Surreal Co-Founder Kit Gammell "We Have Benefited So Much By Having No Rules”

0:00You started a cereal company. To us that means taking on mainstream cereal. So we want to create a brand that really connects and properly disrupts this category. If I showed you our cost of goods when we started the business, you'd probably scream. It was tough to make this product. We went to every manufacturer we could. No one could make it. You're too small. It just can't be done. We had to create the product ourselves. We're still figuring it out. We have benefited so much by having no rules. Just focus on ideas, try stuff, make mistakes, go from there. hello good connection yeah that's a good start great stuff thank you for joining me get really exciting to kind of hear the story of surreal you started a cereal company yeah most people dream i probably had that dream when i was five years old eating my uh my favorite cereal thinking wow i wonder i'm gonna start a cereal company but you did it how tell us uh it's been a winding journey So I wanted to start a business with my mate Jack and we looked at loads of stuff, bin bags.

1:01I can bore you about bin bags another time. We got into Autofentons for a little bit and then we came on to cereal. That was the first idea that hooked us emotionally. And when we looked at it, we felt like as kids, we loved cereal. And this kind of felt like whenever we spoke to anyone, what they were getting, but full of flavor, full of personality, free toys, cartoons, back a pack full of sugar and then we felt like you grow up 40 notes stop behind a desk 30 years old eating a bowl brand flakes and so we were like it was the customer journey where we were like there's a really like we can like practically see why this is exciting but emotionally like we're bought in so today what we do we just take the kids childhood cereals you loved growing up and give them a grown up reboot so childhood taste but high protein zero sugar fantastic I'm a testament every morning.

1:54I start my day with surreal. Nice. How did you end up here? What's your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?

2:03Yeah, I wouldn't say it's an obvious journey. So I was born and raised in Scotland and left school, like everyone, clueless about what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. And so I studied history, which I'm going to give you. but I think I left uni and I just had this affinity towards brands. I don't know why, but I just love brands. So I applied to every grad scheme you could think of. They all said no. So I then came across this business called Vita Cocoa, which was a coconut water brand, which back then felt like alien to the market. But I was just in. like minute I met them like the energy I was I would take any role at that company and so I did I took a role which I didn't know what it was I ended up in a luminous green jacket walking streets of London selling coconut water's convenience stores and I learned a lot about resilience in it and I wasn't a particularly good salesman so I learned a lot there and I think over time I got to see the full aspect for that business from so I started in sales I moved to marketing, who worked with ops, who worked with finance.

3:17And that's probably where we cut our teeth of what does a startup look like and what does it take? I love it. And you went on to build your own. Talk to me about brand because obviously Vitacoco was very, had a very prolific brand and surreal. You guys have a very bold, very humorous, very brave brand you're building. It's a real challenger. Obviously you're doing something different in terms of differentiation in market with zero sugar and high protein, but talk to me about the importance of brand and how you think about brand building. We're still figuring it out. Look, we're two and a half years in.

3:49I think we have benefited so much by having no rules. Like it is so liberating when it's, no one cares about your business. Your business isn't even really a business. So you can basically do whatever you want. I think we always put a focus at the start on like, just focus on ideas, try stuff, make mistakes, go from there. I was saying to someone the other day, no one remembers bad marketing. and we do loads and loads of bad marketing. We do bad marketing weekly, but no one remembers it. But it's taking those risks that gives you a chance of that one memorable moment, that bit that jumps out in people's minds.

4:26I think the one thing that I've always admired in seeing surreal is obviously there's an ability to execute quickly, to test things. You say you're not risk-averse by any means, but collaborations and partnerships has been a big part of that as well, where you've been able to body up with some of the like-minded challenger brands. Talk to me about how you think about those collaborations and those partnerships and why they've been so important for Surreal. Yeah, I wish I could say there's a strategy. You'll pick up there's not a lot of strategy at Surreal. But we, so there was this brand, Wild, if you know Healthy Deodorant.

5:01Of course. We just looked up to them. We wanted to do something with them and we came up with some fairly stupid, funny billboards and they went for it. And billboards blew up. and we're immediately like, wow, this has impact. We're reaching new audiences, but it's also creating a connection. From there, we're just focused on ideas. So we'll always think of something and then go to the brand, not the other way around. And nine times out of 10, if you go to someone with a track record and a fleshed out idea, they'll usually say, yeah. You say we, talked about the team. What is the structure? What are you doing differently in terms of building that team?

5:39because something's working you guys are making such an impact in the market um how do you think about team and culture and talk to us about the structure of that team today i understand there's a comedian on your team there's a comedian on the team and a few failed comedians um yes but um again i just i think we learned a lot from where we were before in terms of like what good looks like from a culture perspective so we've tried to take a lot of the fun from bite cocoa and surreal and fun isn't um it's not beers of the dark board we do have a dark sword but it's um empowering people just to make mistakes yeah our job is honestly just to get out of people's way let them make mistakes um and then be there to help them solve that afterwards so i'll give you an example when i was at base cocoa i gave away a million cases of coconut water by accident right so six million bottles of coconut water which at the time was more than we sold a year wow so over a weekend this happened i won't go into the details of how i did it and but i was terrified and i came into work monday morning and the very very head of the business guy called giles just took me into a room said it's happened don't worry about it how are we going to fix it and how can we help you and that was like that will always stick with me because um the lack of a blame culture like yeah that is so empowering when people just go out there yeah and just wait for for the rafters.

7:05And let's face it, our business isn't big enough or significant enough that it's gonna be killed from taking risks. Our business will die because no one takes risks. I love it. Talk about D2C and retail, because you started off as D2C. You've done a great job in getting people to really break a behavior. Most people don't buy cereal online. You buy cereal when you're in the supermarket. You guys started with D2C, but you didn't stay D2C. I see so many D2C brands. they are quite strong in their minds and they have to be direct to consumer and you guys have really embraced retail um especially in the last year or so and so talk to us about those partnerships with the likes of sainsbury's and uh whole foods and holland and mara talk to you about why retail is important how you think about it going forward and maybe if there's any uh lessons or um secrets you can share for others who are thinking about retail listings uh talk to us about what you've learned there yeah this is gonna be a good segment because i didn't do anything to the three tell So I'll steal my co-founder's thunder, but how do we think about our business?

8:05It's just we're a serial company. We're a modern serial company. So we just want to be where people buy serial. It's that simple. DTC was this amazing test and learn channel for us that suddenly had some scale to it as well. And so we never thought we'd be able to sell the amount of serial we could online, but it was always natural that we wanted to be in retail. And I think having had that DC business was so, so powerful. Yeah. When we spoke to the same trees of Hong and Barrett, I think the big things that really moved the needle is we knew exactly who our customer was. Not kind of, we knew like everything about our customer because we spoke to them every week.

8:46We knew how to improve our product. So we're on version 5, technically 35, but we knew all this stuff. and then we went to retail and we had the stats. Yeah. So the big stats were what we were selling. And by the way, we were the fastest growing cereal in all cereal. Yeah. Value and percentage. And then also we were incremental to the category. So we could ask our customers, were you buying cereal before? The majority answered no. And that's golden insight for Sainsbury's. And so, yeah, we had to learn loads to be able to present like a really compelling story for why we made sense in retail. You mentioned version five of the product.

9:26or probably the reality version, 35 or maybe 305. Yeah. That probably surprises people to think, you know, a business that you're scared already in, you know, it's still early into the journey, but it's the fastest growing serial brand in the UK, but you're still iterating. How do you think about that cultural iteration? How do you think about product development and kind of continually evolving the product based on that customer feedback? Yeah, hugely important. And I think Jack and I's background was never product, which is a blessing and a curse. blessing because we just go in like first principles we always want the product to get better we're never wedded to the recipe we've created you know it's not unfortunately grandmother's recipe passed down through the generations and but it means you're just constantly trying to get better and if you've got this source of data from your dc you're doing your customers a disservice if you're not listening so what does good look like feedback from customers, development, trial with customers, launch.

10:27And we're lucky enough to have that data, so it's our responsibility to use it. I know from my time working with so many entrepreneurs, a great entrepreneur takes risks, which we talked about, but pivots in particular as well, where they have a vision on how they want to do something, or they think something's going to work, and then they get this feedback, and they realize it's not the market fit, or customers are telling them something different. How do you think about those kind of pivotal decisions? How do you think about those pivotal moments in the business in the last few years that you've had to make where if you hadn't taken them, you probably wouldn't be where you are today?

11:00A fairly pivotal one pre-business was, so we really struggled to make this product. Well, I told Jack it was going to take three months. It took 18. And I know you always say this out before, but it was tough to make this product. we went to every manufacturer we could Europe and UK no one could make it either a combination of you're too small which we were yeah or it just can't be done yeah and so we had to start we had to create the product ourselves yeah and that meant going to university yeah I made up the recipe on the spreadsheet yeah and blagged our way into university um and now it's pretty pivotal why because it cost us a lot of money a lot of money that we wouldn't have had to spend if we We just went and got a blanket product off a manufacturer, but we knew that product wasn't good enough.

11:47So if I showed you our cost of goods when we started the business, you'd probably scream. But it was the right decision. It had to be a great product that we understood. And then over time, we've been able to make it. I feel that's the key to probably summer success. And certainly with Surreal, if you've got a great product, everything starts there. Talking about uncertainty, as I think about the greatest entrepreneurs always have resilience, and they have to have resilience through those periods and uncertainty. Talk about how you handle uncertainty. Talk about how you handle stress in those days where things aren't going quite so well or those months where perhaps sales targets haven't been reached or the highs you wanted to make haven't happened quick enough or someone moves on from the business, whatever it may be.

12:27Talk about how you handle that stress and that resilience. Poorly, but better and better. And that's been probably our biggest learning curve. From our previous businesses, we knew what a startup looked like. Let's face it, we didn't have that like the buck stops with your responsibility. Yeah. And I think that that can weigh heavy. The one having a co-founder for me is like you're in a relationship, right? And actually that support is like I'm in awe of people doing on their own that way. And the second is, and this like runs across the team is, we are just making serials and trying to make people laugh fundamentally.

13:08Right. and I think if we don't think about that long enough we can generally snap out of it perspective is always useful getting to know you in the last few years Kit you're always incredibly calm, always very very chill whenever I see you I feel like I walk away more calm and more chill, you should see what's going on you're doing something right, even on the exterior you're very calm talk to me about how you keep your motivation high because you talked a little about resilience and uncertainty but what motivates you every morning to get out of bed i know you have a young family how do you keep that motivation really high um in particular say what is you know often challenges um not everything you know as most people know with entrepreneurships ups and downs but keeps you really motivated uh yeah it's changed is the truth i think when you start out um it's probably more external your motivation let's face it yeah the more and more it's i've done a lot of think about it it's just working with great people yeah And it raises the bar for everyone.

14:08So honestly, what motivates me is going to work. I love it there. It's fun and engaging and that's how it should feel. But I'm also surrounded by amazing people where there's always that little bit of like, well, if they're that great, like I need to be up to it. And I think everyone always talks about like enjoy the journey and like it's taken us a long time to figure out like what we're doing right now is the great bit. Yeah. You know, and success or failure will be an outcome. But we find that pretty motivating just to enjoy it. Yeah. Talk about kids because you, I have a kid. Yeah. You have another one coming.

14:46Yeah. That's a tough thing for any entrepreneur to balance having a young family and also a young, nascent, fast-growing business. How do you think about ramaging the two and how much do you think, you know, you talk about your motivation changing. I don't think entrepreneurs talk enough sometimes about family and especially those who are raising young families, how tough that is and the toll that takes um i think it's so impressive when i see entrepreneurs who are building very very fast great businesses and raising families to talk to us about how you're finding that balance uh again it's been a journey um you all know yourself uh i think they're like the first kid and like casphalting it into no sleep yeah yeah with where the business was a year ago was yeah was tough if i'm honest but um we it kind of all falls in line with our culture right?

15:29So we talk about we want people to enjoy where they're working. We genuinely don't want people working crazy hours and we don't want them building loads of stress and that needs to come from Jack and I, right? So I leave the office in good time. I get to spend time with my family and I think it's balance that's important. It's not perfect. But I think we... You just muddle through. Yeah. It's so clear to me when you talk about fun and enjoyment, this is what makes you such a unique entrepreneur kit. You know, for others, they don't necessarily prioritize fun, they don't prioritize the journey, they're very, very focused on the destination.

16:09I probably was more like that in my own previous ventures. So I think it's really admirable. I think there's so much other entrepreneurs can learn from this idea of actually prioritizing fun and enjoyment because life is short. What other lessons do you have for other entrepreneurs? Maybe there's someone sitting there watching this inspired and they want to start something one day hopefully not a serial company yeah yeah um maybe there's someone who's on the journey but wants to you know be even more ambitious in their vision and cementing their vision what do you think you can share with them in particular around building a company and scaling it but also i think where you guys are excelling so much in terms of brand building um and doing it in such a fun and unique way what can you share what are those kind of simple takeaways or lessons you can give to give to others uh we're so early on so it's tough uh i need to learn a lot more i think um so i was always the guy who talked about ideas you know the guy down the pub yeah i was that guy yeah who was like yeah i got this great idea and i've got this whole business plan and never did it um and uh the honest truth of why i started this business is i watched my brother start a business and that was the first time I was like oh this is like this is possible yeah you can do this yeah and so anyone who's like who is that ideas but like everyone has ideas right like if it is something you want to do just do yeah like the um when you start a business there's small problems there's big problems and then there's impossible problems you'll never solve yeah uh you'll know the feeling and uh if I look back to those first two years those impossible problems you'll never solve yeah we solved yeah and when you figure out that um everything's fixable everything's problem solving it just builds momentum um the other thing we've really learned is just simplify every time we complicate it business gets harder yeah the answer is always keep it simple just simplify yeah um so yeah i'm talking about those moments where things weren't going as well as they are perhaps now have there been moments where you thought you know this is just too hard i want to quit i don't have that motivation um and how did you get through those i don't know i don't know if i've ever got there we're two and a half years in ask me and a few more yeah um but there's definitely low moments and uh jack uh my co-founder is is probably the biggest shoulder for a lot of that and i think there's um there's a lot to be said just for for talking it's right yeah and it kind of comes back to what i said earlier like we're creating this serial brand that's meant to um remind people of their childhoods yeah and like implore them to like imagine and create yeah there's no point being stressed out doing that like something's gone wrong in that journey like if we're this fun funny serial brand yeah why would there be like a burnt out wanting to quit founder yeah um and so um simplifying things helps but also just yeah it's what we're here to do i I think it's one thing getting to know you, Keir, over the last few years is how much you surrounded yourself with advisors and good advice and good people.

19:12Talk to people about the benefit of surrounding yourself with people who have been there and done it, who can give you the benefit of their experience. I often say when I meet entrepreneurs, the best advice is to ignore every bit of advice, but to listen and to forge your own path and to listen to the bits where you think it's going to be valuable. But you guys have a great network of advisors around you. how have you forged that and what lessons have you taken from that what advice can you give to others thinking about making sure they have others with them on the journey uh yeah i like there's so much we don't know anything about him um put it this way we 10 of our business we understand 90 we have to learn like basically um and so advisors for us was if someone's willing to talk to us like we'll talk to them um and so you probably do a lot of that and start and then you start to realize that people who like listen more than they talk and like really understand your problem also have the experience because we're you we're we're trading from like complete uncertainty okay we worked in careers we know the industry but we've never done this before um and so learning from people who have like i remember when you and i first met i think we we went for lunch i mean we had this really good chat and in the end i sort of mentioned uh oh cash is getting a bit tight i don't even remember this i do cash getting a bit tight but we'll be fine and you're like no no no that's your number one problem and that was like i've had moments across business where someone just like snaps you out of it yeah um and as long as you listen and take action yeah great um but i yeah i'll always remember that that lunch well at least i can be helpful yeah um talk about the future of zero what does it look like uh you guys are on a tail right now I think it's, I understand, you know, dominating in the UK, which is, you know, Syria itself is a huge category ripe for disruption.

21:04How do you think about the future? How do you think about international expansion? Because that's something that in particular excites me is watching entrepreneurs build in the UK, where I think we have this incredible creativity and know-how. But sometimes we lack the confidence to take brands outside of the UK and international. So talk to me about how you think about the future of Syria and also with that kind of international lens. Future of Serial, we want to create a brand that really connects and properly disrupts this category. And we're fairly open about us. To us, that means taking on mainstream Serial, which is no easy task.

21:39I think we focus on going deep in the UK market for that. We are aware enough to know we've got lots we need to do here. I think where the role of brand is really important is when you want to stretch. Yeah. And that's geographic extension or products or category extension. So we're open to all of that. But I think we always focus on nail the UK market and nail the brand. Create a brand that means something to someone because if you don't have that, it's very hard to replicate in another category, let alone in another geography. Yeah. Got it. What's the future for you, it what do you want to get out of being an entrepreneur i think it's um i think that entrepreneurship is a personal growth story with the business on the side how do you think about entrepreneurship what do you uh if you fast forward 10 15 20 years from now where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur and happy hopefully um i the word the term entrepreneur always sits a bit funnily with me i think um maybe that's where i'll aspire to get to but what does good look like for me building a great business, great people.

22:51And one of the things I would love is if Surreal could create a place where new founders come out of it. Like from where we were at Vice Coco, there's a whole cohort, brilliant founders. And that's not by chance. That's by culture. So that would be real success in terms of what I want to do. I don't know. I'm I'm pretty open. Food and drink for now, I love, but I love the idea of doing something else in time. I heard something recently from a founder saying that when they address their team, they say, it's a privilege to have you here. I hope you stay forever, but I'll be most pleased when you will even start your own companies.

23:31And I think in this day where more people are feeling entrepreneurial, people wanna start their own ventures, I think being in a startup before you're ready to start your own, I think it's just the best way to learn you had it in Vitacoco. I suddenly had it in my own experiences. I think it's brilliant when you have a leadership team and founders that really nurture an entrepreneurial spirit within the team. So I'm looking forward to seeing the surreal mafia, almost like the PayPal mafia of past, but the surreal mafia in a few years where all of your team goes off to start companies. Yeah, but you need it, right?

24:00You need a bunch of many founders in your team. When you're as small as us, Yeah. Like what do people need to be good at? They need to problem solve. Yeah. They need to be unflackable and they need to be like positive thinkers. Like essentially what most founders are, you need it in your team. You need like known as clear roles. Problems are the only constant. Yeah. So you need someone who's just knocking them down, comfortable with it. And so I think you naturally you're going to attract someone who will want to do it themselves on their head take. I think startup cultures and values are so, that's a really an extension of the founding team.

24:38It really feels like you've done that. So your values are an extension of you and Jack alternate. Last couple of questions for you, Kit. What advice do you have for others? We've talked about advice for building brands, but if there's someone sitting there today, I want to start something and perhaps don't have that confidence to do so, what can they do to get into a mindset of getting out and doing it? making something happen, what advice would you give them? If someone was sitting in a room with you, what advice would you give them today? Just do. Do. And this is because I was, I think we spoke about it earlier, I was the guy who didn't.

25:15Yeah. And I think I kind of spoke about it, but the minute you start trying, things start to happen. Yeah. And it's not linear. Yeah. But you look back in a month, you're like, holy crap. Yeah. How did we end up here? Yeah. And if you're like positive about it, willing to solve problems, and like can keep the perspectives that that we always talk about it right we are getting bigger we're still tiny and it compares into kellogg's right and so fundamentally nothing we do should matter that much and so you just take risks you just do stuff if something lands great you find the next like great trajectory if it doesn't work um like like we think about it like if you put a post it on instagram no one likes it yeah one no one likes it so it's got no reach two you can delete it like if it's that bad yeah so um i think that having the mindset about nothing's permanent just try just do can um can unlock a lot of opportunity i think that low ego which you have an abundance i think is incredibly helpful in building companies you say being not being afraid to just try something you know so many people don't start because they're worried about what other people are going to think of them and ultimately that ego stops them or confidence issue stops them and i've been keeping that you know that it goes very low and realizing that shit like don't care try something yeah it's very powerful because action as you say has a very magical force the moment you just get out in the world and start doing things yeah stuff happens i think it's great advice last question if you weren't building a company if you weren't building surreal today what would you be doing otherwise i shouldn't know the answer this quickly but um and my friends laugh at me about this but i would have a woodworking studio and don't ask me why i so i've never built anything in my life let alone something at words but for some reason it has just lodged in my mind yeah um i think my um i think my ambition probably exceeds my talent in fact that's probably a good general way to summarize me but um yeah there's something um cathartic about the idea you're absolutely right making stuff with your hands is this lost art i i actually i feel it too i yeah this idea that you want to make something real put it out in the world but you don't want to do you want to create something physical and tangible um i think is yeah i think it's uh yeah we'll start a woodwork studio together maybe one day kit i'm laughing so i struggle with the night kit okay maybe we won't start that that won't be the next business.

27:47Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure, sir. Thanks for your time.