The Entrepreneur Who Turned Rejection Into A €100m Success Story | SheerLuxe Conversations

0:00Hello, I'm Georgie Coleridge Cole, ShearLux's founder and CEO and welcome to today's ShearLux podcast. I am joined today by Gary Lavin, who is the founder of Vithit, the UK's leading health drink brand. After a rugby injury ended his career at 24, Gary spotted a gap in the market, people working out and then basically reaching for sugary drinks. And that moment sparked the idea for Vithit. The journey hasn't been 100 % smooth. From losing his home during the recession to selling bottles out of a van, Gary stopped at nothing to bring his vision to life. Today, it looks quite different though to that.

0:43And it's sold in 15 countries, generates over 100 million euros in retail sales, all without any outside investment. I am a massive fan, was, cross my heart, I hope to die, Long before I met Gary, I was buying this drink. So it's even more thrilling to have you here today.

1:10Welcome. Thanks a million. That's my life story. So we don't have to talk about anything else now. We need to talk about all of that. God, I'm fascinated. I mean, as I said, I am genuinely, I walked in here today with one of these. I had been drinking these long before I met you I met you a few years ago now Yeah only two or three years ago But I was already a massive fan So there's so much to cover But can you take us back to your early days Sure Rugby What that taught you Yeah I was actually playing rugby in the amateur era It went professional I moved over here to the UK I got a contract with Harlequins Time of my life Everything was amazing And pre-season training Banged my knee Lost my contract life over and if anybody listening to this has like lost their job it was the only thing I could do I was a rugby player I didn't know what else to do.

2:00Holoquins they were mega back in the day weren't they? They were yeah. Are they still? I never played a game for them because I got into pre-season yeah so I was a nearly man and I had always been both my parents were entrepreneurs so I'd always been buying and selling things so believe it or not. Tell me a bit about that tell me about buying and selling before the rugby career that didn't happen. When rugby world cup many years before that was on in Europe, in Ireland. I won't even tell you the date because you'll realise how old I am. I thought that I was only like a teenager, maybe 19. I thought that people would, because the seats in the stadiums used to be really hard and I thought I would create a cushion that everyone would want to sit on and it was called bummers.

2:39So I was selling cushions outside the stadiums with no licence to sell it. And the business was a bummer. I hardly sold any. I had to give them all away. So that was one business. then I actually went into when I moved to the UK I don't know maybe 95 or whatever I went into women's vitamins um got listed in boots why did you go into women's vitamins I realized that first of all there was things missing um you know with I had a product called PMEs I had another one called menopause and uh as in two words yes well you're aware ahead of your time actually well I was always into health I was always interested in health but the business wasn't didn't make any money and I literally just closed it down I didn't even try and sell it because I was just I suppose when I look back I was banging my head against the wall and trying again and trying again and just and that's the one thing that I would always say to people just you know yesterday was the best time to try a bit to start a business today is the second best time just go do it so I was doing stuff and failing and doing stuff and failing and eventually you know the short the short term thing was I just kind of fell into this drinks thing because I didn't like taking vitamins myself.

3:46So that was my, one of my thought processes is that I couldn't swallow vitamins, but I wanted to take them. So I kind of said, well, can you put them into drinks? Along with the fact that I saw everybody drinking sugary drinks back in the nineties and early two thousands, like your average sports drink contains like 48 grams of sugar. And I knew through my rugby training that sugar was really bad for you. So that kind of thought process back in early 2000 was probably ahead of its time because nobody really knew the damage that sugar did back then it wasn't a it wasn't public knowledge but like companies are still lacing drinks with sugar which is to me is appalling because you know that leads to obesity and we could go down the hole yeah you know the obesity issues but that's one of the main reasons why i started so what year did you launch vithit was it vithit that you launched no so i launched i was researching from 1998 and I remember the internet was so long ago but the internet was was in such as infancy that you couldn't really google manufacturers of soft drinks so I was driving up and down Ireland like I heard there was a manufacturer in Ireland I went down to see him then I said to him look can you put vitamins into drinks he said I don't know but there's a research company in in Germany then I got on a flight to the German company how old are you at this time I was probably like 24.

5:04You are going to work out your age by then. That's okay, that's okay. I'm not 24 now. I was kind of researching and doing all of those things and getting the basics of it done. And then I just went ahead and produced what I could afford, which was, let's say, I don't know, 5 ,000 cases and stuck them in a warehouse and just stared at them and went, right, now I have to go sell them. What was it called? It was called VITZ, V-I-T-Z. and it's another really interesting part of marketing in that I thought vits meant vitamins that was my whole idea um but no one else did so after about five years of losing money and going to stores and and coming back the worst thing if you're a salesperson is walking into a store and seeing your product hasn't sold it's it's soul destroying so I'd go in and I this would happen for about five years and eventually I said I'm gonna have to change came up with the name vithit registered it but you had some distribution for bits yeah yeah yeah I was probably in around Ireland I was probably in like 500, 2000 maybe 500 stores in Ireland and did it taste like bit hit?

6:06it's exactly the same exactly the same exactly the same and this is the amazing thing for 25 years ago when the product wasn't selling there's two flavours we have that are now still the same flavours and we now sell the same in a day that we used to in a whole year wow but it's just the end of packaging as in well I used to like in fragrance marketing they used to say the name the bottle the packaging the branding everything was more important than the actual smell of the juice which used to break my mind so it's exactly yeah so I would always say the product has to look great first if it doesn't look great and if it's not obvious you've no chance but then number two so people will always try it once if it looks great but if it doesn't taste great then you're done people will never buy it for the second time what were the original flavours were they the yuzu in No, the berry, which I think is available in some stores in the UK.

6:54And then the citrus one, which is available in Ireland. It's not really available here. Berry is definitely available here. Yeah, yeah, it is. Citrus, I'm not. Citrus, not so, no. I'm a user girl. But the amazing thing is, when I came up with the brand name Vithit, stuck it on pretty much the same bottle, pretty much the same label, sales went up about 300 % or 400 % overnight. Okay, right. You're an Irishman, you talk very quickly. Let's get back a bit. So, Vithit was in 500 to 1 ,000 stores in Ireland. Yeah, just in Ireland. And we are in 1990. Well, this was 2000, let's say. 2000-ish. And you decided how long in to rebrand?

7:30Was it within how many years? I was about five years in. Five years of losing money and not being able to pay my rent and getting depressed, all that stuff, which every entrepreneur goes through, by the way. That must have been quite novel. I'm trying to think what it was like. I mean, there was LucasAid, wasn't there? What else was there in the sports drink market in 2000? There was just basic sports drinks. So we were literally the first in Europe and maybe even in the world. If there was an American product called Vitamin Water, which sold for 50 cent was an investor back in the early 2000s.

7:59We were actually before those guys. So as far as I know, we were pretty much the first in the world. There might have been a couple in kind of beatnik products in Germany or something like that. But yeah, this was so it was basically so mainstream. I mean, I just called into a couple of stores here in the UK, in London, just this morning to see what kind of products are coming through. And there's so much innovation now. But back then, we were the only ones. So there was like LucasAid Sports, Powerade, Coke, Diet Coke. Oh, I mean, also. And then Innocent then came along after that. So Innocent would have come in maybe 2006, 2008, that kind of era.

8:33But no, this was like, there was nothing like this on the shelves. Gosh, okay. So early 2000s, you rebranded as Vittich. Yeah. And you took everything off the shelf. You took the Vits off the shelf, didn't you? Well, no, I couldn't afford to. I let it kind of sell through. kind of sell through and then yeah when we put vitted on the shelf then the difference was just phenomenal and i learned a lesson then that you know you've got to say exactly what what it is within the name because when i had vits if you can imagine this bottle here vits said vits low calorie vitamin things and it just had so many messages that everything was getting lost so the most important thing now is vittish i don't have to explain if i took away everything else and just put vitted there people would guess that it's a vitamin drink right yeah yeah and that's the most important thing you have to have certain messages in your logo that you know the three most important things first second and third and your first has to be like very large second doesn't matter where it is really I mean because people only have 0.3 of a second to decide what they want to buy on the shelf.

9:32So much to look at isn't there? Yeah. And this really stands out on shelf obviously did it look like this did the first version of Vithit look like this? It's looked like this for about 14 years and so I kept tweaking it and tweaking it till I knew I got it right and once I got it right don't touch it if it ain't broke don't don't don't try to fix it so once we got it right um which took a lot of tweaks and eventually then we just left it and we haven't touched it since I want to keep going through the story and what happened in 2011 and but but can you just take a moment to and a bit of a sales pitch can you can you explain what is in here because I think the thing for me is I drink too much Diet Coke.

10:16I don't drink enough water. This is a bit hit on it. It tastes really good. Yeah. So I just started drinking these as an alternative to water and, you know, they sell them at the health club I go to and blah, blah, blah. But I don't know. I know they taste great. I know they're good for you. Yeah. And I know they're not water, which I don't like, or Diet Coke, which isn't very good for me. What is in here? We actually had sell Diet Coke in Ireland. So we outsell them. Yeah. In Ireland. Yeah. Yeah. And a couple of retailers, we outsell them here in the UK. You outsell Diet Coke? Yeah. In Ireland.

10:50Yeah. Yeah. If you go to Ireland, you'll literally be hit in the face with a bottle of it everywhere you go. I wanted to be everything that, let's say, Coke wasn't. So I wanted to be low sugar. I wanted to be low calories. I wanted to look healthy and be healthy. So what we did was, I mean, yesterday I was down in a research lab with a lab coat and a hairnet on doing tastings for like more flavors and it takes about a year and a half to get the flavors right because vitamins don't taste great right yeah so you have to kind of mask them with a little bit of juice so we have juice water vitamins and tea and we kind of mix them all together and yeah there's actually teas in all these yeah and it's just it's just a little extra benefit so there's green there's green tea in this one so it'll give you a little bit of a kick of energy about the same amount as a cup of green tea and so it'll give you a bit of energy but what i wanted to do was take sugar away sugar like here's the thing sugar tastes great but it's also highly addictive so if you want to get in better shape or you want to you want to get clarity and not clouded of mind you want to get away from sugar so that was the whole basis behind it so we mix juice with vitamins with waters and teas and we just kind of mix it all up and it took about a year and a half to get the first product right and we know what we're doing now and we you know And we have good technology just to get it right, to get all the tastings right.

12:08But ultimately, it's low calorie. Yeah. It's 85 % less sugar than your average drink. So that's what I think caught me, if I'm going to be really honest. I am someone who is quite vain and doesn't want to drink all my catamaran. Drink it in wine, maybe. But, you know, otherwise it's diet cocoa. And so I think the thing for me that really grabbed me, that it was so low calorie. Yeah. I mean I used to drink I've been alive quite a lot when I was you know a student and beyond actually but this tastes really good but it's low calorie and it doesn't taste very sweet now like as I said generally by the time I'm wondering if I can nab that green one off you I did PT at 60 seconds of course you can yeah you can grab whatever you want you want I'll get a load delivered to the office as well we've got some more upstairs yeah well look like I said like flavour is so important and the way when I started this there was no real health revolution back in 2000 So what I basically said was, look, if my product can look as good or better than sugary drinks and people try it and it tastes as good or better than sugary drinks.

13:09And then they look at the product and go, oh, it's low in sugar. Then I knew I would be able to keep a customer for life. And that was the principle behind it. And actually, I just called into a health store here just near your office. And I looked on the shelf and there was a load of new products. And I bought two or three of them and I taste them all. And they actually didn't taste great. And I'm kind of going, you're never going to make it unless the product. They looked nice. And they had interesting things to say on the cans. But I just tasted them and I was like, they're not going to succeed.

13:38You know, that's the basis. You've got to look great, taste great, be great. That's kind of the three principles. Yeah. Tell me a bit about the stage from BitHit hitting the shelves to 2011 when you were told the business was in the solver. Before we get to that point, and obviously, you know, possible to where we are now, and it's a totally, totally different story, but how did you get Vithit taken seriously when you got it on the shelf in its new state, in its new product? You know, it was very new, as you said. There wasn't anything like it. I think what's really interesting is, to me, the branding is very commercial, but it's got serious stuff in it.

14:24Yeah. So how did you get people to take it seriously? Well, I think in any business, you have to put a flag in the ground, like try and conquer a city or an area. So if I was to do it all again, I'd probably, I wouldn't start in London because it's very expensive to conquer London. I'd probably start in, I don't know, Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester, some big city and try and make a success there. And then I always try and create FOMO then for the buyers, fear of missing out. So in Ireland, I made it highly. I started in Dublin and it's kind of upmarket stores there, kind of like market stores.

14:59And then from that, I went to sparse stores. Then from that, I went to Tesco. And then from that, I went to petrol retailers, all that kind of stuff. So you build a brand that was just around Dublin. And then naturally then from a capital or a large city, it just starts to flow out of there. And so I did that. Were you working with distributors or were you doing it yourself? A bit of both. Sometimes I went through three or four different distributors who sometimes it's hard to trust that they're going to do a job because let's say you get a distributor with a brand that's unknown like Vithid back in the day and they might be selling Red Bull.

15:32The sales guys are just going to sell Red Bull because that's what they're making their commission off. So I used to have to get in the trucks with the sales guys and I would try and get on, you know, get on well with them. If they like me, then I'd go meet the store managers. And if the store manager liked me, they would give me a shot. so it was all kind of literally on day to day calling into stores and you showing up and you selling the product and yeah I'm sure you sell the well you sell your own product better than anyone didn't you yeah yeah when the company went insolvent I had a few sales reps working for me and I had to let them go and all I had left was a van from one of the sales reps so I drove around Ireland basically I sat down with an accountant and she just used the word insolvent and I was kind of like I've never really heard that word before I was kind of like it's not good and so the company was very sick she said and she said you're going to have to fire everybody and you're going to have to basically she said I believe in your product I've seen 23 companies in this state I've rescued one of them I forget it was a gardening centre random and she said we can rescue you guys but you need to get off your high horse and get in a car and just go south so I was like right and why what I mean in Sullivan you'd obviously run out of cash run out of cash I was paying all the sales as far as I was paying myself the company was burning like back in let's say from 2007 to 2011 the company was burning through like 10 ,000 euros a month which is a lot of money but it was seriously a lot of money back then when it was just all mine and I ran out of money and you know the bailiffs were knocking on the door that I couldn't pay my mortgage and I had to I lost my house I had to hand the keys back of my house to the bank I had to they repossessed my car so it was last chance saloon How did you deal with that?

17:24Extreme optimism and I'm always a good sleeper so at night if anybody hopefully there isn't but if anybody here is listening and they're going through kind of struggles a lot of people then the struggle ends at night when you can go to sleep so I used to just yeah I'd just fall asleep and then you'd wake up and you'd be like and the solicitor's letter would be at the door it was pretty horrific it wasn't fun but it motivated me to just work better, work harder and work more intelligently and look, most people would put the company into administration right? but then I'd have to get a real job that wouldn't be fun but you know, that's what happens Sherlock's is 18, I've seen it time and time and time again you didn't failure wasn't an option, honestly I didn't know what else to do and I knew that someday that if I could keep getting the product on the shelf, I knew that someday people would buy it.

18:17And the product presumably was selling. You were just, you know, you had losses of 10 to 11, you said, thousand euros a month. So it's not that the product wasn't selling. Correct. It's just, you know, you weren't in profit enough to... Correct. So I had to just change tax. So my overheads were too big. I had three sales ups on the roads. I had a distributor. I was giving them all the margin. so I just went back out in the van that I had taken all I had left the Vidit branded van that I had taken back off one of the sales reps that I had let go and I just got in the car and I drove across Ireland and I sold it into 3 ,500 stores within about 18 months I stayed in bed and breakfast across the country Oh gosh, you make me emotional Yeah, and then I literally reversed the fortunes of the company within the first three months of doing that So it was actually And so you were optimistic it you were like I can sort this out yeah well it was actually it ended up being a really positive time the point up to that was horrendous but from that point onwards I knew that I was breaking even starting to make a profit I knew if I would go into the store and sell them 10 cases that I knew that I would personally make like 500 euros for every store so suddenly I actually started I became a much smaller company but profitable so it was just me so I knew every time I'd sell x amount of cases I wouldn't give it to anybody else it would just come back to me and how were you managing to produce the product without any cash at that point yeah well that's so hard well I had stock to sell so I had lots of stock in a warehouse so if I got rid of that stock fast then I could pull the money back in give it back to the manufacturer and do it again so that's pretty much and the accountant was very busy in those days trying to just hold people off to pay them and then we'd get paid and we'd hang on to the money for a while and give it to the right people and so it was like I was like a ninja fighting off lots of different cash flow is king as they say yeah very much so and look and that's another point in that I had I got brought somebody in earlier who was better at accountancy than I was so everybody's good at something right I mean very seldom people are good at everything um and I was just terrible at accountancy I was good at selling good at creating brands um but I realized then I need to get somebody who can just watch the figures yeah and then i'll just go out and sell and do what i do well so you know everybody's good at something and i'm just i was terrible at that so you have to you have to cover off those numbers don't you i i would say i i you've met my husband um when i started shit up to read a book that said smart girls my accountants and i was like right i've nailed it absolutely um uh how were you marketing the product were you was getting it on shelves doing that for you or was their marketing activity running alongside it because it's one thing being in store it's obviously going to sell yeah um and it was a fairly new category you know you obviously look great on shelf that is a huge part of success in supermarket retailing isn't it yeah um but but how were you yeah were you doing any marketing we didn't have any money to do marketing so it was paint the van up drive around and I used to put I created leaves that I would like paper leaves that were said less calories than an apple and I would throw it over the I would go in to the stores myself and throw it over each neck of every bottle so the bottle then would just pop as you'd walk into a store you'd see like leaves on top of the bottle just something that simple What you're just sneaking in and doing it Yeah yeah I was just going in and just sticking them all on and the manager would go what are you doing I said oh I'm the owner here nice to meet you I'm just going to throw them out yeah what are you doing I'm in this brand have you mind part of it is I mean I guess that's what you'd call guerrilla marketing but it was desperation I mean I knew that if people weren't buying it I was out of a job and out of my house which I already was so it was last chance saloon so I was willing to do anything so less calories in an apple I love that I mean well it worked Gary because that is what I don't remember seeing I didn't buy one with an apple with a leaf no that was in Dublin that was in Dublin But, you know, it really, as I said, that's what caught my eye.

22:20This vitamins, the fact that it could replace Ribena or water and it had low calories. Got you off the Ribena. I never thought that would happen. I never really like. I know. I used to drink a lot of that. You, at some point, got this into Tesco's and Boots. I think Boots. I started buying it. When did that happen? That must have been a pretty eureka moment after 18 months in your van and bed and breakfast. Yeah, so when I then got it successful in Ireland in around 2010, 2011, I came here to the UK and I was living in a 450 square foot flat. And I remember sitting there at my desk, that was my office and my kitchen and my sitting room.

23:01And I go, right. And I started making phone calls. And of course, they don't pick up the phone. So I started getting into small retailers around London. And how did you do that? Is that you again knocking on the door? That was me again, yeah, on a moped, going around with them. I basically had a distributor who had some cases of it in the corner, and I said, look, I'm going to go sell it with them like I did in Ireland. And I'd go around in a moped into the store, say, listen, I'm the owner here. Can you take this on? They'd take it on, stick it on the shelf. And then, you know, the distributor would go back week in, week out to get it there.

23:34So I started getting into more and more stores. and then I met up with, I won't mention the retailer, but I met up with one of the biggest retailers in the country just through sheer luck. I basically just started harassing them and eventually I kept sending them emails and I found the buyer's number and eventually she picked up the phone. I said, look, we're the most successful brand in Ireland. I know Ireland's not the UK, but you need to have a look at this brand. She had a look at it. That's the piece, isn't it, that everyone's looking for, like the access to that buyer. That was just persistence, was it?

24:04Yeah, just persistence. Throw enough stuff at the wall, it'll stick. so Annoyed them so much they say for God's sake No I did I annoyed them so much because I was kind of like look this is a product you need to have on your shelves you've got sugar everywhere it's a burning platform you're going to lose out in retail you know you've got to move on to non-sugar products You're giving them a solution to a problem that they're going to have yeah because I could see it happening in the States I knew it was going to happen in the UK and if you look at the shelves back then versus now like there's so much more healthy products because I knew that this was happening and people didn't want to have sugar so she trialed it on 100 stores we became the one three and fourth best seller of their secondary brand so like behind Lucas Aid Monster well Monster weren't there all of those big products but she didn't list the product so this to me was mind boggling I'm like well if your best selling product were making you more money surely you'd stick us on the shelf and it's one of the things with big retail they've got deals with all the bigger companies and who are getting free stock and whatever so we didn't get listed them.

25:05So I sent those results. What do you mean you didn't get listed? So you were available online but not? No, no, no. So it was a trial and they just said the trial didn't work and I said no it did work. She was like no it didn't and I was like okay. So this was mind boggling to me. I didn't understand because you know where I'm from if you're the best seller you get on the shelves. Not in larger countries. So I took that information to Boots and the Boots buyer said wow she said she must be in every one of those stores around the country. I said no and she said I'm not going to make the same mistake.

25:34we're listing you and I was like great and that's why you saw it in Boots so thank you Boots they were the first ones to get it and again then I'm sticking a flag in the ground now I'm in Boots a national retailer across the UK and from that point then I went to Sainsbury's I went to WH Smith I went to Waitrose Co-op we've just been told that we're going to get on our last retailer that we don't have was Waitrose and we're just going to get on the shelves I can't believe you're not in Waitrose about time Waitrose I know I know and actually it's almost like a perfectly waitress design type product.

26:06You'd think it'd be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've been in Sainsbury's for ages. Yeah, Sainsbury's back just really early. Yeah. And yeah, they were amazing. So your route to the customer is all through? Yeah, well, we do sell online as well. It's funny, when I first started selling online was around through COVID when everyone couldn't get it through retail. And I was like, people aren't going to order cases of it through couriers. And actually they do. so some people don't want to have to go to retail but sure we know about that now i've got a question here about legal action in 2014 yeah that was interesting a competitor which is really interesting because i remember interviewing the founder of proper corn sandra um and her saying that sort of a month before she launched proper corn which went on to become the best-selling snack in europe um for a period i don't know if it's it is i remember her saying sort of a week a month before she launched proper corn her heart sank because tyrells were also launching popcorn posh popcorn if that's what you want yes yes and actually she had this panic moment and somebody said you know one product doesn't make a category and actually you need more to make a category so you sort of won a bit of competition don't you because it forces a supermarket to create a serious space on the shelves exactly and get behind something yeah but then there's a limit isn't there and well there's a line that I don't like what was the situation I embrace more and more health products because it just means there's going to be less sugar products and you know more choice yeah more choice makes everybody healthier and more people will start buying our products and other products and just the category will grow and it'll shrink the sugar products but there's a line that shouldn't be crossed and that's a branding line so when we became successful in Ireland I remember walking into a store one day and I saw a product called Vit Plus and it actually had a circular logo.

28:02It had fruits on the left. It was literally a carbon copy. And I was like, wow. So I went to a lawyer. The lawyer said, oh, it's a bit dodgy. I'm not sure you're actually going to win. And I didn't have the money for it. And then I went and got a second opinion. And the lawyer said, no, no, this is a slam dunk. We'll get these people. I said, well, what happens if we lose? He said, well, it's going to cost you 50 grand. And I didn't have 50 grand. This was around the time when I was trying to build the company back up. So I had to go after them because they were definitely stealing our cake. We had created this category and I don't mind competition, but these guys were almost identical.

28:40They had almost identical flavors. So yeah, we went after them and my lawyer turned to me and said, don't worry, I'll have them bleeding out on the floor. I went, you're my lawyer. so so it took about actually it was very fast it took about a month and I basically said look we're going straight to court and they were like no no give us time to discuss it with our barrister and their barrister and I didn't know much about law back then a lot more now but I basically said no no I said we're going to court I want to take these guys to court and I want to show everybody what they've done and then pretty much in the steps of the court they did an agreement with us they pulled all the product off the shelf and yeah that was the end of them oh one other thing I did which was I actually phoned all the retailers and I basically said to the retailer I said look I've created this category started off in 2000 I've been here for 14 years I've been in a van driving up and down the country I don't mind competition but I said I don't think you should be supporting anybody who is plagiarising and completely copying me and about 80 % of the retailers agreed and they didn't list them yeah quite right yeah put the pressure on them to do the right thing So what year, other key, when you look back, was there a tipping point?

30:00I mean, you obviously came here, you went out, you met the retailers here, you got listed in Boots, in Sainsbury's, et cetera, et cetera. When did you sort of feel like you could breathe? And actually this business that you've been told was insolvent in 2011. Yeah, it was around. Because it's a phenomenal success story. And I know there's lots of innovation in the pipeline. and still lots of potential, but, you know, I mean, you've killed it. At what point did you go, okay? Yeah, it was around 2014, which is mad because if someone had told me in 2000, I wouldn't be able to breathe for 14 years, I wouldn't have done it maybe.

30:39Don't do anything very carefully, people. Yeah. So when you're in that kind of stage, every step you're taking towards success is a step, right? You know, you're not going to, you fail all the time and you only need to succeed once, right? So it was 2014. We were selling 3 ,000 cases a month in Ireland. And a big distributor approached me. And he said, how many cases are you doing? I said, 7 ,000. And he goes, okay, we'd like to take you on. They were the Red Bull distributor in Ireland. And I said, all right, let's do it. And in the first month, they sold 30 ,000 cases. So they 10X'd it overnight.

31:18So at that stage, I knew that we had a product that sold because I could see it in the individual stores. We just weren't in enough stores. And they multiplied it out overnight. And that's now the case here. So there's probably 45 ,000 stores in the UK. We're still only in 9 ,000 or 10 ,000 of them. But our rate of sale is so strong. But because we're not a massive company, we can't just turn it on overnight. So it's slowly, slowly to, you know, to get into more and more stores. But it's happening. When you say 45 ,000 stores, you mean that you could be in? Yeah, so like that's corner stores, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Tesco, all that kind of stuff.

31:52Right, and you're at about 20, 25 % of that. So there's a lot of potential. There's a lot of room to grow. Come on, Waitrose, skate some. All that you need is a good rate of sale in some, like let's say in a grocery store or whatever. So in Sainsbury's, our rate of sale is extremely strong. So we go back to Sainsbury's and say, look how well we're doing. we'd like to be in more of your stores and that's the kind of negotiation that you go through you're also i'm really interested you're in quite a lot of independence as well sort of local i mean i love seeing it sort of become a bit of a game seeing where you pop up yeah i mean you live in dubai um but it always amuses me sort of being in doha or something and being oh that's it you know how do you sort of balance big supermarkets big retailers with all the small ones because obviously you know long tail you want those two don't you how do the supermarkets feel about that is there an order within which to do that what advice do you have on that well it's funny one of our most unsuccessful because I'm just talking about the success that we've had but it's not all high success so actually in Dubai is one of our is our worst per capita territory and I lived there, which is pretty embarrassing, right?

33:09But what we did wrong was we went into top end retail. So the likes of Sainsbury's Tesco's over there, their spinnies and waitrose and Carrefour over in Dubai. So we went in there, but we didn't see it from the bottom. We weren't in cafes, gyms, you know, hospitals, colleges, sports centers, that kind of thing, which is what we did in Ireland. It's what we've done in the UK, but you have to be able to build a brand. You can't just go into a country and throw it there and people just see it on a shelf in a retailer, you have to build a story before that. People have to be buying it in their coffee shops and they have to be buying it in their local retailers and that kind of stuff.

33:41So that was a recent lesson. So you said that way around, did you? So we did it the wrong way around. So that's a recent lesson. We're always learning. And because we had built it organically in Ireland, did the same thing in the UK, in Belgium, in Holland, in Iceland, wherever else we are around the world, we always did it that way without even knowing we were doing it that way. And then in Dubai, now I've turned it around in Dubai, it's growing pretty fast now. But I mean, I've been in Dubai for four years and the first three years it was a disaster. I'm trying to get it right. It was a bit of a mess.

34:12And can you talk to me about the range? What is in the range? How many flavors are there? Can I also, can I drink that? Yes. You've been staring at that. I can't remember if I started to say this is Apple and Elderflower. That's your go-to. I'm not being paid to say this. I genuinely drink this all the time. I also love the Yuzu and dragonfly water, what's that called? Dragon fruit. Close. We don't put dragonflies in our jails. No, you wouldn't, would you? I mean, you could. There's probably loads of health benefits. Can you just talk us a little bit through the range? What does it look like? How have you built that up?

34:47Yeah, well, I mean, still in the UK, the larger retailers only take on two flavours, maybe three if we're really lucky. Really? Yeah. Co-op actually have taken on all four, which is great. but we try and visually we try and put in like a rainbow effect so they're all natural colours but if you put them like the green beside the pink beside the, so we actually have So sorry, all four is these two the yuzu and dragon, fruit not fly and the berry one Yes, so if you put them beside each other you kind of get a rainbow effect on the shelf but yeah, they all have different purposes so each one of them contains less than 35 calories less than 6 grams of sugar and we have 100 % RDA of eight vitamins in every one and we'll throw in a different tea into every one.