PerfectTed’s £30m Brand Building Secrets Revealed in 46 Minutes

0:28Are we good to go? at about six and we finished at about nine and what sort of was mind-boggling was your whole team was in the office they're blasting the tunes there's just this this drive and I remember you saying to me like we're going to build a fucking rocket ship and two years down the line you certainly have some massive congratulations um what I'd love to start with though is one of my favorite questions to ask is what was the last thing since that November 23 what was the last thing you really radically changed your mind on in terms of brand building? Firstly, great question, but firstly, thank you everyone for coming.

1:04I was literally sitting here three years ago and it's humbling that people actually come and might give a shit about what I have to say. So hopefully the session is of a little bit of value. The biggest thing I've changed my mind on, I would say, is that when we first started, I thought business was clean. I thought if you were doing a good job, then it means that things are running smoothly. You know, when you're manufacturing, if you're doing a good job, the manufacturing happens and you deliver to the retailer and it sells. But the truth that I've learned, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in this room will agree that someone here from a much bigger company than ours, that when you're doing a good job, it's often when the business is messiest because growth is messy.

1:48Growth is chaotic. It's painful, especially if you're doing something truly innovative. You're doing something for the first time, then it means that there is no playbook. And when you're writing the playbook, and I mean that like quite literally, I know it's quite a metaphorical or fun thing to say that we're writing the playbook, or at least we want to write a playbook. We really want to do things differently. And when you do things differently, shit just hits the fan. I love that. And what's your, because I interviewed a guy, Tom Gosney, who does the pizza ovens the other week, and he said they've been a massive brand in the States and everything.

2:21And he was saying that, you know, business is a thousand missiles pointed at your head every single day once you expect that once you expect that everything gets easier it's almost your pain threshold goes up um and you know similar to your point mate is he was like so growth problems equals growth so embrace it one thing i think you guys do incredibly well is you have sort of creativity at the apex of everything you do um and i've one of my big beliefs is sort of 10x creativity beats 10x budget so build a brand and a culture that is always focused on creativity on that problem piece of like you know growth equals problems or problems equals growth sorry what has been the sort of the scary monster that was hiding in in in the weeds that came out and just sort of jumped on you guys and how did you creatively kind of you know swim around under over over that problem um i think the thing for us has been that we have no food and beverage background can i have a show of hands here who has no food and beverage background before this is their first food and beverage thing okay a good bunch of you i was exactly the same and so the challenge is is you don't know what you don't know so if i think about the problems that i'm dealing with today it's a shipment that's arrived from Japan to the UK that has to be sent back to Japan because it was missing a document.

3:40Like if I'd been in logistics or I'd been in customs clearance, I would have known that that document was required, but I just didn't know that. And so unfortunately, there are some experiences, unless you're hiring a team from day one, that you're going to have to go through and pain that you're going to have to go through until you have the experience to overcome those issues. As I think about how we've overcome them, we have been so incredibly agile and persistent to the point of like annoyance. when I think now about the retailers that we're in, 99 % of them didn't respond to the first 20 emails that we sent.

4:14And it was in that, like, we just didn't give up. We just didn't take no. And we also took a lot of risk. So if I, there's someone here that told us we shouldn't launch into our first mainstream retailer. And by all accounts, we definitely shouldn't have done it. because the theory was you're going to launch before you have brand awareness. It's not going to sell and you're going to get delisted. And we got lucky because we didn't get delisted. And that was due to our marketing. But the thought process when we launched was we cannot get delisted. And so we're going to do everything possible. We didn't know what we had to do to not get delisted, but we were going to try everything and something was going to stick.

4:54And we got lucky. I think it's undeniable that we've had a lot of luck over the last couple of years. I think a lot of people look at us and they're like, that's amazing, the growth, the rocket ship. And it's true, we've had an amazing growth story over the last couple of years and we've worked incredibly hard, but there are so many people that do also work incredibly hard and maybe the timing isn't right. So I think the other thing that I wanted to take away from this experience of building Perfect Ted is that even if this isn't our thing or this isn't our time, if you are persistent, I really believe that your time will come.

5:30and that's been our thesis the whole time. I love that. And in terms of just sink a little bit more into the, we can't get delisted. It's kind of the guns to our head, right? You have to make it work. What did you specifically do? The one, two, three things you look back on and you're like, right, that's what actually got the beast moving. The first thing is sales doesn't happen from behind a computer screen. And so when we first launched into Tesco, we had no field sales team or a compliance team, which is Red Bull will have 100 people that all they do is day-to-day go to stores and make sure the product is on shelf.

6:06So we launched with Tesco into their meal deal. And they forced it into the range because it was ahead of our Dragon's Den airing. And they wanted, not the publicity, but they wanted to get the rush of sales that were going to come from our Dragon's Den airing. But as a result, we went on something called a planogram, which essentially means that the store staff, when they were stocking the shelves, didn't know where to put our product. And so they thought it was a mispick. they thought the product shouldn't be in the store and a lot of them were either selling it at a discount or they were throwing it away or they were just leaving it in the back of the warehouse so for the first three months I would say of launching into Tesco I spent 99 % of my time in the basement of Tesco stores physically pulling the product out of the basement and putting it on shelf and I still do it today this morning I was at Old Street our product wasn't where it usually is.

6:54I went into the back of a Tesco. There's an elevator down to the basement. I went into the fridge. I went into the cage to find our drinks and I physically pulled it out and put it on shelf. And I think you can have the best marketing in the world, but if your product is not physically available on the shelf, it will not sell. So one of the biggest, not even hacks, but the things that we did that required us to get up off our ass and honestly do the hard work was get into stores, speak to customers. One of the most valuable pieces of feedback we got was standing at a waitress shelf. There's a lady called Tessa who does an amazing job of going into stores and asking consumers.

7:28We didn't have the budget for something like that, but we would go into stores, stand at the shelf, watch someone pick up a competitor's product, and then ask them, just out of interest, why didn't you pick up ours? And it might have been a color thing. It might have been, oh, they just weren't aware of it or making decision in a moment. Or it might have been they didn't really understand the messaging. And so we worked with a lady called Fiona Fitzpatrick who's in the audience on her growth strategy program, which was super transformative for us. And one of the biggest insights we had was, okay, we were building a brand around Matcha, but three, four years ago, people weren't buying into Matcha.

8:02They were buying into the benefits of it, more specifically the energy behind it. And so we completely repositioned our packaging and we launched into Tesco with a completely different set of packaging design. So it's getting out into stores, speaking to consumers and remembering that whilst you can build a really successful brand on social media, the most I think the most valuable feedback that you can get is in person yeah the well MD CEO of Waitrose James Bailey said to me availability like not being on shelves like scoring your own goal so you do all the hard work of getting it on you know do the amazing pitch get listed and then if you're not on shelf you're just basically pissing money up the wall so that's super interesting and I love that about the clean energy and I think we talked about that on our first podcast about pushing the benefits, not the features of Matcha.

8:49In terms now that you're in more retailers, I think what we talked about before was how, and what I love about what you guys do is you kind of have a different approach. So you have this big overall mission, but then you do it like retailer specific. Could you talk to me about that? So from like a Tesco to a Waitrose, how do you change what you do? So you're still pushing your same vision, same mission, but tailoring it ever so slightly to the nuances of the customer that's going into that store? Yeah, it's all about different shoppers. I mean, our marketing team, to be honest, they're probably better to speak to this than I am.

9:22But the way that you would pitch a buyer that is, or the way that we would pitch a buyer that is 24 years old is different to the way that we would pitch a buyer that is 40 years old. And that's why I hate pitch decks. Whenever we present to retailers, whether it's Selfridges or Tesco, we do not have a deck. And now we are at the stage where we do actually have to bring category insights and invest in data and really add value in other ways. But at the beginning of your journey, you're selling your brand and your vision more than you're selling your historical sales data because you just don't have that track record.

9:56So I think for us, it's about communicating to different people in a really personalized way. If you'd seen our Dragon's Den pitch, you would have seen that when we went in there, we were in there for an hour and a half and you would have seen 14 minutes. But the way that we crafted the pitch was specifically designed for each of the five dragons, trying to hit different aspects of what we thought they would care about. Because our goal going in was to get five offers. Our goal wasn't to get one amazing offer. Our goal was to get five offers so that we could go to retailers or we could run social media campaigns that said, we won Dragon's Den or we got five offers on Dragon's Den.

10:32So I think it's also thinking long-term with your marketing. The best advice I could give if you take anything away from this is please go on Dragon's Den if you get the opportunity because it has single-handedly changed our business and our lives and it can do that quite literally overnight. So definitely take the opportunity if you can. If any of these guys do go on Dragon's Den, what's the subtle art of making your pitch bang on? If I could do things differently, I would try to remember that it is television and it's entertainment and I would have gone even crazier and whack it. What could you have done?

11:05And I don't even know what I would have done. I think it's dangerous to even let my mind go there. But to give you an idea of what we did do, my first Bread and Jam, we got the opportunity to pitch Sainsbury's. I won't ask if there's a Sainsbury's buyer in the room. And looking back on it, it was totally inappropriate and I would never do this again and I highly wouldn't recommend it. But we'd prepared all night and it was half an hour before and I was sitting with my co-founder Marissa and I said, it just feels flat. Like it's not memorable. All I want, this buyer does not need to list us, but I want her to remember our pitch.

11:39So she said, what do you want to do? I said, I don't know. Marissa said, I want you to take your top off and It's true story. I will send people the photo after Take your top off and write Sainsbury's across your chest in black permanent marker Go into the pitch topless and tell her that if she gives you the listing you'll get Sainsbury's tattooed on your chest Makes no sense. Like literally no. Why would she want me to do that makes no sense, but we did it We did not get the listing, but we are in Sainsbury's now, which is great. But it was memorable. And I think people often, I come from like a finance consulting data background.

12:23People don't connect with data. They connect with emotions and sentiment. And most importantly, people, they connect with you. So if any of you are pitching or have pitched, I'm sure you've done this. just remember that because it's very easy to think that the answer is the proposition of your product or the market opportunity. It's not. It's you. And just like an investor is investing in you at an early stage business, buyers are investing in your brand and your product, but they're also investing in you because when you're not on shelf or it's not being marketed, that's because you haven't done it.

12:57And if it is being marketed incredibly well and you are investing and getting into the basement of Tesco stores, that's because you're making the effort to do that. so don't underestimate the power of review I guess. Amazing and just quickly on that I love what you said there you had five you're sort of tailoring it to five different dragons to get five different to get five yeses essentially you can almost look at that through the retail landscape you know Sainsbury's you know sort of big four just going back to how you do the nuances how you speak to each shopper what would those be from say a waitress to a to a asda or something like that?

13:32It's the message that you use. So for example, Waitrose massively over-indexes on an ingredient like ginger. So it could be, for example, the skew that we put in. We put in our pear ginger skew versus. So looking at different flavors that they over-index on. It could be that the Waitrose shopper is slightly older, more sophisticated, or more premium. So the way that we communicate with them has to be a little bit more elevated. But it's also the occasion, right? So if someone is buying our drink as a four-pack back of store, maybe they're more family-oriented and we need to speak to the family occasion.

14:04Whereas if it's in a Tesco meal deal, it's that urban working professional that is going to care about the productivity piece. So it's about really going deep. And I think the thing that we're really lucky with as founders is we are our target consumers. I'm not a female, and 75 % of our customer base is female. But I would say that I don't know the exact number, but we have a team of 32 right now. and 80 % of them probably are women, and all of the marketing team bar one is female. So for them, they are marketing to themselves. Of course, there are nuances and diversity within that, but on the whole, it's a lot easier when you know who you're talking to, and even easier if you're talking to yourself.

14:46Talk to me about Japan. So you guys have been flying over there a lot, obviously not on LinkedIn, and I kind of love the way you describe the, you sort of sap away the romance of it, and you're like, this is fucking work. Like, we're here to work. I think Japan as a culture fascinates me endlessly. What are some of the lessons you've taken from just sort of sponging yourself in Japan that you would love to apply to the 32 team back in the office? There are a few things. There are little things like when you go into an... Who here has been to Japan? Show of hands. Leave your hands up if you have done business in Japan.

15:25Okay, cool. So maybe you'll know this. If you walk into an office in Japan, every single person, whether it's an office of five or an office of 100, will stand up and they will face you and they will keep standing until you have left into a conference room or you left the building. And there was so much respect. And I think I came back from Japan last time and I said to the team, I said, every time we have a bar in the office or a supplier or a distributor or whoever, I want everyone to stand up to go over to them, whether you're in social media or you're in sales and go and shake their hand and introduce yourself because again they're not just buying into us as founders now they're buying into our organization and we want buyers when they list our product to feel like they are buying into our company because there's no longevity in a relationship between our account manager and a buyer buyers change hopefully you don't lose an account manager but people change but ultimately if they're buying into the brand there's a lot more longevity there um i forgot the question but hopefully about japan but it's interesting because the uh the nike bloke shoe dog he talks about trying to do that osaka deal um getting that over the line he was reading the little book about how to do business with japan so i think what he says in the book is they um they'll say yes they'll say yes but as soon as you leave that meeting it doesn't mean yes at all oh yeah like is that another sort of yeah other nuances have you picked up from there other than they're like everyone meet and be gregarious towards whoever's coming into the office?

16:53There are no contracts, which I think is an interesting thing. And I love that because everything is built on trust. So when I speak to our co-packers today, or I speak to our distribution partners, yes, we have contracts, but a lot of the discussion is around is, if we fuck you, just don't work with us again. And likewise, if you screw us, then we won't work with you. And we had a situation last week where we had an issue with a supplier and they resolved it because they cared about the longevity of that partnership. So I think one, yes, it can be challenging because there is a big thing around honor there.

17:29So people are afraid of saying no or disappointing, but there is a huge amount of trust as well. And the reason it's really good for someone like us is it means that Nestle can't go to a farmer that we're cooperating with and offer twice the price for the match that we're buying because they don't care about selling it today. They care about selling it three generations down the line. So as an example, with our supply chain, we have forward purchased Matcha for the next four years. So we have bought from the 2029 harvest. And the reason they care about that is because there's such a risk averse culture that they aren't willing to invest in their capacity unless they know that they have a partner that is going to buy from them and support them for the next four years.

18:10Same with our manufacturing partners, though. We've worked with the same manufacturing partners, the same flavor suppliers, the same juice suppliers from the very beginning. So yes, contracts are important, but I would encourage you guys to invest in your relationships with your manufacturers. Because when you get a Tesco listing or you lose a listing and you need to scale back production, they're going to be the people that you call and you ask a favor from. I spend most of my week asking for favors. And in return, I spend a lot of my week returning the favor so um yeah and what's what's the reason for actually going going there we're not doing it all is that is the trust piece yeah it's trust is it not long taken out of your back when you get back to the because i interviewed a guy called david milner and he was saying when they were trying to build an oz one of the things he sort of didn't foresee was with the trip he'd come back and he's jet lagged he's completely knackered and actually it meant when he was on the on the ground here trying to build the brand he was like trying to give everything to the team but he was completely knackered what's the sort of the cost of going to japan versus the benefit if you were to email one of our partners today and say i want to buy matcha from you they say we haven't got any right and then you turn up there and it turns out they've got matcha okay we also have a partnership with the japanese government so when we're there we're with translators and um the local japanese government so it's it's a trust thing and the way that we have built trust is yes by going every four weeks quite literally to japan but also by partnering with the Japanese government to add some legitimacy because they're also worried that we're not going to pay because really what can they do if we don't pay we're in a different country the biggest damage they can do if we don't pay is they'll never supply us again so that's where that trust element comes in as well if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in D2C but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got an Okada listing maybe you've got a Whole Foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in Selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies.

20:05But my friends, making the leap, crossing El Chasum, crossing El Rubicon to grocery retail is not easy. It's the Champions League of FMCG. It's super hard. It means playing at a higher level, and that's where some of your amazing brands sadly stumble. Look, retailers want stories backed by data, not dreams, and a pretty pitch deck. And let's be real, supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand. They need data. Something's got to go for you to get in, for you to get on shelf. And that is why I've got to tell you about Northstar. They are the team that's helping purpose-led FMCG brands go from gut instinct dreams to unstoppable pitch decks that actually unlock retailers.

20:49Northstar are not like another data company that force Fiji data like Fuagua that act like a NASA space mission. It's super, super simple to use. Their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset. Northstar are your shortcut to smarter decisions, stronger pitches and investor confidence, all built specifically for challenger brands like yours. You don't need a massive sales team. You need Northstar. Link in the show notes. Click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with Northstar. Highly, highly recommend that and thank me later. So you were here, was it, you say you were sat in the audience three years ago, two years ago, four years ago?

21:25Three years ago. Three years ago. So you've been in these guys' positions. What's something you would say to the Teddy of 2022 that you think would really help these guys as they go and build their brands? That's a great question. The thing that I would take away is I wish we would have had the guts to approach someone like Tesco sooner. I think we spent a lot of time trying to prove the brand in specialty retail. By the way, we didn't spend a lot of time. We got a Tesla listing after like a year, which is really quick for a brand. But I think about the amount of time that I spent in single independent stores that never paid the bill, like never paid our invoices or sampling out of a random store on a Thursday night when no one really wants an energy drink.

22:19I wish that we would have just focused earlier and try to go big with it. And I wish I would have rather have failed within the first three months than maybe have spent that first year wondering what Tesco might have thought. And it's very easy to say that, right? Because you guys know how hard it is to get a meeting with a retailer. It's like near on impossible. But I do believe that if you are on lock was LinkedIn, like we contacted the produce by Tesco when we were trying to sell a soft drink. Like we contacted everyone and we just tried to get our foot in the door and just to get some feedback.

22:59And again, the feedback wasn't really, I didn't really care if the produce buyer believed in our proposition or thought an energy drink like ours would sell in Tesco. What I cared is that the produce buyer believed in us because then they could refer us to the accelerator program or maybe on their lunch break, they'll bump into the drinks buyer and they'll say, you know what? I think you should have a 15 minute conversation with these guys. I think there's something there. You just need one retail launch. You just need to prove it in one retailer. And it doesn't need to be in a thousand stores.

23:27If you can prove it in Tesco a hundred stores, like you can do it anywhere, especially when you're thinking about the drinks category. The meal deal fridge is the most competitive space in the world for grocery. It's obviously a wild statement, but I genuinely believe it is. So we've been now in the Tesco Mildale for quite a few years I believe that we've earned that but it you know it didn't start with them just saying I really believe it's going to work it started with them giving us a shot and and we took that opportunity the the other thing I wanted to ask you is again from from you being in the audience three years ago to now right um there's a quote I love which is by Robert Rodriguez who is a director a super creative guy and he says you've got to study the ashes of your failure because in your failure there'll be a piece of gold that will then take you on to the next thing if you look back on some of your favorite failures from you know three years ago to now what have those been and what have because i really feel like the greatest learning comes from pain um and what yes what have been some of your favorite failures that have taught you loads um burying my head in the sand like we talk about eating the frog or if you're going to eat shit don't nibble because there are so many things that i knew at the time that we needed to do that i put off packaging as packaging redesign like i knew our proposition going into tesco was not gonna work but i was so scared about and we did we did all the redesign like we knew what it needed to be but we weren't sure and we thought if we take the risk and it doesn't work then we haven't got this in our back pocket like trust your gut and if it's not working it's not just going to magically start working unless you do something about it and i put my head in the sand and if i think about things that I'm doing today that I'm still putting my head in the sand about, it's usually people problems.

25:17It's like, if you have a problematic co-founder or you have a problematic person in your team and it is behavioral and it's not going to change, then like something needs to change. And as a young founder, I'm 28, we have a team of 32, firing our first person was like the most traumatic thing ever, but it was unfair to them. It was unfair to the rest of the team. And I wish that I would have learned the lesson that clear is kind and like direct is kind and actually putting things off is less kind in the context of people, but also in the context of your business, you are doing more damage to your business.

25:52If you don't do anything, then if you just, sorry, you'll do more damage if you, yeah, if you do nothing, then if you at least take a risk and, and, and, and try to do something different and it might not work. It might be the next iteration that works but I promise you you will look back and be like damn I wish I hadn't wasted so much time just being static and you know we worked with sh foodie for the development of our initial drinks and when we first developed them they were great but the first development of your product is not going to be good enough I can tell you that or if it is really good it can be better and so we worked with them continuously and we probably changed our recipe every single production run for the first year and even today we're still constantly tweaking our recipe um so don't just bury your head in the sand if things aren't working something needs to change i love that how do you guys use data i know you work with uh north star but i think that's a chasm uh brands and founders have to cross at some point and to be honest i i was like data is not my thing at all but how have you guys used that to sort of i don't know i interviewed the founder of grenade right and he was basically saying, Al, that he used data to sort of just pick off Cadbury's, right?

27:05He was looking at everything, the category data. How do you guys use that now as you sort of evolve to that next level? Yeah, we were so blind for a long time. We worked with Northstar and I was so resistant to invest in data because it was so expensive. And we'd relied on, for the first two years, we'd relied on our brand and you can kind of get away with it until you're not performing or you're not performing versus your competition set. And you need to understand why you're not performing or who is performing and how you can take learnings away from them. So the moment we invested in visibility with Northstar, and this isn't a paid thing, they are genuinely the best in the business in terms of providing you access to data that isn't just irrelevant and you're paying extra for.

27:49Until we understood where we were underperforming, we couldn't really make the changes that I was referring to around our packaging because we realized that we were playing in the right flavor profiles. Like peach as a flavor does perform, but the drinks that are performing better are perhaps focusing on a specific area of the energy category, like women or functional or whatever. So I was very resistant because I'm a stingy guy, but it was one of the best investments. And we are going to be, we are, we've just approved another big investment into more data. And actually we've just hired a head of AI.

28:24I don't know any other food and beverage brands in the UK, let alone outside the UK, that have a head of AI. They're going to be able to build AI agents that can automate processes, that can free up our talent to work on more important things. So as an example, right now, when Tesco places an order through EDI, it basically generates a purchase order that gets sent to us via email. Someone manually inputs that and basically instructs our 3PL to dispatch it and book a slot with Tesco. So we have now built an agent that scrapes the email inbox, can read the POs as attachments, and then input that data directly into Unleashed, which is our inventory management software, and also integrate with our 3PL to dispatch the order without anyone having to do absolutely anything.

29:13And as an example, we have people that spend three hours a day just processing orders. That's time that now they have back that they can focus on other things. so yeah that's another thing that we do for example is with packaging we used to launch a product with a certain packaging iteration wait for it to perform or not and then take the learning now what we'll do and we took this from Stephen Bartlett who when Stephen releases a podcast episode he will run and you you will have probably been targeted with ads from his podcast he will he will run about a hundred different thumbnails which is that like static photo at the beginning of the podcast, he will run 100 different iterations of that thumbnail as a Instagram ad.

29:56He will monitor the highest click through and then he will release the video with that thumbnail. We will do the same thing with packaging. So you will get hit with an ad of maybe we're testing whether it should be called lemonade, lemon lime or strawberry lemon or whatever. And you will see those three iterations and then we will test which has the highest click through and then launch the packaging that statistically has the highest probability of succeeding so little things like that that is that saves a lot of time and money and you can do that for you know with a thousand two thousand three thousand pound ad budget a couple more things mate then we'll wrap this up but amazing one thing i do want to ask you is about linkedin and how you because i literally turn on my blower and it's just like a green flood of perfect heads i mean i absolutely love it but i think what you guys do is not just the founders your whole team are just on it?