quite a lot of serious conversations back in this room where we go, okay, should we do it? Look at the, you know, look at the upside, look at the volume that could mean. But the minute we drop that and go to that pound price point, then we're just back into the same pool as everybody else. And we call it the pound party that every other brand is in and the pound party is one in, one out. And this was, Haribo will launch a new line. and 1D lists, new line, 1D list, new line, 1D list. And they're on this kind of forever kind of merry-go-round of trying to sell a bag of sweets at a pound.

54:54And we're just saying, okay, well, we're actually, we're not going to go to that party. We've got a better party going on over here and it's a three pound or two pound 50 or whatever. And that is a big sort of, I think, signpost of quality as well for people in the price point. So that's sort of working for us at the moment did you um get kickback on pricing so with the island's chocolate at the minute is our chocolate is bloody expensive yeah as i think stella say it's like be reassuringly expensive i think it's a price isn't a very elastic thing did you get kickback from buyers being like well hang a sec mate like harry bows yeah how to say and i think that the i would say that the kickback Like on that topic, it's always bigger from the buyer than the consumer.

55:42So the buyer that's making those decisions, that price that's 70%, 80 % more expensive than anything else they list just looks weird in their spreadsheet, right? So when they drop that in, it's like big red flashing alarms that, hang on, this is more expensive than anything else we've ever sold. But the consumer doesn't think like that, okay? So the consumer, I don't believe, thinks about price per gram or direct comparison. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the buyers get obsessed by these metrics. And rightly so. That's kind of what they're trained and paid to do. I'm not taken away from that. But on the other side of it, we're able to prove now that it works.

56:19So the first time you have those conversations, it's tough. But over the last five, six years, whatever, we've been able to build that case study to say, i know this is going to really scare you but we can sell a product at this price and look what it's doing and then once you get past that initial kind of alarm bell in their head all the benefits that brings you know we're able to sell less volume for you but deliver a higher cash margin we're able to drag the average transaction in your category up by whatever you know we can we can then offer a big point of difference and we'll also give you a real kind of good sort of board to play the other brands against as well to say okay why do we have to sell all these brands at a pound perhaps we can start dragging everybody else up a little bit and not just continually sort of we're sort of putting the plug back in the bath and the value is now building up again rather than letting it all just drain away yeah i mean it's such such a good point but i think for a lot of people listening because it's like sounds easy on paper but what i'm trying of get in is as i said earlier it's like every brand has now got competition that's piled in with you guys not really as far as i can see what's been sort of the uh i know we talked about the gap course but i think life's negotiation uh as a brand you're up against big boys you've got to negotiate what's been sort of the hardest negotiation you guys have gone through um um yeah like how did you prepare i think i think i mean i speak probably for every fmcbcg business in in the uk if not europe over the last 18 months there's been so much discussion around price because of inflation and all of these external factors that have enforced us to put price increases through to the consumer that's been really really tough and one of the you know one of the biggest challenges probably since we started the business but it comes back to this sort of belief in the story and the belief in what we're trying to do we still know that candy kittens can serve a really good interesting fun purpose for the consumer and as long as everything we're doing continues to deliver for the consumer then the rest of it is just kind of nuts and bolts that you kind of work out in the background i think so there's been some tough conversations and the frustration for me is that you can waste an awful lot of time sort of squabbling over pennies and 0.03 of a penny when if we just sort of all agreed okay let's suck it up this is what it is inflation is here food prices are going up let's now get on with it then we could work out ways of sort of making that more palatable for the consumer or overcoming some of those challenges on a more kind of macro level um and i just think sometimes the way that the the industry is set up to have these very small detailed conversations with a buyer over precise metrics stops that kind of bigger more creative more um more consumer-led interesting conversation going on so that that was tough but we've we've sort of thankfully got through that we're in a good place we had a lot of great support from all of our customers we work with to enable that to happen um and we're now able to sort of move on and do more interesting things hopefully so that's kind of hopefully behind us um at least for the time being so touch wood we'll get over that for now But that was the toughest, I think, mainly because it was about passing something on to the consumer that, you know, we wouldn't have done unless we really, really had to.

59:52So that sort of hurt. Yeah, no, it's just, as you say, it's like, it's such a good answer because everyone's had to go through it over the last, well, year, year and a half, 18 months. Yeah. but i think what you said there about it kind of goes back to this fish and water thing right is that you can get so focused with with the bar with the retailing is sort of myopic like 0.000 whatever on an excel spreadsheet it's like well yeah let's jump out of this pond and go into the consumer's pond and like see what they're actually feeling and i think it just being able to have that reframe is really powerful yeah and don't get me wrong you know we're um we're in a fortunate position as a premium brand in the category as well the actually a bit of a bump on price for us which was necessary to keep making the same quality product and delivering everything that candy kittens is yeah is is a bit more palatable for the consumer when when we're talking about some of the everyday products you know i would have hated to be working in fresh grocery right now with those kind of areas where you're seeing the price of basics like potatoes go up 20 that's that's bonkers stuff right so it's it's a bit easier where we are i don't i don't want to sort of plead this kind of sob story but yeah it's it's frustrating more than anything else at times it's well one thing i wanted to explore with you is is most talented brands are sort of created by middle class people for middle class create middle class products for middle class yeah uh people and i think there's a huge opportunity where no one's looking in that whole untapped market of people who are up and down the country yeah um would you i know this kind of goes completely opposite i just kind of want to explore this would you ever think of creating a brand that would create something for that whole untapped need because i think brands as you say are always going up always be a remi-wising why is premiumizing but i think if you kind of have a flight of imagination look like down and there's a whole delta of opportunity there has that ever crossed your mind because um it hasn't really i think the one thing that i have been really interested in recently though is um some of the work that they're doing at iceland richard like richard walker at iceland i think is like really on to something and that whole frozen food space and all of that the sort of innovation that's going on there number one is much sort of cheap makes products more affordable but there's also a huge sustainability benefit to some of those things and you're right everybody goes to to premiumize um haven't given it enough thought but you've maybe sort of planted the seed of an idea i think that's the thing that is about looking at things differently right yeah everybody follows that same path okay we let's to challenge means premiumize but i guess the the difficulty is that the retailers have so much own brand they kind of monopolize that lower price point space um and and often the premium for in our case we didn't in all honesty set out to say okay let's go for a premium product we set out to make the best product and the best product actually ended up becoming or having a premium price point attached it became expensive so we put all this sort of thought and ideas and love into something and at the end of the end it spat out a bag of sweets at three pounds that wasn't that wasn't the plan um and now we've got there we've kind of owned the premium i think that there's there's ways of doing that differently probably um with a bit more experience and a bit more of a sort of thought behind it you could probably attack the other end i think it's so perry's just i don't know if you've seen the brand he's working on called picnic okay no I don't think so.

1:03:25He showed me the designs, done about a thousand designs. Yeah. But they've basically created a brand. It's a Dutch supermarket. Okay. Who have basically cut out all the logistics. You just order through an app, but all the brands, your products you're getting are, in terms of like the good, better, best. Yeah. They're all good. So they're cheap and affordable, but they've got an amazing brand. And I mean, he was going crazy. Yeah, really excited. I can imagine. But I was like, I was like, because we were talking about, I was like, that's just such an untapped. yeah um just like just left of the market there and i think the other thing with that though is which is important to remember is the um food products and we talked you know back to this kind of inflation boring conversation but the the food has generally been too cheap for too long so i was listening to richard walker from iceland talking about this recently and he was saying that an Iceland asania was a pound in 1997.

1:04:22And an Iceland asania in 2023 is still a pound. So whilst everything else around us has moved on in price, and that's probably quite an extreme example, and I may even be misquoting it, but the food hasn't followed inflation generally. So all of a sudden now we're seeing these big 20 % rises in price. That's actually just food finally catching up. And I think a lot of supermarkets, all the things about how dairy farmers have been screwed over and prices is drilled to the ground and eggs and all these sort of things that the supermarkets are desperate to get at the lowest possible price point has kind of squeezed that quality and love out of these categories.

1:05:06and I think there's maybe part of the reason why people that love and care about the products they're making don't want to enter at that point because they have sort of too much pride in what they're doing perhaps and it's too difficult to make the price points work that the supermarkets are able to you know they throw all of that kind of credibility if you like out the window and go we don't care we just want it at 50p at all costs you know. hadn't thought of it like that it's like yeah because i think i think that's what james barely said to me as well from waitress is that the pricing in food is so hasn't caught up yeah i think he thought there was going to be a whole movement towards actually way more premium premium premium premium yeah um and it's i mean you know you know the things are nicer quality if you go to a farm shop and buy the local milk or the local bread or the local you're wow i can't believe the bread tastes this good and that's because that's just it's made properly with nice ingredients and obviously that's going to taste better than your 19 pence loaf of bread from your so people are happy to pay for it i think once you get it right the for sure one of the things that you two of the other ones that you said is on that wall out there which i think are really good is be prepared and revolve resourcefulness is the game yeah where did why why are those two up there and what do they mean for you guys?

1:06:29So I think resourcefulness, I think, is we're always trying to punch above our weight. That's since day one, and we're still doing that now. And I think that there's always reasons why you can't do something or why someone can't print the thing you need by Friday or they can't give you this thing on budget or you can't appear at this trade show because of whatever reason. And being able to sort of, I guess, not take no for an answer is probably what that is and being able to find another way is everything that we're about. Because all the reasons I mentioned earlier about the no's that we had around product, you know, don't make it vegan, don't make it in a stand-up pouch, don't do whatever.

1:07:09We have to be resourceful then to sort of ignore that and find someone that would do those things and would say yes. So that's really, really important. And just trying to encourage, it's very easy, particularly as you grow and budgets get bigger and teams get more experienced, to fall back into the traps that other businesses do. You know, you take your marketing campaign and you pitch it out to three agencies and you pick the one that takes you to the nicest restaurant or whatever. If we start doing that, then we end up back where everybody else is. But if we can continue to be resourceful and say, no, we're not going to go to an agency, we're going to do it in-house, or we're going to do this, or we're going to hand paint that thing that we need to paint or whatever.

1:07:50I think it's that being scrappy and being sort of a bit more of a fighter in there helps us helps us sort of do it differently it's just so what i find what i'm enjoying so much about this conversation is like you guys are 10 years into this yeah and it's a long time for most people listen to i don't know what the statistics are most businesses don't get past year two or three i don't know what it is but you've still got this naivety yeah be scrappy be resourceful like anything can go attitude i think it's just it's so reassuring what is um will chase taught me this thing which is when you're in the winner's enclosure you realize all the fun was in the race right and i like it uh not say you're in the winner's enclosure but what what does it feel like for you like what's keeping you awake at night now because so many people listen to this thinking well they've got a banging brand they've got a huge office and they've got full distribution in the uk like what's currently keeping you awake at night um good question i think i think a lot of my focus is around continuing to hold on to the things that make the brand special so how do we not lose that that nice list of kind of uh words you've you've reeled off you know how do we make sure that the people within this nice office still think like jamie and i were thinking when we were working from our kitchen table and and And that, I think, is something we put a lot of time and energy into.