TRIP Drinks Founder REVEALS All Their Crazy Success Secrets Behind - Liv Ferdi

0:00Buongiorno, buongiorno, hope you are wonderful. This episode with Liv Ferdy from Trip is a suwerty banger. um it was actually recorded a couple of years ago so we're reposting it um but since then they've had this ginormous intergalactic mammoth success um built one of the biggest drinks brands in the world and i think it's a beautiful episode to go back to to see where they were at two years ago and ultimately like Liv and Dan are just go-getters they get after it they go so hard um they push so hard they go deep into the uh brand building process that their sales technique like if if a door shuts open a window they are just ferociously um getting after it and i love this episode i listened back to the other day i was like look i want to repost this the reason i'm reposting is we've got like three changes in the team's uh new editors coming on and stuff so it's a bit of a shit show behind the scenes but we are polishing up that shit show very you know promptly um and i think it's the whole adage of slow is smooth smooth is fast which is something I hate adhering to but probably should adhere to more um yeah I thought we'd get this week sorted everything that's going to be coming up we've got Rory Sutherland coming up next week um which is going to be a whopper um and loads more massive massive massive guests that are recorded um to help you build your food drink brand so I hope you enjoy this episode please as always I'd be super grateful for you if you could share it on whatsapp whack it on um uh Whack it on a friend to WhatsApp.

1:30Leave us a five-star review. It already helps push the podcast out there. That's the other thing as well. We're transferring to video on Spotify, which is a... It's a bullache. We do feel like once we do that, we can go harder and faster. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this wonderful episode with the wonderful Liv from the wonderful trip. Thank you so much. Hello there, people and listeners of the Homeway Podcast. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Liv Ferdy of the podcast. Liv is the co-founder of Trip, along with her husband, Dan. They are the fastest growing soft treat brand in the UK. Everyone listening to Sainsbury's Waitrose, Co-op Ocada, Ocada, Ocada and Asa, I'm going to say two things at once there.

2:17Selfridges, Brewdog. They also partner with Calm, Soar House. And look, I'm so thrilled to have, well, for you to welcome me to your sort of wonderful abode in Notting Hill. I was saying that before we hit record, I remember seeing you guys at a trade show in 2018. Yeah. To walk into this sort of palatial place today is crazy. Oh, yeah. It's totally crazy. Thank you so much for coming in and having me on the podcast. Super excited to have a chat and, yeah, tell all. But it has been quite the journey. It's definitely, when I walk into the office every day, that is still like very much a picture-by moment.

2:51And it never gets old walking in and seeing a team full of people who all care about your product and even seeing a single can on a shelf like my iphone is just full of photos or trip on a shelf either i've taken or people have sent me you know my friends even still send me like a picture of a can they see in a recycling bin on the street but i love it i'm like send me more it's i'm well i'll actually take pictures of the office and put it in our newsletter for the list because because it's um yeah i mean i've been into offices and worked offices but this is just something else i don't know how did you um how did you stumble upon this and what were you doing pre where were you working pre this place yeah i think it's um it's definitely kind of a really special part of the trip journey and kind of the growth story so far really testament to i think what we've built and the kind of internal community that we have that we're able to create this really beautiful collaborative space i think especially because um having launched the business really only a handful of months before like the first lockdown you know we were around Dan and I around our living room table for the best part of 2020 it was an adventure and it felt really exciting but honestly you know personally it was quite bleak for for a lot of us that time so we never started with an office space um so it was much later on when um over a year into the business a year and a bit we actually hired our first non-family member so it was um Dan my husband and myself my brother-in-law James and his little sister um I actually remember meeting her and like offering her the job very very funny story for another time but um family around the table it was only when we had a couple of our first hires and I have such fond memories of those early days and kind of even the interview process it was fully a lockdown um one of our first sales hires who's um amazing Tom interviewed him like on the street outside our flat you know I mean, you couldn't meet up.

4:48And I was like, sorry, but I need, especially in a sales run, I need to get a feel for this person in person. Would you mind possibly coming to my area for a walk around the block? And it was like a February, it was like zero degrees. Here was that cold snap. It was brutal. But to ask your question, it was actually in lockdown that Dan and I were walking around the area. So we don't live too far from here. And it's quite unusual to get office space in this area. It's super residential, really lovely. and spotted this building that we hadn't noticed before. And if anyone knows Notting Hill or the Hillgate pub, which is a bit of an institution, it's opposite there.

5:23So we were walking around the area in lockdown, noticed this place, it seemed totally empty, peered in and just got on Google and we're like, how can we find out how to get in there? There's clearly people working there, but it looks pretty empty. What do we do? And like with anything, Google's best friend and figured out some mobile numbers of people who managed the building or were tenants here and basically begged them to let us have a couple of desks. And that was 2022, I think. And it went from a couple of desks to, could we have more desks? It went from six desks to 20 desks to could we take over a floor we then took over two floors as we grew the team we're now over 40 people in london and and just recently taken over the whole building which is magic super cool to be able to create a space because especially for the people who've joined the business and are so passionate about the mission having somewhere they can collaborate like when i talk about hiring and the sale and a lot of sales process it's like this has never been done before like no one sold a CBD drink on a shelf in Sainsbury's before it didn't exist and the person who's reaching for that drink wasn't consuming an alternative product but now switching into trim so we love this kind of do what's never been done come up with your own idea talk to a friend come up with something different like I love great ideas and you might have a great idea I might have a great idea but for me it's that space in between when we talk about it that it becomes a new idea so being able to have somewhere physical people can collaborate especially after covid where a lot of our like younger graduates they finished uni remotely like they've never been in an office so that's quite an interesting learning as well yeah very different it's um and it's and i've only yeah in terms of like an office like this i think it's these moments between moments where ideas can sort of bounce with each other and through serenity you can actually create an environment that foster serendipity yeah and i think walking into here you know and i've worked in some kind of quite sterile offices or it's i'd rather just start fucking that's that's and i think that's why people go to cafes now yeah the whole cafe thing for freelancers has gone up because the cafes are a place you can't afford an office yeah for serendipity um but but what you said there in that kind of opening um bit kind of does sum up the whole challenger mindset you know and i love it it was like we did that we interviewed i think it was said tom on a walk around february it's like just do something that no one else has done before don't follow whatever else has done well the fact that he even accepted and then probably had to cycle across london or something because you couldn't get like you know transport that stage it's like to tick yeah amazing yeah and then also about begging you know like right if we want this we've got to beg for it and i think it's brilliant for founders who are listening to this it's like even the way you've come into this office there's kind of just a delicious sort of story about the challenger mindset yeah um what i want to talk about is and what i've got huge kind of kudos to you guys what you're doing is you're building a brand that that is actually a brand kind of with mental health at the what else i'm looking at the crux of what you're trying to do you know we've got a sign there be kind to your mind yeah uh and i think it is such a hard subject to for anyone to get their head around so to actually build a brand and that is very hard um but what i want to talk about is and then with me and mental health there's only like one way i've been able to sort of get my head around it because it's such a fucking crazy thing everyone experiences it in a different levels like some days i have days where i'm just like this is my my self-doubt is just crippling um you know i burn out all that stuff i'm just don't feel good enough then some days i'm like right i can do anything i want to do and if the only way i can get my head around it is and it's very kind of a trite and rote way to start a conversation with another brit is is um is the weather right and i think the weather is the only way to understand mental health and there's a couple of quotes i want to kind of explore with you so one is you are the sky everything else is just the weather and i think that gives you a nice lens to realize that good days are temporary bad days are temporary um the other one i listened to steven fry on um on steven bartlett's podcast which was great and he basically said i think he said something mental health is like the weather it's real it will pass it's not your fault and i think you you can't i can't control the weather out there and i think it gives you a bit nice bit of separation between you and your thoughts yes um and then obviously yours i think is it's beautiful where you've put it so succinctly it's like keeping you calm in everyday chaos i'd love to kind of know like i think part of being a founder is turning some sort of chaos into into beauty or into a brand like what is some of that chaos you've had in your life and how have you turned it into this beautiful brand so much to unpick there and thanks for sharing about your own personal journey i think that is so critical to the wider conversation everyone's experience is valid everyone's experience is real um but it's very personal um and we'll come on to how cbd can help with that but ultimately it's in this sphere of you are the center of it and it is very personal and flexible so no one can tell you how it should be it's how you feel and um unfortunately that can change day to day week to week even throughout the day because one thing i have learned is that you can't control much at all you can only try and control in the healthiest way possible how you feel after something uncontrollable happens um and that's a hugely steep learning curve in general when as an entrepreneur you basically don't control anything um whereas within small spheres or pockets of corporate life you can feel that you have control because often your tasks or your days can be quite similar in terms of calm in the chaos we talk for me it was really important to emphasize everyday chaos the word everyday because it's not like you need to be a really successful entrepreneur to have valid feelings of being in a chaotic situation it could be as simple as you're rushing for a train your train is delayed that feels chaotic and these things can be every day in their nature whether it's the smallest thing that you might perceive to trigger a feeling of gosh this feels chaotic it could be your wi-fi drops and you're on a call or uh with your boss or whatever whether it's that delayed train or something as simple as spilling your coffee on your white shirt on the way in.

12:12I don't know about you, but they might sound quite trivial, but they definitely push me to feel a little bit overwhelmed at times and kind of recognizing that moments of calm can be created in that every day. It's not that tools or methods to look after well-being or even products like trip are reserved for people who are very busy or very successful or very whatever it really is for me important that the mission is to encompass everybody because whether we like it or not everyone we know has some feeling of stress in their day like today I don't know what time it is now but I imagine there'll be a moment on the way to getting here I certainly had one at least one where you have that slight creep of feeling and for us a big part of what we're trying to do is we're not trying to stick a plaster over something really serious.

13:07We recognize through our own experiences as well, the flexibility within which people can feel stress or chaos, but creating a prompt or what we hope is a very accessible product in terms of physical availability and price point that you can feel empowered to have a conversation with yourself or with anyone around you prompted by you know a brand in your daily life telling you you're allowed to take a moment to unwind take a trip to reset find your calm and for us it's really about empowering more positive conversations about mental well-being we're not going to be the medicine that completely there is no medicine at the end of the day that can just switch it on switch it off yeah it's like trying to put plaster on cancer it's not it's like no and i think it's so fluid i don't know about you but like literally hour to hour there can be something that causes physical stress or mental tension and and recognizing that it is fluid i think is part of the solution in trying to help yourself find tools or tricks or moments that help you feel more in control because we all know that no one's really in control yeah and that it goes back to the to the weather piece yeah you can't control the weather and i think one of the things i do is beat myself up when i feel low but then i'm just like you're basically complaining when the weather when there's a thunderstorm it's like mate it's out of your control and to your point about today is like so i got on the i mean it was called forever baffle me as a train station i mean i was like in my case underneath to go to that one i was like the fuck's that for 10 um so and i completely get that and i love how you're creating a brand to not be like we are the uh pillar or the the plaster that solves the problem it's not a magic pill not but it's hopefully part of a conversation but it's i think it's not a magic pill but it's a beacon of light you see that i see i see trip on a supermarket shelf and why you're doing such a sterling job as a business is you're creating uh something bigger than bigger than a drink right much bigger than a drink but what would what if you go into this chaos piece so in the early days yeah i don't know like what what was the most hardest darkest most chaotic day for you and like how did you get through that because as we were talking about before we hit record it's like i'm in that moment where i'm just sort of rolling through sort of seas of uncertainty yeah and it's hard and lots of people listening to this are going through that as well for sure and again each experience i can't stress enough how how valid it is and you're going to have tough days and you're going to feel really shitty um But just know that there will be brighter days ahead and that's something we talk about a lot.

15:49And other kind of catchphrases we talk about a lot, we've used in our first out of home campaign, things like taking care of yourself is productive. There is this, and you must be exposed to it so much, having this podcast and essentially being an entrepreneur, this concept of like hustle, hustle, hustle, don't stop, overnight success, mythology and glorification, which is absolutely not true at all. um and i think the tricky navigation for an entrepreneur to your point about how we even got this out of this world of this space against all odds um i guess there's two things one huge thing i've learned which i love is the interconnectedness of everything it's the tiny things that connect that actually can create an opportunity a year down the line and sort of where you can lean in and recognize the sort of elements of fate that brought that to you um i think it's a powerful reminder of like there's bigger things going on than you in the world um but the other thing i was going to say is to your point about how we got this space as well the difficulty is that as an entrepreneur you do have to push through moments of chaos because if you don't not unhealthily but basically when you launch a business however good your idea is 99 people will tell you it can't be done and it won't work and it's too niche and it's going to fail And unfortunately, a lot of them are right in the sense that very, very few companies actually manage to find product market fit and then scale.

17:17So you have to learn to get more comfortable in situations where you're told no. And being told no or we don't want it can feel overwhelming and chaotic and a bit low. so there is a big element of the job in the early days where all you have to do is keep keep trying they close the door open a window you know put your foot through say okay not now what about a trial in two months and we see how it goes all that kind of thing so I don't love the word resilience but that does kind of fit the bill a little bit here in the moments of chaos as an entrepreneur are actually often opportunities um without trying to glorify kind of hustle culture and that um but you're right like the weather things will pass and it's kind of it can be a moment it can be a day and I am absolutely learning I am by no means a zen expert let me tell you but recognizing that days start over every morning for me I find really helpful I've been saying to um myself and my husband a lot recently like it's a good day to have a good day I wake up feeling good and then I start thinking about my email or I start thinking about to-do list or the first meeting of the day I need to prep for and that can sometimes give me a sense of creep or stress um but ultimately every morning is a new day yesterday was yesterday how much can you control about tomorrow but you've woken up it's a good day to have a good day so then i get that from the business lens but then i suppose personally in that first yeah i mean what's astonishing is as i said i interviewed edge yesterday and theirs was a 10-year thing yes but we only going to 2019 yeah it's still fucking recent and my mind about 2019 feels like you know yesterday but what for like on a personal level was there any like really dark moments there where you just felt like yeah you you couldn't go on or not couldn't go on but like I completely agree you've got a the mindset is take nose on the chin keep battling through keep rowing keep showing up I had the same thing with this people like mate why do the podcast I was like well I used it as fuel but there are some days I'm like is this going to work definitely and how yeah what was your sort of that Liv the maybe you'd say double-edged sword I guess I'll look back and like the lack of for wonderful word of word like boundaries in that it's my husband and I he's my best friend we've been together 15 years we know each other inside out I think being a sole founder would be like I would not be strong enough to be honest he's my biggest cheerleader he is the eternal optimist he's incredible and I think that any challenging situation the reason I can't necessarily immediately think of a example comes down to kind of teamwork and perspective and you know it might feel like this is the end but it never it never really is if you take a step back And that's difficult when you need that almost slight feeling of stress to push through the fact that the odds are against you as an entrepreneur.

20:24And if you're in food and beverage, stuff goes wrong all the time. I mean, like liquid spilling, cans getting damaged, you know, physical stuff. But actually, it's through talking through it, having someone to laugh about it with. then I guess it's that weird combination of certain people thrive in it. It's just making sure you're on the right healthy side of that productive chaos and making sure you're taking time to kind of look after yourself and take time out. You know, working with your best friend, it sounds really annoying, but it is super fun. So even in a tough situation, there have been endlessly tough situations but you kind of there's always a new one a few hours later so you're kind of like on to the next and if you can shake it off and laugh with your best friends about something definitely i think probably makes it easier than if you were on your own i'm just that the other thing is sense of humor so like i know this is probably that one of the things i will do if it's been about week is i'll go to my mates who do not do the fuck about fmcg do not do the fuck about challenge brands they want to drink and have a cigarette and that that is what sort of those but like that one sometimes just be like what are you worrying about mate like it's it's just oh yeah do it as a reality or whatever yeah and it's like it's actually so healthy just speaking to people who aren't in the same spheres oh yeah for sure that really i've and actually yeah because that's something i'm really while i'm doing is exploring new things like yeah actually having a sense of humor yeah because hustle culture is so serious i don't know if it's american thing but it's like as i said i did a few podcasts over there but i've listening to um there's the way they talk about founders and entrepreneurs it's like you gotta be a savage man you know winner or killer let's google it i'm just like i'm just like it's like being in the um amphitheater in the coliseum it's like there's definitely a lot of glorification i think of being a founder and toughing it out and having an overnight success but i think anyone will tell you that's pretty unrealistic and the blood sweat and tears behind the scene is super real yeah but but okay so to go on to that then is it does it's not an overnight success but you guys have done this rapidly yeah so this one it's a good it's a really okay so so um i love stress testing ideas and things I've learned so every founder I've interviewed on this has said like focus um or not every but like loads have said focus I was interviewing Ed yesterday you can look at the surprise on my face because I'm so unfocused yeah no but it's good for me because I'm like the least focused person I had to really put it on um not put it on after I could basically shuffle my mind and be like just do one thing mate yeah um but everyone but everyone who said that but hasn't had the same speed of growth so i'm thinking well hang on a sec like there's obviously something you guys are doing which other people are on so there's a quote by seth godin which is there's nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific but don't expect to make the change you seek if god i can't say that to make sure that's what you do seth godin so it's basically like focus focus focus steve jobs says focus um is saying no and you know mark palmer did green and blacks and did uh course and press is like just go narrow and deep keep it you know you know super focused whereas you guys you're a alone to no booze replacement you're a coffee replacement yeah you're a post-workout sort of gym yeah that's what i'm saying uh a meal deal like you're spreading your trick wings across numerous occasions, numerous categories, numerous distribution points.

24:15But what is the why behind your strategy? I'd love to explore this. No, I think it's a really good question. It also comes down a lot to, I think, how we got started and sort of some of the nuance of CBD. I think it's so interesting hearing the focus piece and maybe we're getting to a scaling point of trip where that needs to be a bigger part of the conversation. but like candidly after a personal experience where we saw firsthand the benefits of cvd but so many of the challenges that would stop people maybe considering using this natural non-addictive non-psychoactive plant to manage something that affects us all every day um it definitely made it super quick i think and instinctive for um dan and i to create the brand to know the direction we wanted to go in to understand we wanted it to be a lifestyle brand so it'd be flexible it's not just cbd as an ingredient it's a brand and a lifestyle so long term that could be a different ingredient but we're all about kind of stress care and looking after yourself and not taking ourselves too seriously we're not here to preach about a certain type of lifestyle and the breadth of the use cases you mentioned i think is probably overwhelming i think there's definitely there's a conviction in our own experience which a lot of people so we're not from the industry so i used to be a lawyer and i was in finance so it's not right before we launched we had a business plan and we looked through a red bull deck and thought okay perfect i'll do exactly that i know exactly what to do it was really through blind passion and there was obviously a lot of naivety so you didn't know we didn't know and you weren't put off by someone saying you can't possibly try and go front of store meal deal in car next to red bought twice the price what do you think you're doing we would just go for it and i think the sentiment the customer demand the education piece we've been doing and kind of the community advocacy such that people are recommending it to each other and that is so so powerful especially in the early days when we couldn't advertise the peer-to-peer recommendation piece you don't want coca-cola telling you to like relax and de-stress but if your friend is saying you know what i had a tricky morning and i found this thing really helpful you listen you're like wow tell me more um so i think it's overwhelming on paper to consider how this can work in so many places but ultimately the way that cbd works or high quality cbd products you have a system in your body called the ecs which manages your mood your sleep your appetite it stands for endocannabinoid um and that sounds like cbd which is a cannabinoid so cbd essentially when extracted is a molecule that talks directly to the system that manages how you're feeling.

26:52So if you give your body more CBD, it has more fuel to help you feel better. The crazy thing is that works for both your mental stress and your physical tension. The same CBD can affect you or I completely differently in a situation. If you're stressed about meeting up with friends later, or I'm stressed from a really intensive strength workout whatever that same ingredient can help both of us and that's the kind of challenging piece to educate and navigate around and what we've done and some of the stockists that you mentioned at the beginning where we've been the first cbd product even the first functional product or alcohol free product to go into some of these places we lean on those partners to do some of that storytelling for us so if you're going to a brew dog pub with your friends after work and you're looking through the menu you're probably assuming that the products there are I don't know cool or interesting or going to help you relax so we lean into that to help us um in terms of the business strategy I think again because of our personal experience it's like why wouldn't we be everywhere where it makes sense can you name somewhere in your life during today that you could visit where you might be completely free from stress.

28:10Unfortunately, whether it's at the bus stop or a mom about to go pick up a load of kids for a party, in the car, in the Uber, at the train station, in this office, wherever you're going for lunch, wherever you're going later, in your fridge at home, it's kind of all the perfect place to reach for a trip. So we don't want to restrict ourselves. Having said that, there's obviously the reality of timing and opportunity. And we just initially went to everywhere that we might want to go for a drink or yeah I'm having brunch with friends I wish they had trip let's ask them and there's all these crazy stories like one of our first stockists I think in month three after we'd had planet organic selfridges we got into Bill's restaurants you know it's like an all-day dining place it's actually incredible they've got like 80 sites really yeah and we were just thinking where do people go for brunch this is literally how the strategy comes out it's like, where do people do these things?

29:06Let's message 20 of them. We used to have this thing on Wednesdays around our living room table where we'd say like outreach power hour. And it's all a numbers game. If you send 10 emails, you might get one response. It's probably not a yes. If you send a hundred emails, your numbers increase, et cetera. And even bills to your point about just ask the question. People can't say yes to you if you haven't asked a question. So even for Bill's restaurants, when we thought people love to go for brunch there, that'd be the perfect place. Went on the website, customer inquiry email, pop them a message on the online portal.

29:44Someone really lovely in Bill's in the customer service team passed this to a team member who passed it to another team member. I was in front of the head of bartending the next week. Trip was signed off by their board the week after, and we listed in our biggest ever stockist within four weeks like it's crazy so it's really just going with the flow going with some of your instincts and trial and error the other thing we did is launching in grocery quite early but that was like a covid nuance so we thought oh loads of cool brands like sorry it was the first sainsbury's right so a lot of um what we'd been looking at in terms of brands after we started the journey was like where do you go to find a new brand or find a new favorite drink it's probably a bar probably a restaurant somewhere experiential where you can take your time have a look at the menu you're not in your weekly shop mindset so we thought that would be a huge part of the business and after we launched and we did meet a few more people in the industry a lot of people said on trade specialty great places to build a brand covid they were all closed for like seven months it was savage the only places that were open were grocery stores so we were like maybe we should talk to a grocery store you kind of just it sounds like we planned it all but it's very based on your own behaviors and your own experience and try and error what i love about that live is is you have all these strategists out there and it's loads of superfluous bollocks sometimes and i think actually just boil it down as okay i'm the consumer yeah what do you do in a day when do you want the product when you thirsty when you're stressed when you're thirsty when you're stressed and then if you were to actually map out the day as the consumer and be like right okay so i'm at the gym class at 6 a.m or whatever maybe 7 a.m you know and then and then i'm at gale's and i'm at yeah yeah and then you know in the evening i'm at wherever it's annabelle's for example you've had quite a productive day doing that but that makes such sense i think for our listeners is it's there's a there's a lot of value in seeing where you can be without the day and then just thinking fuck it like let's go into bills and let's go into that well you've just you've just drawn a um clock basically on your thing which is what we have no but that's what we have in our deck and i think uh we made this slide where we show kind of it's an all-day consumption moment and i didn't realize this before we launched but i think the beauty of trip specifically and the way our cbd products work is that you know unlike some categories like like, I don't know, ready to eat porridge.

32:20This is very niche because I just had porridge this morning. Where you might want it at home or on the go before work. That is a morning moment. Or wine is an evening moment. Like the circle you just drew on your page, trip is an all day moment. So what we love to tell to retailers as well is this isn't niche. You know, we've already proven that it works in your local Leon and Coco de Mama at lunch and you have a meal deal. So we've actually generated data points that are helpful to those conversations knowingly or unknowingly and i think that's very powerful commercially as well because who wants to sell a product in a three-hour window every day 24 7 i mean it's not like red bull but i'm always surprised when someone's reaching for a red bull you know the person next to you in an exam hall at like 9 a.m some people can stomach it then and for other people it's only a 2 a.m sort of crazy night the situation at the end of the day stress is often unplanned um that's the tricky thing about it you can you can plan ahead and try and you know have various practices and routines that help you feel you're in a bit more um of a comfortable mindset but we want to be everywhere we want this to be accessible within a couple of meters wherever you are so that whenever you feel an inkling of this is feeling a bit chaotic i'm feeling a bit overwhelmed you can go get your trip and i mean what i suppose one question i would have is sounds very unfocused no no i mean i'm for me i'm just like this is like banging because um i think you're right and i think you're what i would want to kind of go into a little bit is say with the selfridges so that you've got those super premium sort of brand builders who will do your storytelling for you which is almost like you um you mark it's or your distribution is your marketing yeah yeah exactly but then i just what i'm trying to get into is what is almost the difference between the pitch you do to annabelle's by one of the most exclusive nightclubs in the world yes um and then and then say co-op right because if i'm annabelle's buyer i'm thinking well hang a sec i am why am i taking trip when it's in 2000 co-op stores yeah it's not like verb to coat yeah and also like a lot of these buyers in that kind of area hopefully none of them are listening yeah we don't mention co-op to annabelle's and vice versa we can try that out but do you know what i mean though it's an interesting for sure um uh thing to balance yeah definitely and i think the reality of it is we um i don't know what the phrase would be but kind of we're a bit of a chameleon so if we were going to an annabelle's or a nightclub um we might explain some of the trends in no and low i think i mentioned to you earlier you know one in two gen z have had a cbd drink with trip at 88 percent of the market share that's pretty powerful stuff in terms of we can drive people in to your venues annabelle's maybe not because members only but in theory the idea that you know hundreds of thousands of people share their trip experience online every day and we can talk to them we have an amazing relationship with those people that follow us on social that we can activate them around stores I think when I'm in the pitch as well I think it's a really tricky thing to talk about and get the kind of leveling right and it definitely requires a lot of reactivity and kind of emotional sensitivity because everyone's experience can be very personal but I feel like post-covid has allowed us to be part of a conversation around mental well-being and stress such that if I'm going to pitch even to Annabelle's or to co-op I might bring up the topic of what CPT does and and why it's something that people like to reach for regularly throughout the day and I think it it's this very personal intimate thing that you have to be very respectful and sensitive about but often it will sort of unlock an openness in some of the conversation around how that person's feeling, their own experiences, especially in that period after COVID when everyone was just pretty down and struggling with fears around health and family and security and all those kinds of things.

36:35What we do though, to answer your question, is basically navigate in the gray space. So when people say, couldn't possibly take your product in somewhere like Annabelle's, we've got a huge contract with um vervico and and they dominate the menu marketing and couldn't possibly oh no no we're not alcohol we're not trying to be alcohol because alcohol you've got to pay a lot to be on the menu and stuff oh no no we're not alcohol so we shouldn't we shouldn't pay you know we're a different thing caching to a different thing and then you know you might go into a selfridges and say oh this single can can speak to someone like a cocktail it's actually one dose of awards as a cocktail without any alcohol in it without any sugar in it and you kind of shift the identity in a way to kind of resonate with different fire sorry i mean at the end of the day it i drink this as a cocktail essentially i also drink it in the morning as you can see now and and i'm not lying i'm just sort of sharing more kind of context to how flexible the product can be and and then commercially as well for a lot of these people and like i said i wouldn't pitch to annabels that we've just launched in the middle and co-op and vice versa.

37:44I don't think either of them would be particularly impressed with each other. But what we do say is, especially after COVID when it was all QR menus, QR code menus and very limited bar space, you can have three sparkling SKUs of Trip. It's a two pound product. People are willing to pay a premium for something that works and people find this works. So we've introduced tens of millions of people to CBD. They have this product. They feel more relaxed in 10, 20 minutes. you list three products as a sparkling option the same products that sit in the fridge can be listed in another part of the menu as an alcohol alternative the same products can be listed in another part of your menu mixed with alcohol as a cool interesting novel functional cocktail those same three products taking up two inches by seven inches can be listed in another part of your menu as a mocktail and they're getting to generate a ton of revenue from a tiny operational piece of real estate occasions essentially or free usage occasions yeah you could have it on the brunch menu without having to go and get another fairly unknown brand it's so again i love finding hunting the nuance right and but this is i'm loving this because it's almost like the way so with the podcast i repurpose content right so i record this conversation i'm a huge fan in repurposing stuff yeah so then i'll but then i'll i'll turn this into into videos so that's that that occasion is is videos yeah yeah nibbles which is a different form of content to get new people who don't want to what we're listening to a full thing straight up but i've never thought about doing it as a brand and it's like okay so yeah we can go into this shelf space brings in all these occasions i think it goes back to i think people listen to this really actual thing is just draw a fucking clock and just say when can we use our brand yeah and it will just change i mean it's insane and i think so your point about annabelle's and co-op i think it's interesting because ultimately annabelle's being annabelle's gives the cop can you not not that they necessarily know about annabelle's but like this is a private members club but but you know in so a house that kind of ilk yes it gives the brand gravitas um authority credibility so the shopper can get a snippet of that in a meal deal banging but equally co-op 2000 whatever stores is drives awareness so i think they too as long as it's a delicate conversation but the two can tango in in a nice way yes um i love that live and so so so you get these listings and how how are you because i remember going to nope the uh or nope um it's like a it's a trade it's a ghastly trade show at the xl um natural organics products europe right and this is like 2018 and this is when cbd had come into the market yes 2017 2018 yeah yeah i was walking around and i was like what is going on here because you had people either look like fucking sleep dog trying to shop weed or you had it was like medicinal loads of um quite serious numbers serious yeah you either felt like you were going down a back alley to pick up you know yeah or you're going to a chemist yeah what you guys did so well is you stole the like clothes of other categories is what i like to say so i actually wrote you about you guys and you know the feel of the can is like it feels this to me looks more like a um like almost like a the feeling of going into like almost like a bed west you know but not bedless or those smooth um colors and it made cbd accessible and it suddenly you know you've you've had this cat's there sorry this huge growth so you weren't trying to be like that end and you weren't really like that end but with with the can with the feel like what was that all about like you you said you very intentionally was wanted it to be a lifestyle brand like yeah unpack that a little bit i think it comes down to that clock that you drew as well lifestyle meaning it's not a medicinal hold your nose feel better take it off the list i've had my supplements for the day it's something that should for me lifestyle means it should fit effortlessly into your lifestyle and um your lifestyle is personal to you and that might look different to mine and it might look different to yours in its own next week so it needs to be flexible it's not like this is only to be taken with a full meal um first thing in the morning or after yoga it it should be a lot more fluid than that because ultimately covid was such a realization that every day can change in an instant so being able to connect with people over something as personal as their stress you get this insane loyalty if you find something natural that tastes amazing that makes you feel better the kind of connection there is unbelievable yeah um so i think for us it's just making sure that we're sort of staying true to that but with the lifestyle piece like you mentioned going through our own personal experience where we'd had cbd for the first time went down was recovering from an injury and really struggled through flavor format meaning it was just sort of cbd drops in dark brown bottles covered in big green leaves tasted really funny um wasn't somewhere i could go and get it comfortably and it wasn't in a format i felt i could connect to on a brand level it wasn't something that made me feel luxurious or joyful or proud in fact i felt embarrassed about bringing out a dark tincture at my work desk in an orphan and my mind so even now my mom because I've got the drops.

43:29The drops, yeah. I mean, taking the last couple of weeks, actually, to sleep and I'm sleeping out like an absolute baby, like, unreal. But even my mum's like, she's, bless her, like, not the most adventurous lady in the world, but she's like, oh, no, no, no, no. She thinks it's like smoking weed. Yeah. She still thinks that. So there's a whole gulf, as your distribution grows, there's a whole gulf of education to do. Like, you know, you've got the early adopters down here in London. um who get cbd who get lifestyle brands yeah what is the strategy to kind of go after that so your distribution grows but the education's got to come definitely they definitely go hand in hand and for us the product remains like front and center as well everything about the product so as you mentioned you know we designed this sleeve if you pick up a can of coca-cola it is um shiny and like tinny and reflective and cold obviously um this velvety matte sleeve is everything about this in all of your senses delivering to you hopefully what the brand is about and what the product's going to do for you in that it's calming so you have the feel of it you probably see it off shelf and and like you mentioned it doesn't look like a normal thing that you'd see in a grocery fridge that color that pastel color is calming the senses what you'll often see is people turning this around in their hands like you're doing right now in like 10 headbands um because it feels good and it's it's calming to touch and it's beautiful to look at and And what I find amazing when so many people ask me, you know, how is the brand perceived?

45:01And yes, it's amazing to have all these Gen Z stats and adoption stats. But ultimately, what we wanted is it doesn't alienate anyone. So even to your mom, she might see this from a distance, think it looks nice. She wouldn't be frightened by how it looks. And for me, it's about that physical moment of reaching for it and then turning it around, learning more. Yes, you might not buy it then, but you'll probably see it in the next shop you walk into and you might buy it in the next shop. so everything from the kind of well the name it's all about kind of reclaiming those negative connotations because so many people have misconceptions um for various reasons rightly or wrongly and kind of being able to pioneer this category we didn't want to just make it ingredient focused and call it like cbd drink or kind of whatever it was like people deserve more like we know that the strength of the efficacy of this sort of product and trip specifically people are going to self-educate as soon as they have one and they feel great they're going to google it they're going to tell their friends and so making sure that it had depth to resonate with them as a brand so that you could reach for it all throughout the day without thinking that's my morning supplement medical moment um and then yeah everything from opening the can the size of the bubbles giving you a calming feeling the aromas that you get from all those other botanicals every single thing has been kind of obsessed over because you probably don't know if i hold this to you here that that is cbd you probably think oh that looks quite pretty maybe it's got something healthy in it because i can't actually tell you what it does have you heard of um there's a guy of who's the interview goes live monday a guy called perry hayden taylor he said we did the branding for goo charlie biggums tyrols i mean every i mean every name of the brand he's done it right and he talks about pack for tising pack for tising whereby when you're a brand starting out spend all your time you haven't got budget to do above the line you haven't got budget to do so invest heavily in your path can imagine you can use that as you as you're kind of marketing that's very sensible and what you guys have done as china's looking at this now is is that one and it is that sort of beacon but two there's another thing if you had a psych physics by a guy called rory sutherland so he basically talks about this so it's like it's these little things that you can't justify if you went to mckinsey you wouldn't be able to justify that like the feel on a mckin on a um on not a tin on a mottle yeah yeah um but it has a real impact like you know so say it's i give you a spaghetti vongole like here yeah well not here here's lovely but maybe in the booze down the road right it made me quite nice if i give you that same spaghetti vongole in ubica under gold and sunshine yeah that tastes different even it's the same thing yes so this allows you the psychophysics thing that rory talks about is it gives you that feeling of calm before i've even yes opened it does that make sense that's very important to the trip experience to be honest yeah yeah which is why i get so funny when i'm like make sure the can is cold make sure it's facing out beautifully and stuff like that for sure um no it's really interesting and actually i feel like a lot of maybe younger brands over the last five ten years didn't have to think about that as much or because of the kind of digital advertising landscape you could own your brand world and create this thing online which wasn't like life or death on the packet but actually with cbd when we had to have physical distribution to do our marketing we can't even tell people what it does very much was yeah what was that because i remember i think i listened to a podcast you did but you could didn't when you weren't able to market or something what told me Yeah, so basically CBD is regulated in a bit of a funny way internationally.

48:39And in the US, it's not federally legal, even though it's legal in most of the states. So in America, they've got legal systems that operate at a federal level, which is like the whole country. And then each state also has its own laws, kind of like a country. so that makes a bit of a patchwork for people to navigate around and some of the biggest companies that run the media landscape like google amazon critio shopify facebook meta they're american owned so their shareholders prefer to follow policies that are unified at a federal level because it kind of reduces their risk and theory clarifies the things so even though there's a lot of budgeting commercial opportunities in cbd a lot of their policies um which flow through american-owned retailers like whole foods as well say things like if it's not federally legal we can't touch it which means most of the biggest companies are like that so yeah we couldn't open shopify website we couldn't do shopify payments which is like the go-to how you just put something online a lot of people might have an idea and to establish product market fit they might think oh i'll just whack it on amazon and see how it goes and get some feedback couldn't put it on amazon um couldn't open a bank account could not he's in the uk as well uh we managed to open a bank account in the uk us is very very challenging bit chicken and egg in these situations yeah it's like well you need a blah blah blah which you can't get if you don't so it basically meant that a lot of people um when they're launching an idea they might have educational product available on a website.

50:12The only way to get people to go to a website is to spend money on Google so that if people are searching for podcasts, yours comes up and they discover you and they enter your world or meta Facebook, you'd ping some targeted spend onto hopefully getting some traffic to your website so you can start to generate that feedback loop. But none of that was available to us. So it was really about physical distribution, organic community and organic search traffic you know being the answer to the question being googled um if you google cbd in the uk trip's the only brand that comes up on page one um there's hundreds and thousands of pages of information about cbd but you have to marry that kind of search intent with having the perfect product the perfect information out there so a lot of it was really reliant on like organic community word of mouth luckily the product itself i think spoke volumes where we weren't in the room or we weren't in the physical place people were finding it having a great experience with the product meant you know our repurchase rate is insanely high the advocacy where people are telling a story about their experience you know I mentioned that we started the brand after our own personal experience and I think sharing that online in a very honest way really resonated with people such that they if you've ever seen our social people take photos of the product all day every day and they put them on internet and they share with friends and they might say why they reach for it or how it helped them it's very personal it's a huge privilege to have that information and have that storytelling but it's very influential in the next you know one person can convince 10 friends better than meta could um and it's it's huge it rolls from there but yeah at the beginning there was a lot of traditional startup challenges or kind of blocks that we didn't anticipate beforehand but it just meant we had to luckily we were already kind of doubling down in the product side of things yeah i was going to say it's almost the whole like i think it's the bruce lee quote is like be like water so it's like when it's an obstacle you just kind of adapt and kind of i'm not going to do that it's getting very theatrical there but it's be like water and so so you can't advertise you can't do the kind of the rudimentary things are brand new to do to test market fit yes what do you do well that's the what people would do i guess in the last like 15 years since meta was really around as a really helpful highly specific highly conversion heavy tool um and then when i meet more traditional marketers you know slightly older industry people they're like well duh it has to be based on the product quality and physical distribution um so all of it i mean we've always been omnichannel i think to your focus point as well we've always done a bit of everything and i think i don't know what phrasing is about taking the clothes off something stealing the clothes um i don't know you taught me that i think it was um i think it was mark palmer actually taught me that who is the guy who does green and blacks yeah uh he's green and black with pret-monge yeah but he was like look at other categories and then you'll stand out in your category yes i think i think one one of the issues you have is like um uh every every brand starts looking the same because they're looking especially online yeah they're starting to look at their category and then you become look at your category category yeah there's a gin brand i saw the other day called n gin i don't know if you've seen it engine so it's basically looks like um a can of uh like an old school racing can of petrol oh i have seen that on the internet i've had the advert yeah yeah the ad yeah and it's like that stands out so much i've seen it at pubs oh really yeah yeah and you look at it and it's like it looks like a gin it looks like petrol can yeah i thought it was like paint or olive oil olive oil but it's got i've seen in like three or four pubs recently it's cool um but again back to that point of like going still clothes from from fucking petrol and then going to because otherwise she's going to another six smith definitely and i think a lot of people would probably argue that can be a really disruptive way to start it doesn't mean that you have to necessarily like commit to that long term as well yeah i think it can be a bit um debilitating thinking how do i get the perfect looking aesthetic and where the distribution strategy like we have you know how can something look good in annabelle's and still look good and attract people on a meal deal.

54:28And that's a big challenge. And I think we're really fortunate that it's working so beautifully. But I think the reality that I've seen in other brands as well is that you can rebrand as well. It's like really not the end of the day. I think we're really lucky and people kind of question, have you changed the brand? Are you going to do a blah, blah, blah? And like everyone in the business knows I'm like obsessed with the cat. I'm like, no one can try and change the front of that cat, which crazy enough was drawn on the back of an envelope. And then we took it to a designer around the corner for like 5k to make it into cans.

54:59And it's just sometimes the simplest thing when you don't like decision over one, when there's too many sources of information, too much advice, too much industry stuff. But yeah, borrowing from other categories is definitely clever. But I would say to anyone listening, you can also...

55:43learn, fail, try again, change. as a founder now there's fucking way more people to look after oh my gosh so true I think when we were talking about it um just before as well when you're in the day-to-day sometimes you don't have the discipline or the time to reflect on those challenges as well so a lot of it is just day-to-day and learning from the day-to-day um so lucky touchwood um that because everyone's new as well everyone's kind of I think one of the differences in trip maybe you'll tell me might be different to other people you've interviewed and and this is the thing i actually don't know sometimes how we're different as like unique and then i'll have a conversation like this and be like wow we're really all doing it very differently but i don't realize until i'm in a conversation like this um so for me i don't know any different to the fact that we've hired 40 people basically overnight and launched into 20 000 stockists in three like that for me that's my reference point which i know is a huge privilege and probably um there's a lot of learnings to unpick there but i think the naivety and simplicity of it is definitely helpful that's probably a different type of focus it's like i'm not unfocused and distracted by there's probably a ton to learn from all those amazing people you've quoted at me today but i'm like never had that but in a way it's created focus because you just trust your instincts and your own experience obviously if it was going badly you would adjust and recenter and and change packaging communication whatever else um so it's a funny one and i think on the team point we're absolutely learning as we go someone said something to me about the business i was in a meeting it caught up in with a buyer this phrase that made me feel really uncomfortable but i was like it is kind of like that is it not running for your walk it was like flying the plane before will you learn or something terrifying and i was like guys that's not a fair i think i've heard that it's like we're flying the plane and building at the same time something like that i was like that makes me feel uncomfortable um i think for the team piece though um trip is a very mission led company and it attracts really incredible people who align themselves with the idea of being super innovative super disruptive contributing to helping people feel better and I when I say feel better there's obviously the entrepreneur journey but like we have this chat I don't know if you guys use um slack but um we have a channel called creating better days and this is an example of kind of how a day can go someone we share messages from customers um dms emails that kind of thing and while you're helping people deal with everyday stress and everyday chaos there's this whole other side that we don't talk about publicly very much but things like if i just show you like even today um a message on instagram thank you so much for creating possibly the best drink to have with this earth after suffering with anxiety after losing a parent i suffered with stress they settled me completely thank you so much things like i've had a really bad relationship with alcohol in the past trips helped me get past these demons um my wife and i live very stressful lives within 10 minutes we feel the effects and can finally have a good night's sleep terrible fortnightly panic attacks for six years since the birth of my son but in the last three months i've only had one thank you so much for your oils and your drinks like that's insane yeah yeah and i think getting to work in an environment where you get these messages all day is very powerful kind of part of the physical realization of the mission so yes it's high intense high performance environment and yes we're playful with the fact that we're just making a product but a lot of people are attracted to work here who want to be part of something like that and that's amazing 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 ocado listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but 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.

1:00:15They 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. Northstar are not like another data company that force feed you data like Foie Gua, 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 north star 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 north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later it's this what I find fascinating is this this naivety naivety um has almost been your super power because as you said i'm definitely agree actually my my rest of it's silly saying it yeah but it's been like that's what caddy kitten said he gives us speaking to edge yesterday he goes we created a gourmet suite three pounds that literally the every buyer every suite is trying to be one pounds yeah he goes i cannot believe my luck yeah why there's not been no other brand into that category think kind of get a category of what yeah really and truly yeah um but so so so in terms of stories there's all this sort of sort of specific not necessarily weaknesses but like blind spots and i know you're saying learning day to day but there will be a lot of people listening to this who are founders scaling what are some of the specific things you've like done blind spots or like blind spots were like yeah just been like okay oh i now learn to do that do you mean or it's like now now we're a 40 um or maybe habits is the best way of saying it so when we're a team of um four very easy to deliver a message we're sat on a kitchen table have a cup of tea yeah we're now 40 people we've got 40 lives to look after and manage the way you deliver a kind of delicate message is different that's the meantime do you know what i mean so like yeah that's what i'm getting at yeah i think um can't think of anything super specific or a personal level a lot of challenges and learning you know your job changes every week and my job in the future might be a lot more kind of less of the doing more of the like leadership um high level direction kind of category wide staff probably taking trip to the next level in terms of like lobbying for better regulation better opportunities you know being a real like spokesperson for the industry and and the job will change for now i'm really loving that it is still it does feel still small i think within each team there's still that very magical feeling of you can ask anyone anything you can share there's no stupid ideas like there's no precedent i think the office space allows that as well it's so important and i think it's something brands put maybe last yeah like in their budget is like but yeah i think looking at it and just absorbing it here um in terms of i want to go to this fund the fundraise right so how much did you raise it last year we raised 10 million pounds and the year before that three and a half probably that's mental what did you what did you put in your deck that you think most people wouldn't have put in that was like how did you do that these are the questions where I'm like oh my gosh that's the thing if you showed me the decks of other people that have raised money I'd probably like be terrified and be like oh my gosh how did we get away with this sometimes in these conversations I do just it's actually nice so I'm gonna be in a really good move the rest of the day just feeling really lucky that i didn't know what i didn't know and people who've trusted us and i think was there anything in the deck i mean i'm happy to show you the deck there's nothing um pretty organic flow mission statement up front why the product's special how have we gone above and beyond i think that is pretty powerful but how did you go above and beyond or like what were you because i think i think there's you know i i I kind of don't really necessarily believe in decks because I think decks are quite the defense mechanism and actually they stop conversations.

1:04:41So one of the things I always do is I'll have the deck, but I'll send it at the end of the meeting. I'd rather to have the conversation with someone and actually get to know them or a personal level. I think when I've got the deck there, it's just a fucking getting in the way, I think. Yeah, I think that's really true. And I think what's really unusual, actually I was laughing with Dan this morning because he's um he couldn't be here because he's gone on a train to a buyer meeting and it's like in the 20 000 stockists we have fastest growing um beverage brand in the uk we've both met in person like less than one hand's worth of buyers face to face and to your point about like death by slides i think it's such an interesting nuance to because if you're only building relationship on a half file zoom with a wi-fi issue a team slash zoom confusion link situation pulling out a minute and half of your 30 minutes face time there's not a lot of time for slides you've got to be pretty slick so actually what we've relied on it's pretty hard everything i mentioned around personal nature and sensitivity around people's experiences with stress and trying to establish that rapport and let them know this is a totally new category but it will sell etc like that's a lot of messages is to digest through a screen when you're not in person and you don't have the social cues to react and kind of have the benefit of physical meetings so in general with slides i would definitely also encourage like reduce alpha short the way i do as well as i i sort of think and although like it's just what's it worth for me right yeah what's me getting sponsors for this podcast what work with me getting listings yeah i don't like this but is you get them really get people excited by the way you communicate at the meeting yeah and then if they've got like a 12 15 slide deck they'll be excited to go home and read it yeah definitely leave them waiting for more whereas if you go straight up with 15 slides they're like oh my god this is another deck and i think what you're talking about there about we're actually going to ask about your personal problems and that you know the the manifestation of that is that slack channel there these are the ones that people send they're all the ones that people does like you can have that conversation with an investor it's like yeah yeah and then let's watch so so is there like an example of how sorry to go through you don't have to give specifics but yeah just of like a meeting where you basically got five loads of money and you came out and you're like this is unreal like it was then like a really kind of at the moment of hysteria and almost nirvana do you know what i can't pinpoint one you never maybe this is also the sort of nature or the curse of being an entrepreneur at least a CBD entrepreneur, like your website can get turned off tomorrow.

1:07:13Um, your listing could be pulled because of someone in a boardroom has a misconception about hemp and you've done the new lines forms. It's all ready to go. And then there's a kind of pause. And, um, I say a lot, you know, we, um, we've been talking a lot in the team about, uh, we have this, um, gong for wins that we bag and we've been talking about buying a big gong because there's so many wins, et cetera. um and I love watching the team get excited and like walk up to it and and smash it every time there's something a piece of exciting news and I think I've been probably conditioned as a lawyer to worst case scenario stuff so much that we often say um we don't celebrate or I don't say this to the team but to Dan we don't celebrate till it's on the shelf and I see it there there's so many elements of the journey where unfortunately there's a lot of things out of your control And I don't know if that's necessarily the best advice in terms of you should enjoy every moment because it's actually all about the journey.

1:08:12And that would be my biggest advice or learning, whether or not you become the brand of a decade or the fastest growing, whatever. If you're not enjoying the day to day, you've actually really lost out in terms of the time you're investing into something. um but in terms of those investor pitches um we've had such an incredible experience and we're so fortunate that we have actually a handful of really supportive strategic um individuals who've loved the journey respected the mission the product and been there for us i think from what i hear from other people as well now understanding more about like fundraising in this environment is like super challenging you know you can think that you're best friends with an investor be given some documents and until the dotted line is signed and even if the signature is there until the money's in the account there's always a bit of this and i don't know if that's the right way to look at it we certainly celebrate after but it's just about kind of managing expectations throughout i think what was the sort of the biggest celebration in terms of getting money in and like how did you do that how do we celebrate yeah because i think like a part of you know i want to take a trip literally through your journey and yeah the founder's journey is one littered with obstacles and setbacks but there's also this fucking elation which makes all those hard days so worth it definitely i think for us it's making sure you're doing it as you go as well so while we're not preemptively celebrating being on shelf or getting something before it's happened it is recognizing it and kind of even though it's been an incredibly short timeline will kind of reminisce i have like an album on my phone of that first design on an envelope and we share with the tea sometimes uh we had a last of our third birthday and we did a presentation you know selfies of us in the living room you know um when our first order came through when we had our first 10k our first 100k for whatever it is and it's about like i think marking those and actually all those setbacks or stressful days i remember speaking to a couple of friends um really good friends from where i used to work so not in the industry and complaining about something that was challenging or stressful or difficult and one of them turned around and it's something i say to other people now um it's one for the for the book it's one for the memoir but yes this is an absolute shit show and you don't see how you're going to get out of it and you can't believe the odds have been stacked against you and this is what you're at but it's going to be a bloody good story if you remember it so write it down and like sharing that that's such a you've got to hope for that kind of thing obviously yeah whatever but it's like yes one of the things i've learned from the founders to do really well is that is an ability an innate ability to reframe things so you know i was speaking to ed yesterday and he was like um i was i wish your ability to take pain because you know pain is a again every founder of interview is like there's a common thing is be able to take pain um in terms of not not necessarily um pain as like um more kind of the the tedium and monotony of the day-to-day is that it could be quite like doing the same thing and he was like well i don't see it as that like i don't see you know we're 10 years in now but i always had like the 20 year plan so i'm actually i'm only halfway through do you know my gosh just like it's as i don't think he said those exact words that's an example of it but like he's i don't feel pain because i'm halfway through and then with this podcast i need to be here in two years and actually what i've done is like well let's do six years and then i'm always i'm I'm forcing myself to win because I'm ahead of it.

1:11:46I think it's kind of what you've done there with that memory book. It's like, right, this is a challenge, but it's one for memory books. And it's a very clever reframe and allows you to enjoy the journey as well, which I think is. Definitely. I think the thing you mentioned about celebrating, like you have to remember that the most part of the trip journey was genuinely family. And we have some family that invested as well. We get to celebrate with people who have been there since the beginning, who want what's best for us, who totally get why we're doing what we're doing. It's because they were there at the wedding when we had this experience and they have seen us leave our jobs and they've seen what we think we can do.

1:12:22And it is this really beautiful, I think, unusual situation. But celebrating throughout, like the other thing, as you were saying, and the scaling and the Candy Kittens example, I feel there's a different challenge now where actually the stakes are so high. it's actually a lot more scary than the beginning when you're building out of pure passion everything is upside um we've obviously had a pretty unusual journey and incredible amount of support and and success but it can be those earlier moments that you remember more full body sometimes because when you get these listings week after week there's a sense of like the stakes are so high now there are 40 people that have jobs that depend on you and you're part of their career you're part of their professional and personal development that's quite so how do you deal with that but but how do you deal with that but but trying to still enjoy it do you know what I mean because it's a good point it's it's something again I was saying I haven't explored before is it's like and with with more scale becomes becomes more responsibility so people look on internet and they're like right oh my god they've got you know this many stores clapped batsmen it's like yeah but there's also a lot more of a lot more pressure comes with that and it's also more like you know that listing doesn't work i'm not talking about you specifically i'm talking about brands it's like if that listing doesn't work there's people's livelihoods on the line now how are you how are you navigating that i think it's overwhelming if you take it all too much too seriously about all of that and actually some of my fondest memories it could be messages like the ones i just showed you or someone stopping me on the street when we did our first out of home and we did some posters around the corner and this old lady stopped me on the street someone was taking someone in the team came to take a picture of me in front of the poster to lie to my bum or something and this old lady stopped me and was like oh have you had have you had that product before and I was like oh I have actually have you she was like yeah me and my husband buy it around the corner he's had a brain tumor we have one every evening together and it's like our favorite thing to do really recommend you try it I was like oh my gosh that's amazing um and yes that's not the same as the kind of celebration that we got to enjoy after closing a fundraise or getting in the sunday times or being confirmed as the fastest growing company but it's like these human stories make the world go round i think i'm probably more emotional in the team um in terms of like dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the thought of all those people relying on you i'm not gonna lie every um everyone feels the pressure of uh whether it's cash flow forecasting logistics um fundraising there's so much out of your control but it's like the little moments like i remember we probably celebrated more with our first um like 10k followers on social than 100k i remember the moments in the video call we did um all these little things i remember walking down on the street in the pandemic and we just launched to fenix and again first cbd product in there like not a natural fit necessarily but kind of convinced them the opportunity and i'm walking down royal street and there's a big fenix store um down there with huge windows and there were giant trip cbd bottles in the windows as photographs and i had no idea what was happening was walking past it stopped my tracks the shop was closed because no one was allowed to go shopping in that part of covid and i was like oh my god there is huge trip advertising in a store in a heritage store in Bosch Street it's insane like FaceTimed the team at the time was me Dan Katie and I've got screenshots of our FaceTime and I'll remember that you know I'll remember our first celebrity DM asking for product on Instagram I think it's about just enjoying those moments and if you can record them remember them because they're the best parts of the journey that you need to remember in the moments where you're like oh we're slightly under the whatever forecast yeah i think it's like that the the the fulfillment will always come from the little things and then people will feel that probably around you i mean you should probably shut the team about it i don't know but i think i think excitement in in in life and one of the things actually i want to ask you this is um i think one of the every founder of any video is exited exited yeah yeah it was the worst day of my life oh yeah and because i think it's like you lose that you lose that moment and um and actually they all wait they all say so we interviewed grenade uh till's william chase he william chase specifically said when you were in the williams enclosure you realize all the fun was in the race and i was like that's such a good aphorism to be like that's welcome and see then And he goes, Caesar is third business.

1:17:11So he did take Christmas. They did vodka, sold that. And he's like, well, I've been on a yacht on Ibiza and it's great for three weeks. And after July, I need to get back in the race. So it's really interesting. But on that Slack channel, I listened to a podcast you did and you said, I think it's you and James have like a Slack channel of ideas. And a lot of Slack channels, yeah. Yeah, as in, but I think it's interesting about what women with you is you just you're not like anyone else you personally and as a brand as well but i'd love to know if trip was like a hotel where where would it be and what would it be like and would it feel like oh my gosh i would struggle to commit to one location i feel like the people you need to throw them to one channel i feel like people who would come to our it would be a boutique hotel it would feel like home but it would definitely be premium spot of luxury understated luxury the kind of people who would visit would probably like to travel and experience different things while still getting their home comfort so meeting kind of um interesting people there'd be a lot of people it wouldn't be like zen and quiet and bonsai trees and silence and silent retreats it would be somewhere with conversation there would be unexpected things obviously you get trip in your mini bar in your restaurant as soon as you check in you need a sip of cold trip and your relaxation starts now still the thing as well is is as again it's a bit of a paradox in that people think of cbd as zen like you know yeah whereas you're actually more of a kind of a you know that instagram ad i used to always say that yeah so i'm feeling good yeah yeah i'm so totally that song is like burned but it's burning to my brain i love that song i can't i mean it's clever from you guys because it came out at the time it was just the perfect lyrics but i'm just like it was something i think of trip very lockdown yeah very yeah yeah that is og that was one of the first adverts we managed to get through but it but what was so clever about that is is it is bear in mind trip is a or cbd is quote-unquote like uh something you take before you go to bed or relax yeah you're actually acting like a party brand or not a party brand like as as a feel-good brands yeah and i think there's yeah it's almost like this is what we do but like there's executing somewhere completely different do you know what i mean what would be the like if in terms of activations if money was no object like you ever sort of played the trip yeah i'm like are we doing the hotel thing because this is a really fun game yeah i can talk about the hotel let's stay on the hotel then because i've only the only because i think one of my reason that where that question came from yeah is um i wrote a piece i do like write a lot and i wrote a thing about how brands must see their brand as a hotel and their buyer as a guest right so if you're if you're a buyer if you've got a hotel right and it's trip whatever or whatever brand or hungry for example and a buyer comes in and if if you're managing that hotel and that buyer's just got got got in you're going to call them and say you come for breakfast you come for breakfast come for breakfast how's your stay how's your stay and it's the same with buyers you send a buyer a sample you shouldn't call send them 50 emails saying if you tried it if you tried it if you tried it like you've got to yeah you've got to be more hospitable to buyers like they're getting and by thinking of it as a hotel every other tom dick and jane is is peppering buyers with emails like alex foster's the whole foods bar she's one of my very good mates she came to the subaclub she was like every band since it's just badgering badgering badgering badgering when you start thinking like a hotel you're like well you wouldn't say to that guest you know uh where's so when they ask for all the money when you check in and you're like whoa well yeah yeah yeah so because yeah yes anyway let's go into the into this hotel so like you said boutique you said lots of people you said it wasn't going to be bond bond trees yeah where would it sort of be Are there any places you have been to that you've kind of...

1:21:16I mean, nature nearby for sure. Right. But understanding that for convenience, a lot of people need something a bit closer to a city centre. I think for me, it's more like the feeling than the specific location. I can think of a ton of places I've been that I would love to open a hotel for a trip. Give me some of those places. We just got back from the last bank holiday. We have a partnership with the Six Senses Hotel in Ivy Fair. it's like a super um experiential there's loads of like ayurvedic stuff crystals in all the water i mean there's obviously a party island it's this like insane combination of like hiking with sound baths and they do a lot of really cool events there so we did a big um trip event there the last bank holiday i really yeah because i love i'd be i'd be i mean when i was much younger i was a bit of a hedonist so you used to go and just do this all the yeah this is on the other side yeah yeah very northern tip yeah but then you know i went with my family to the other side and i was like i mean that place is super spiritual but it's super yeah but like have a good time as well it's not be quiet it's let's have the best of both because that's reality for a lot of people and i think to a point about badgering buyers and stuff i think it's a really good analogy and something that we've always been really hot on like customer first like the hotel manager it's always going to be don't know if you've seen white lotus very funny um no my mates yeah yeah um but yeah customers always first and it's i think for cbd specifically given so much of the misunderstanding historically and um the misperception it's it's even more extreme because we've got this beautiful lovely hotel we want to bring people to but for some reason which is illogical they've heard like shit things about it so you have to kind of counter the misconceptions delicately before they come and there's actually a really funny hotel story I met in terms of um what you alluded to with me and James always sharing ideas and design concepts and um I met there's a fashion brand called Salvatore Ferragamo it's like a very historic Italian menswear luxury brand and they opened a hotel in Italy and I met the CEO once and he was telling a story about how it's a super luxury super boutique hotel in Florence.

1:23:30It's only got like 12 rooms. And it was voted like top hotel in the world, successive years in a row, and has all these reviews from people saying it's the most stunning on their wishlist, like amazing place. And he was like, we've only been open four years. There's only 12 rooms. There's like 700 reviews. They could not have stayed at the hotel. But the power of the brand is so strong that it was consistently voted number one because people found it aspirational and beautiful and exciting and actually the power that your brand can have outside of its physical existence or constraints is also really powerful and that brand flows absolutely through how you speak to people how you speak to people on your channel how you speak people on every private message for me that's the same whether it's a private dm a buyer outreach email or a really upset customer they should be treated the same with like the same level of respect and kindness i think a lot of people don't always assume that for sure well then this is a question i ask most well in fact not all but most guests like what would you say in one sentence is a brand like i think it's what do you think it is yeah well it hasn't get excited every time i ask that to guests so they're like it's a hard question so i always kind of jump in to give a bit of context but like some people say it's a friend some people say so caravan coffee you know caravan coffee yeah how would it be a friend as in like as in it's quite an ethereal question but brands are quite ethereal in some ways but it's like a brand is someone you want to take on holiday will chase said a brand you should so link this all together right so yeah caravan said a brand is a friend you want to take on holiday will chase said you the best brands speak to their customers like friends linking that together um uh ed williams from canny kittens said a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room i would agree with that um and but then rory sutherland who's the guy ogilvy he went off on a massive uh delicious tirade about how brands are actually needed you gave a great example of um the soviet union how there wasn't any brands and actually brands is kind of like that selfish gene that but you get a brand that ends the category oat milk steel for example that forced another band to go in forced another band to go in so it's actually it's a good thing brand yeah yeah but yeah i'd love to know like what uses because it's such a i do a lot on the brand side of trip but i don't have any traditional brand or marketing experience and i definitely should catch up on these episodes and actually hear what people say about brand for me it's a how people feel about i say you but i don't mean you individually i mean your product or how it how they've ever experienced it whether they've seen it in an advert or they've got it in their fridge how do they feel when they think about it or see it for a drink that can include well for a functional drink like trip that can include the feeling of calming refreshment and deliciousness but actually overwhelmingly what i love is um often when I'll go into a buyer meeting and there might be questions about well obviously this brand appeals to millennials and gen z's but how's he going to appeal to my 65 year old weekly shopper um in Sunderland or whatever I'm like what is incredible which if you go on our socials see from just the way people post pictures day in day out you put this product in front of any age person you know you said your mom was conservative and would be wary of CBD but if you put that can in front of her, she never heard of it, she never seen it.

1:27:09And you put whatever 50 cans in a row in front of 50 people of all ages, all backgrounds, all over the UK, well widen that, you know, the ambition is global. Every single person seems to say, that's pretty, that's cool. What is that? I'm interested in that. Tell me more. For me, that's a very, very powerful emotional reaction. And no one ignores it. No one is ever like, whatever, oh that's boring there's a reaction and i think an emotional reaction is something that again i didn't go to like brand school but i imagine that's like a big part of the goal because if you're irrelevant then it's a it's emotion isn't it and it's it's uh yeah you have memory as well and you connect memory and experience if you had a great night on trip drinks out when you were in a sewer house or a brew dog or whatever you're going to remember the good night and you're going to remember the product that comes with it it's like how alcohol brands and like car brands seem to kind of connect emotion to the product like you're lonely it's like it's absolutely mental how you've done this with like no experience but it's a great a great um lesson in in this naivety piece i want to take kind of a trick down um kind of memory lane i think i read somewhere about you know you you dam was in finance you were a lawyer uh like i think you said about your old man wanting you to go down that route like how's what was that like where did you kind of like grow up like almost going back before trip like what was his influence all of this yeah i think the whole thing feels very unexpected and i love that it was all unplanned and even dan and my relationship which is such a big part of how trip started feels very unexpected it's like how did you guys meet well i don't know if he would i always joke about this with him and i'm like would you have ever imagined you'd end up with this like english um you know half asian or whatever and he's just full of confidence like yeah it had to be you you know like love at first sight situation whereas i'm like well i remember telling my parents about you um you know born and raised in beirut uh party guy first time we met first time i met my parents i mean that was a story for another time but um now i was we met at university so he was friends with my older brother so we were at cambridge together i didn't want to go to university i didn't want to go to cambridge i very had a very fun teenage life in london shall we say quite different to the average were you around zero yeah and um my brother who's super overprotective older was like oh please don't come to the same uni it's gonna be a nightmare i'm gonna see you all the time we weren't like close in a social way we were very like brother sisterly yeah i was like well don't worry i'm never gonna hang out with you and i'm never gonna see you yeah get to cambridge it's absolutely tiny i didn't realize everyone goes to the same place on the same day there's like one thing to do that evening um and all his friends looked out for me i found it quite tough at the beginning coming from a london teenage freedom day school life where as a young girl it was pretty fun and especially around here yeah i mean it's unreal around here yeah and had a bit of a shock to the system found it really hard and actually she massively looked after me and we became like super close i didn't realize until that point because it had always been this overprotective brother thing of like we're not going to socialize together i'm like well you're not cool anyway i don't want to hang out with you um that we ended up hanging out a lot and his friends took me under their wing and and i would see my brother regularly he really helped me and became like best friends we didn't I didn't realize we were so similar we had the same humor we had some of the same interests you know it was an amazing thing we became super close anyway he was obviously like no one can touch you in Cambridge you're off off limits um and ended up dating one of his close friends Dan they were in the same college and um yeah very unexpected very funny story but very different upbringing so he grew up in Beirut he's Lebanese irish so there's a lot of mediterranean hot-blooded party genes i'm much more kind of um conservative lawyer worst case scenario love the rules love school love being told what to do not an entrepreneurial bone in my body never had an idea never had a desire the reason i chose law i chose it at the end of uni because everyone was like you can just delay any further choices and go to school for another like four years you go to law school i was like great you get paid to study more not study you naturally quite clever then if like it was an academic in that in that like you could go out and not party but like you lived the notting hill kind of lifestyle but you could still yeah so get cambridge is no easy feat yeah i grew up in north london and hertfordshire went to um school up there very very lucky both my parents were their asses off to send me to private school privilege yeah so like yeah it's only at this age when you kind of start talking to your parents as friends almost and you're like wow you gave up so much to send me to school I remember getting um I gone on to like the gymnastics team or something when I was like 12 and I remember my birthday present was the uniform and thinking it was the best thing ever because you get a special uniform when you're on team but I didn't know I was so sheltered and incredibly so I didn't have any of those worries of growing up and knowing these things but it was a struggle for my parents to buy a uniform struggle to pay for another birthday present for a friend when you're invited to another class birthday but they let me feel so safe and secure it's incredibly lucky and um grateful for that but yeah so the university experience felt a little bit unexpected never planned to apply got in all that stuff met dan really early on we've been together ever since which is 15 years we've actually like grown up together in many ways because you're pretty young at 18 um i was 18 at the time and yeah my parents have been an incredible support incredible influence um my dad's the asian one so it was very like are you best in maths class you know one of you needs to be a doctor one of you needs to be a lawyer one of you needs to be accountant well my brother went and did surgery was the doctor i was like well i'll take law yeah my sister was like well f that i don't want any of that um so um i tried accountancy for for one summer i was like i'll do the law thing but um no loads of support from them and they were actually amazing when we decided to to leave it off because everyone is this stone but even for me is it's like you can reinvent yourself whenever and i think what you've said there about i wanted to be the lawyer i wanted to follow the rules i wanted to to know what was going on and then you've created this for us like no fucking rules oh my god and it's like and it's and if i think and you know i'm kind of sort of reinventing myself for this it's like as i've said i made really clear like i want to create the the it started as a podcast but now i want to create almost like the vice media cool for challenger brands to take on the grocer and it's like well no one's done that before so i'm just going to go for it and see what happens yeah and you know even speaking to you now is is i felt what even pre probably this conversation is i felt so timid of like okay i've got to focus i've got to do these things um it was actually you know you can just unleash those shackles wherever you want and there is no fixed if that's what we're saying everything's fluid and like yeah as i said if you want to rebrand rebrand if you want to try that try that and obviously there's money involved in all of these things but ultimately you can still do it you know yeah it's a person you have to weigh up obviously your personal commitments and what's realistic for you but i think at this age we do have the privilege of like time and health that a lot of people don't have when they've got mortgages or commitments to look after family members etc so i would definitely say if it's time to go for it go for it like it's definitely now And I think when I think about our experience and how lucky I've been, if I was working for someone else after the pandemic, I don't know if I could do it in terms of definitely realigned my like, what do you care about in the day?

1:35:02What is a good day to you? What is a bad day? How does it feel? How do you want to spend your time? I know a lot of people who've kind of tapped out emotionally of their work and kind of it's very much a nine to five. They don't spend any extra time on it emotionally, which is no bad thing. I think it's different for everyone depending on what stage of your life you're in. If you want it to be all consuming and fulfilling in a certain way, you do have to sacrifice and commit yourself to that thing. um equally if you want to have a really clear delineation close the laptop 5tm and that is the end of work for you that's also super healthy yeah for sure i think it's it's just how to i think it's developing the self-awareness which is always a always a tricky one a few more things i want to explore with you live well yeah i'm thoroughly loving this and i'd love to know what

1:35:59sorry so yeah so you said your old man was super supportive like what are some of the principles that do you believe that that actually like he taught you that filter into to your kind of leadership um uh approach because i think leadership is actually you know you've got all the sort of the hardware principles leadership which you get taught on these courses yeah but actually great leadership is almost like software skills it's all the nuance and i'd love to kind yeah i mean i don't know if i've got i've been a manager in previous career but i've i've never been a leader as such so i definitely don't know for sure that i've got um not necessarily confidence like a perfect example um and it will shift and it will change and just being open to feedback and and recognizing that i don't have all the answers i don't read the books on it and i don't have the experience and that that will change i think is an important aspect of humility when you have all these brilliant people working really hard for your shared vision.

1:36:59So kind of caveat that I definitely don't think I've got it completely nailed, but what I have learned, it's not even just my dad, it's my mama and my dad. My dad has his own business, I'd say worked super hard, sacrificed quite a lot of family time, having to travel, that kind of thing. Like I found that really hard as a kid, but really respect how much he kind of did to keep me feeling safe and not knowing any of the kind of grown-up challenges that people have my mom the same um my mom's amazing super things through everything sometimes I guess over worrying is something that happens a lot I think when you have kids and you have a family yeah but it teaches you a lot you know um in terms of thinking through things and and that definitely impacted my legal career which is very you have to think of all the all the things that could go wrong so you're not very linear in your approach to things but it while it brings out a lot of like potential worry about potential negative situations that are not likely to happen it's not a bad discipline to be thinking in such a holistic way about a situation or an outcome um i've learned a lot from dan's parents as well like having met them from 18 you know um his mom's amazing full of life irish glass half full the best dinner party guests like any situation whether you're in a queue at the airport or like around a dinner table she's like the funnest any time of day and dan has that in spades and i think it's magical and i don't know where it comes from i think when you were also growing up in beirut which is obviously full of turmoil and and war-torn tragically in in many ways there's this vibrancy of like live life to the full and there's this mad energy there i don't know if you'll ever get a chance to go but um they party like no one i've ever seen and i think they celebrate everything because you never know what's coming um sadly it's like so what did you put it through like both your parents and the impact on the brand it's like you said you know your mom was a bit of a warrior over thinker that's why you probably drink this drink no not you specifically but there's something there but then the way we're branding it and packaging it is as i said earlier it's like we not not like parties and going out and get off your nuts but as in like yeah say something's like dance celebrate yeah sort of the irish and the beirut and yeah i love sort of pulling that through through the brand um in terms of america so you've raised this money yes like what is what's the game plan you're at 40 people now yes um hiring in the u.s so basically the plan is And so where are you in the US?

1:39:43Like what's... The plan is global. So there's a couple of nuances to CBD, but we want to be everywhere. We are the largest CBD brand by revenue. We are the most globally... In the global. Yeah. In the global. In the global. That's amazing. We are the, you know, most Google CBD brand in the world, which is very exciting when people say, this is an issue, it can't be done. When it comes to the US, so we've been a couple of months ago, we spent um a couple of weeks in california so the home of kind of wellness and natural products is california yeah um all of these trends started there so you have this um kind of incredible incredible landscape and customer demand up front and california's you know economy is big in here it's one of the largest places um economically so a very concentrated place for you to launch a business highly competitive but at the same time incredible opportunity um doing super amazing things out there incredible traction super exciting um pipeline of things and what i'm excited about as well is people are obsessed with the brand they are loving the product taste better than anything they've ever had the feedback has been incredible and actually that makes me really proud because it's really competitive and really saturated out there so the fact that i don't need to be the first one to tell them what CBD does but I can just brand build and people are resonating with what we're doing and it's translating transatlantically is very unique and again if I probably spoke to more industry people and marketers they'd be like that never happens but kind of just taking it in Australia taking it for what it is building out a team out there um we are interstates there's a couple of nationwide players um there aren't that many nationwide players yet because of this federal regulation thing i mentioned um but go puff is one of them so it's more than a billion dollar company but in many many states in the us doing this sort of fast grocery delivery which is a great great channel for us because unfortunately when people feel a moment of stress whether it's at their work desk or when they're getting ready to go out or even the morning after to get something in 15 minutes that you know is going to make you feel better half an hour later great so that's one of the biggest multi-state players are working with at the moment.