Candy Kittens’ Recipe for Business Success

0:00It took about 18 months back and forth with a couple of different manufacturers eventually settled on one and then had to really sort of twist their arm into making what we wanted to make, which was a product that was kind of using the most natural ingredients, using real fruit juice in all of the recipes and making it kind of as good as the product is today. I always say that to everyone out there. Any brand you want to start, stay true to what you believe in and what you want to do. Otherwise, you tend to mess up and make mistakes.

0:24Alex Chisnall:Candy Kittens founders Jamie Lang and Ed Williams, they share what it took to move from idea to execution as they went from frustration with boring sweets on the shelves to building a colourful challenger brand with purpose. Let's do the max we can possibly do ourselves and then as soon as we've run out of time then we find somebody to do that bit. And it still probably to this day goes like that. We've grown quite organically and just stepped it up each time as we've gone along. Welcome to this special bite-sized episode of Screw It, Just Do It from our back catalogue of over 550 past episodes.

0:56Alex Chisnall:If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow the show and grab your free two-day pass to the Festival of Entrepreneurs this October. Just head to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk to claim yours and don't forget to dive into the back catalogue. Now open for this year's Festival of Entrepreneurs. Join us at the NEC in Birmingham on October the 8th and 9th for two game-changing days with 200 plus speakers and thousands of ambitious founders. Get your free limited two-day pass at festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk or click my personal link in the show notes. And how did you go about then taking that idea and building a team, putting the idea into action?

1:31Alex Chisnall:What were the first steps, the first kind of hires that you made for someone who's listening and wants to scale up a startup? up um i think the first thing we did was we opened a pop-up shop so we opened a pop-up shop to kind of as a kind of marketing sort of stunt i suppose um and opened that and realized we need some people to kind of work in there so the first thing we did was hire a few uh kind of part-time staff to work at the shop um and actually as that once the pop-up shop closed a couple like a month later or whatever it was six weeks later those people then the good ones kind of left and and some of the not the good ones sorry the good ones stayed the bad ones um the bad ones left and the good ones kind of stayed on and worked then in our office so after the post we then used some of the money that we generated in the pop-up to open an office and and then uh yeah invited some of the people that have been really good for us at the shop to kind of come and work in the office and help out it was more just putting people in place for what for jobs that were needed rather than kind of building a team and then trying to think of a job for them it was more you know kind of let's do the max we can possibly do ourselves and then as soon as we've run out of time then we find somebody to do that bit yeah and it's still probably to this day goes like that we kind of we've grown quite organically and just stepped it up each time as we've gone along and how big's the team now We've got 12 people in the office.

3:0112 ,000 people in the office. Candy Kittens Towers. Yeah, we've got 12 ,000 people in the office. No, 12 in the office, and then we've got two different teams outside of the office. We've got a field sales team that's five, and we've got an events and brand ambassador team of six, so another 11 outside of the office. But also what we do have, which Ed came up with this brilliant idea, is that everyone across the whole of the UK, across the world, everyone loves sweets. And it's impossible to get having a team based in London to get all over the country. So what we decided to do was create like a sweet team.

3:40So basically a bunch of ambassadors all around the country who were big fans of the brand, who love sweets, who actually have a general interest in it, who live in Wales, who live in the Isle of Wight, who live in Aberdeen. It doesn't matter. So we got 50 odd people, brought them down to London, put on a cool brunch and basically made them part of the suite team. And so we don't have to, you know, and what they do is they, you know, we have this army of people around the country who when they see a pack of candy can sweets which are on the ground or they're not quite shelved properly or something happens.

4:12We have a team everywhere checking on it the entire time. So which is just a great way to kind of always keep an eye on your brand all around the country.

4:21Alex Chisnall:And how did you find those people? Were those people who already had like a strong social presence, for example, that could communicate that to their friends, family, etc.? I think what we did, we did go and look at the people who had a strong social influence for sure, just because social media nowadays is such a big phenomenon, especially in brands. Makes sense. It's the best form of marketing in the entire world. If you can build a huge social media following, I mean, it's endless the power you can do with it. So, yeah, we did look at those people, but also it's people who just have a general interest in the brands.

4:52You know, what we love at Candy Giffins are people who are excited, who have a vision of seeing where it wants to go, who are passionate about the brand and who, you know, actually want to make a difference. You know, there are so many different people out there who have great degrees and do these kind of things, do that. But they actually just don't have like that passion and that excitement and that kind of, you know, sort of freshness to build a brand. And so that's what we always look for in everyone that works, kind of gets a work part of the team. It's true. And I think also the kind of social influence thing is interesting because you can go for these kind of influencers who have maybe got 50 to 100 ,000 followers, which is great.

5:33But it's kind of then the modern day equivalent of TV advertising where you're just kind of appealing to you're hoping to catch loads of people. whereas actually if you look at just the most popular girl at the local school or the most popular guy in his year group or class or whatever it might be they've often got more influence um so everybody wants to buy into their this guy's thing because they think he's cool and those are kind of yeah smaller micro influences i think it's quite useful do you know so interesting about that that we got told this this uh this story which um it is we were told it's true possibly might not be so don't take 100 % of it.

6:11But do you remember there was that advert, the Yo Valley yogurt advert, when the farmers were dancing around? Yeah, yeah. A huge, incredible viral advert that everyone saw. That actually lost, I think it was Yo Valley, three million pounds worth of sales. That's actually lost in that because what it did is it represented the brand in a different way. The brand was meant to be about organic, you know, yogurt and freshness, all these kind of things, and actually commercialized it. So actually targeted some wrong audience. So the thing for us which happens sometimes is that, especially with brands, brands see people who have a big social media following, like it's 100, 200, 300 ,000.

6:47But actually, it's just the wrong demographic. It's the people actually who aren't going to buy it. So you pay heaps of money to hire these bloggers or these vloggers or these YouTubers or whatever who have this huge following. And you may get the sales once, but the buyback never works. So for us, like Ed says, it's about finding those people who actually do make a difference rather than just finding people, anyone, because you think they're good.

7:07Alex Chisnall:If you're enjoying this conversation and thinking, I need to be around more people like this, then I've got the perfect solution for you. The Festival of Entrepreneurs is where 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 ambitious entrepreneurs come together to learn from the people who've actually done it. It's on October the 8th and 9th at the NEC in Birmingham, and I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes. Real entrepreneurs, real stories, real strategies, exactly like what you're hearing right now, but live and in person. Go to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk and get your free two-day pass before they're gone. It's being targeted, I suppose, and it's the same for your customer base, isn't it, at the end of the day as well?

7:46Alex Chisnall:You want to be that incredibly targeted with that. And I remember listening to Ed talk before, which I'd love to hear again now, is how long was it from idea to actually having a physical product? Because I'm sure you said it was something like 18 months, yet you still managed to build a huge following of people who wanted to be able to buy and taste your product. yeah absolutely so you're right you're bang on it was 18 months um i think the big one of the most important things we realized really quick was that we had this amazing kind of marketing platform in jamie and and sort of links are made in chelsea um so that meant that we could have probably just bought out a bag of candy kittens and stuffed it with cola bottles um from coco and just sold 100 ,000 bags.

8:33But actually, we wanted it to be much bigger and sort of have a lot more longevity than that. So for us, it was about making the product the best it could possibly be. And that's kind of where the core idea of the business started. It was how do we make better sweets?

8:48Alex Chisnall:Yeah. And yeah, it was a difficult journey. Jamie mentioned earlier that you can't just Google how do you make a bag of sweets because that doesn't really work. So lots and lots of conversations and research and kind of speaking to everybody we could possibly speak to. I'm a big believer that you just kind of, however, you sort of judge a conversation, but what happens, just have the conversation and speak to as many people as you possibly can always because you never know kind of what nugget of information someone's going to be able to give you. yeah and it took about 18 months back and forth with a couple of different manufacturers eventually settled on one and then had to really sort of twist their arm into making what we wanted wanted to make which was a product that was kind of using the most natural ingredients using real fruit juice in all the recipes and making it kind of as good as the product is today that was quite difficult at the time because it was something completely new for them um so going back and forth for two guys that had absolutely no experience in food and drink let alone sort of confectionery and sort of food technology so that was that was quite a challenge but we got there in the end and I think we're we're always glad that we waited that long I think that first 18 months was tough because we were a sweets company without any sweets but yeah we managed to somehow string people along for that long and I think it worked I think the big thing is kind of I always say move quickly is a good bit of advice but in this instance I think it was about trying to make sure we had everything right before we moved quickly and then as soon as we did have the sweets we then did go kind of completely berserk and pushed it out as hard as we possibly could.

10:32But also there's that there's that thing as well which we were so we kept so true to is that if you if you talk to you know you said yourself with a father right you're a father of kids right yeah exactly if we asked you about your kids you could talk for hours about them yeah yeah you're right like everything about that and that's the same with your brand you know we we had to stay true to our brand we could have as ed said package you know sweets with you know whatever we wanted to and probably sold them and all these kind of things but that we wouldn't stay true to ourselves we wouldn't be able to talk to about our brand that we talk about our kids you know that's what you want to you want to be able to say everything about it because you love it because you you understand it because you know you've put all the effort into it and you actually believe in it and so that's we've always made sure that we you know it did take us 18 months and perhaps and we had created this huge hype about nothing in a sense but you know we stayed true to our guns and uh and touch wood it's it sort of worked so far and i always say that to everyone out there you know if you whatever brand you're starting make it any brand you want to start stay true to what you believe in and what you want to do otherwise you tend to like mess up and make mistakes.

11:37Alex Chisnall:Yeah, no, that's great advice. And within that, Jamie and Ed, were there, in that 80 months, were there moments of self-doubt that it was ever going to happen? Probably a couple of times, but not serious ones. I think that both Jamie and I are very, very determined and 100 % behind it from day one. And I think whatever obstacle that's been put up in front of us or however many times someone said no, we've just kind of you know dusted that off and carried on as if nothing happened i think that that's so so important you've just got to be completely resilient and i think that yeah we were just determined to get what we wanted whether that's stubbornness or belief or kind of just yeah all of those things yeah perseverance yeah perseverance yeah i'm not sure it was it was definitely what it was all about at the start there was lots of times we could have given up but i guess that's why we're still here that conversation just proves something you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with so here's my challenge upgrade your network the festival of entrepreneurs is happening october the 8th and 9th and i'm giving my listeners free two-day passes to get in the room with five to ten thousand entrepreneurs who are actually building something this is where the risk takers the game changers and the people who've decided to screw it and just do it come for inspiration, education and connection.

13:01Alex Chisnall:Don't just listen to their success stories. Go meet the people living them. Grab your free pass now because the biggest risk isn't taking a chance. It's missing the opportunity entirely. So a few takeaways for me from that conversation with Jamie and Ed. I've been lucky enough over the years to interview them a bunch of times that we've probably done eight, nine, 10 different events together as well over the years, everywhere from Manchester down to Brighton and everywhere in between. So look, You don't need to know everything. You just need to start, right? I shouldn't need to tell you that, but sometimes you need reminding.

13:32Alex Chisnall:Ideas are everywhere, but execution is everything. Everyone can come up with an idea, but actually executing it is the difficult bit. Partnering with the right person can be your superpower. Absolutely. You can get there far quicker with help rather than trying to do everything on your own. And look, if you enjoyed that bite-sized episodes, follow wherever you get your podcasts. It just means more people get to see this show. And don't forget, you can meet the founders of brands like Candy Kittens at the Festival of Entrepreneurs this October the 8th and 9th. There's limited free two-day passes to join me and over 200 speakers there via the link in the show notes.

14:07Alex Chisnall:And you can go to a festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk to see the full speaker lineup.