#54 - Bina Edwards - Holie's [UK Commercial Director]

0:00Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today I am joined by the wonderful Bina Edwards, who is the UK Commercial Director at Holies. Now, Holies are a healthy cereal and granola brand. They are making it low sugar, high fiber, high protein, and absolutely delicious. And they're doing it in a really fun, non-preachy way. The marketing is fantastic. It's already landed them in hot water with a very well-known bakery and snacking brand. And it's taken them to court. It's given them great PR. It's all discussed within this episode. But it was really great to get to know Bina and her background from the early days of being a Red Bull Wings ambassador.

0:33Moving into Ugly Drinks, an early stage startup with Joe and Hugh who have gone on to do fantastic things. She's moved on to places like Liquid Death and talks about her experience of the growth and amazing rush doing that. And then the swift exit as Ben discussed on the previous episode. And then now at Holy's what their goal is, how they're going to do that. and yeah there's so much in this without further ado let's dig into the episode enjoy are you a founder of the next exciting food and drink brand are you looking to scale and grow well let me introduce you to mission kitchen london's home food and drink entrepreneurs and sponsor of the unfounders mission kitchen gives you the equipment support and community to take your business to the next level with flexible access to commercial kitchens expert mentorship on site and a network of hundreds of like-minded founders this could be exactly what your business needs to level up.

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1:36Hello and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today I'm joined by the lovely Bina Edwards. So Bina, can you please let everyone know where you work and how long you have been there? Yes, of course. My name is Bina, as you've already covered, and I'm the commercial director for Holies, which is a granola brand that's come out of the Netherlands. And me and my business partner, I guess, my colleague, Ashley, I have launched it in the UK for them. And we've only been there about six months. The original launch they did out of the Netherlands, brought it here in September and launched onto Ocado. And then we've now been brought in as like a full-time team to actually set it up.

2:12You know, we've set up like a UK entity, the logistics, operations, we've got an office like the nuts and bolts um and that's our full-time focus and for those who haven't come across holies before give us a spiel like what makes it special how did it start like what's the the backstory behind like why does holies exist so holies is um the the tagline is the world's healthiest breakfast which we truly believe that it is i think obviously you could argue that blueberries are as we were talking about that earlier but basically it's it's like the cleanest nutritionals you can get so it's as close as you can get to making your like granola at home shop boards if you look at the back of the packet we've got the highest protein lower sugar and the highest fiber content which i don't know if you've come across this but we've seen a much much more focus on fiber recently than there ever has been there's always sugar's always been under the spotlight protein as we know is like a huge like buzzword trend at the moment there's a lot of things that have protein just shoved in for the sake of it this is mostly like oat based so actually has quite high protein itself but then yeah in terms of fiber that's something that people are starting to focus on as well and if you have a product that's got super high protein but not much fiber it's faster to digest i think a lot of people yeah there's just there's just a much bigger focus on like holistically what what is in the things that you're eating holies ticks that box and there's a lot of brands that have their core range and then they might have one or two skews that are low sugar or one or two protein skews whereas with holies it's kind of like in the netherlands i've got 24 skews here we've got 12 um and every single one of them is is committed to to those um nutritionals um so that's the actual product and then the brand the brand is just fun like it's run by these two guys um who two dutch guys both like 17 feet tall they run around in these holies robes with like the logo on and they're just they just don't take themselves too seriously i think um a lot of health food brands can come across a little bit preachy in terms of you know don't eat this don't eat that have ours it's better for you whereas with holies it tastes good and and the brand is supposed to feel like friendly and approachable which is what drew me to it in the first place i was like this looks fun like the people that work they look like they're having fun and also the product is something that i'd be proud to be growing as a business rather than yeah i don't know some products that you know people may feel a little bit less excited to be growing the sales of you know so yeah i think it's kind of a blend of a really healthy good products but fun packaging fun brand light-hearted energy um towards the team and everyone's just really nice so yeah that gives you a bit of a picture yeah no brilliant i was gonna say how did you first kind of discover them or come across the opportunity i think i saw you guys wondering about bread and jam so the the brand was very nice and standout nice and bold but i'd love to know what kind of drew you in and went yeah this is the right opportunity for me i was working at liquid death before i had this job and i loved my role there and it was incredible we had like an amazing journey i'm sure hopefully you heard of it and saw saw what we achieved there so when you're in a role that you love and then that opportunity is removed they actually pulled out of the uk market um or anything outside of the us it left us in a position i say us because me and ashley have both come here left us in a position of wanting the next move to be something that's something you commit to long term but also that gives you the excitement of a cool brand and part of that buzz of you know the levels that we had at the previous roles so when i was looking for a job is really difficult to find something that ticked all of those boxes and I thought because majority of my experience is in the drinks industry I thought I'd really want to stick to that but actually a lot of brands I was speaking to I didn't get that feeling of like oh do you know what I actually either feel like this is a really good time to join and it's about to go like this or you know when you say this that involves like a crazy amount of work but you know there's like a special feeling and I don't know about you but when I've worked with people who've worked at brands that are really big, they talk about how it felt at the beginning, which I've experienced with Ugly, I experienced with Liquid Death.

6:03And it's something you can't really explain. It's like, I guess, hope, like this feeling of hope and excitement of like, cool, we're going to pioneer this brand in whatever location we're in. And so when it came to Holies, it was actually through people I knew, Joe Ben, who was the founder of Ugly, Ugly Drinks, which I think we spoke about previously. He did some consulting for Holies. I think he actually brokered that deal to get them into Ocado. And I then hadn't seen Joe for years and bumped into him on a train. And it just felt like one of those moments where I was like, cool, this conversation was meant to happen because I had a bit of a feeling of like, OK, I think, you know, things with liquid death might not be going the way that I want them to go.

6:41But I want this next move to be like, I had this quite strict list of criteria. And he told me about Holies and I thought it sounded really cool. But I was like, oh, I think the drinks industry is kind of where I want to go. and then I went home and looked them up and started following them and every time I saw a bit of content I was like oh like actually this does look like the kind of brand where it's it's still so small in terms of the team the volumes that they do over there it's not small but but the team still has that feeling where like if you if you had a concept or an idea for a bit of content you can then go out and film it the next day and post it the next day whereas if you're at a big brand you don't necessarily have that it's a lot of red tape there's a lot of board meetings around sign off and stuff and I definitely knew I didn't want that and so I was really drawn towards holies and and then I had another conversation and was like okay it'd be really great to meet the founders I think working for a founder-led business is it's really crucial that you like the people that started it I think if you're a huge company there can be many layers between you and the person that started it and so therefore yes you still want to admire that person and like them but it's it's less of a personal relationship and when it comes to being a direct report into a founder it is imperative that you get on and that you've got a similar style of working and a similar style of management I guess like some people like to have a really clear direction of like a menu of okay go do this and and then you'll get a tick and you get your bonus other people which is where more my camp is here's a goal here's a budget it's a bit of an ambiguous budget you can have more if you need to but you need a good reason for it please make it happen um And so I met the guys on Zoom and they were exactly that sort of later point that I've just made.

8:19And I don't know the way that they spoke about it and the way that they saw the UK as this incredible opportunity. I guess, you know, again, any founder is going to sell their brand into you and tell you that it's going to be the next biggest thing. But I just got a really good feeling from them. And then also there was some sales data from Ocado and the sales, given that they've done zero marketing really in the UK, the sales are really good. And I was like, okay. And it was outperforming some like really quite established brands and brands that I've seen spending a lot of money. And that for me was a bit of a clincher.

8:49I was like, this isn't just cool people doing something nice that might be cool to be involved. And I was like, there's a proof of concept, not only in the Netherlands, they're also in Belgium. And then actually, yeah, it's working in the UK as well. Yeah, that was a very, very long answer to, I can't even remember what the question was. No, I loved it. No, it's great. I think that's the main thing for me. It's you want to find people like you to join your team if if you are the founder you want people as excited about their mission as you clearly were when you saw that and i think the important part that you mentioned there was the the fact that you saw the traction like i i know when i when i was looking to join pact it was the same thing of like i don't know how big like organic fruit and veg can be like is it something i really want to like get behind and then got sent the task and got a load of category data and digged into it i was like hang on they're doing more sales than non-organic but like i was like hang on they're putting so much value into this category and they're only on ocado and like a couple of skews and sainsbury's like there's so much to go after like this is so exciting so i think it's that same thing of going like right everything the brand has been doing has kind of got them to where they are you know like it's your time to step in and do that and i think that's such a nice feeling and as you said i'd love to go back now because you mentioned ugly and how you kind of have focused on drinks i'd love to kind of take things right the way back to say education from your studying to then going okay then my first step into the world of fmcg or this is where my career started like how did that all come about to get you to where you are today yeah i mean my degree is absolutely nothing to do with what i've ended up doing um i studied biology and there was a massive focus in like neuroscience and i became hyper fixated on insect studies and had like my own colony of ants that i studied it was very niche my friends thought i was really weird and it i mean even drove me to the point of getting this tattoo so it's a real obsession but yeah whilst I was at uni I needed a job and I applied for the Red Bull I think it was a time we were called Wings Girls it's now moved on and we actually are called I can't remember Wings team members but basically it was like the funnest job in the world you've got given a car with a giant can on them I'm sure you've seen in the minis and I just drove around Brighton and gave fun people cans of Red Bull for years so I did that for a couple of years and the thing that's really good about the student program there is they don't just give you a car and product and leave you to it like that's that's the majority of the job but they properly train you so they'd get everyone together you made loads of mates you went to the head office at the time it was in Toley Street in London Bridge and they had a recording studio and there'd often be like a huge artist recording in there when we're going there to learn about how to pitch Red Bull to people and I don't know as an 18 or 90 I can remember how old I was I guess 19 as a student like that's just like the coolest thing in the world so that drew me away from my lab studies it's like this feels like more of the kind of angle that I'd want to go down than like studying ants although who knows never say never so yeah so I was that's how I kind of started in the food and drink world and then as I was graduating I wanted a job obviously and I saw ugly had put up an Instagram and it was just a logo they literally just had the word ugly I think it said because you're sweet enough already or something was the tagline that was it but it just looked like I don't know it just looked kind of intriguing and they put up this post and they said they're looking for interns please apply so I applied for that job I had a phone interview it went really badly and I knew that it'd gone badly I had an exam the next day and I and I messaged it was Joe again I messaged Joe afterwards being like hello that was awful I promise you I'm actually better than that please give me another shot which thankfully he did and And then I met him in person.

12:23He was like, OK, cool, we'll give you the job. And yeah, I guess that's how I like properly embedded in the food and drink world. I was there for three and a half years. So at the beginning, it was Hugh and Joe, the two founders, and then myself and a girl called Ola. And it was the four of us for a couple of years. And then the team grew. And those days were just so special to look back on. A real hard slog, like you walk literally thousands of miles a day at the beginning because you're just putting your backpack on with 20 cans, which is not light, and just walking around London and just hitting up every single possible shop and just yeah field selling was the initial part of that role because I think the the role was marketed slightly differently but you know when you start a brand you have to sell to places like that is point one you can't market something that then isn't available anywhere it's kind of like you've got to get the balance right of having some distribution before you do some of the fun stuff but yeah the field sales part of that was hectic like it was miles and miles and miles and it went on for a long time we did it for a couple of years and we also worked for some other brands in the meantime like we we kind of seconded ourselves out we had a bit of a product issue we thought we had shelf life of about a year and a half and it turned out to be about nine weeks so there was a moment in time where the guys sat us down and they were like you can leave because we don't know when this is going to be sorted out or we can all stick together as a business and try and make some money elsewhere and focus on a recipe in the meantime and develop a new product and i think you know again being a 19 year old full of hope i was like cool we'll stay i think they probably were like fuck so yeah we worked for for graze um snacking they did a retail launch so obviously they went from online to shops and at that point they had like no retailers at all so again we filled our backpacks this time with flapjacks um and just opened up i think we did about 500 accounts in the six months that we were working there, which is crazy.

14:14So yeah, that was kind of where it all started. And then the role grew as we got more and more customers and clients and it became more of a kind of sales leader role, I guess, managing like bigger accounts as we got them. And then I think I just got to a point, I'd been there three and a half years. It was the only job that I knew and I loved it and I loved the business, but I kind of wanted to see what you did when you then had a bigger budget because we were kind of bootstrapping it. And then actually we did get investment at one point and then that sort of shifts, as I'm sure anybody on this podcast has spoken to about startups, like each round of investment just completely changes the pressures.

14:50You've got a board expecting numbers and deliverables that you never had before, or you've got a completely different direction, right? You might be focusing originally on building in the on-premise and making it cool and a lifestyle brand. But then once you get investment, they're like, just go down the retail branch. That's where you'll make the money. and those are two very different strategies so yeah for me it was it was time to go and then yeah I mean I've had lots of jobs so I think I'll probably just focus on the food and drink ones for the purpose of this podcast did I did a year at the Telegraph in media which was not for me and then swiftly went back to food and drink world and then I was at an agency for a few years and that was an experiential agency that focused mostly on food and drink uh food and drink clients so we worked a lot with Unilever and Diageo which was really cool because obviously their budgets were like the polar opposite of what I was used to.

15:39You'd be working with like Guinness or Bailey's or Coca-Cola. I mean, they just have like crazy, crazy money. So yeah, we do really cool projects with them. A lot of strategy work as well. I think one of the funnest days there was working for Krispy Kreme and the brief was Krispy Kreme sells loads in summer, but in winter there's a bit of a seasonal dip because most people, when they want that sweet treat with them, go and buy an ice cream. So they were like, how do we offset that? And I basically had a whole week or three days in a Krispy Kreme kitchen with just like racks and racks and racks of all of the donuts and then the brand team there and an ice cream machine and we tried to make this like summer version of what people could have as a Krispy Kreme.

16:16I think we landed on a kind of like bao bun type style ice cream stuffed Krispy Kreme but I mean that was like a kid's dream right? I couldn't really believe that that was my job. So yeah I was there for a few years and then I kind of missed the feeling of building a brand because when you're at an agency it's great because you get exposure to loads of different brands and different categories. And in that role, you know, some of them aren't food and drink. So it's interesting for me. But I quite like acting on something, learning from it, and then building it and growing it. And when you're at an agency, you'd probably be brought in for a project and then that's it.

16:47And you might do that same project again the next year, but it's not part of the brand team. So I missed that. And I then started looking for a brand role and then found a role at Red Bull, went back. I knew the culture there was good. I still knew some people that worked there. and they all just seem to be having the best time of their lives so I applied and got the job um and then was there for nearly three years as well and that was in the marketing team so I was in the brand team there and that was an incredible like working at Red Bull is just crazy fun obviously like at the events that you get to do the people you get to meet the places you get to go to like it's just a like objectively cool place to work and cool brand to work for um but I think for me the struggle with that we're working in a big place like that as as i was saying like it's kind of there's quite a lot of red tape so if you have an idea or a concept that you want to do particularly within brand it's the parameters are quite like i don't have to put this in a political way you basically have to jump through lots and lots of hoops and get through loads of rounds of sign-off obviously because the brand is very strongly protected and it's global so you can't just do something completely random that doesn't fit the criteria because then they wouldn't if every if every country did that and everyone had these ideas that weren't actually fitting what they should then you wouldn't have such a strong brand if that makes sense so i think for me it was incredible i learned a lot there and the role was kind of a hybrid of marketing and sales in terms of you worked really closely with both teams to make sure we had the perfect portfolio in my mind before i started they had like four skews there's like 58 skews or something crazy like so it became a lot of like admin it's like the role became like slightly less creative and and more like operations led and I yeah wanted a bit more of a challenge so then I left and went to liquid death um which was just mental like that again like our budgets were really big the team was really small and we we had quite a lot of freedom and and I feel very very very proud of that role like the team achieved a crazy amount I think we were told our target for the year was like 5.4 million dollars for and we'll be looking after the UK Australia Ireland and some other smaller countries in Europe and and we achieved that goal in fact surpassed it in in year one which was just incredible but yeah it was it was a really weird experience there was a lot of um eyes on the brand there's a lot of LinkedIn keyboard warriors giving their two pence as to what's going on what's going right what's going wrong so like that was a like a strange yeah it's a strange one to navigate but it was incredible and sadly they yeah they pulled out of the market for for operational reasons and i'm not sure if they'll come back maybe they will but you know that was it was kind of like it felt like we were building or you're painting a picture and just before you put like the last brush stroke on the painting's taken away you know so that was yeah that was tough um and then that's that's what's got got us i keep saying us because i'm talking about ashley as well and to where we are with hayley's so yeah a bit of a whistle stop tour but hopefully clear i love that no i think um yeah on the liquid death side obviously we just literally had ben on the podcast um who shared a bit of the the workings around that and reflections and the fact that like when it was the decision was made to to leave from the uk and kind of pull back it was like uh oh that's quite public that's like everyone had an opinion on why liquid death per se failed even though it wasn't really a failure like everything was growing and it was going well and all this was happening um from like from your side within that experience like it seemed all to be going well like as you said you had a target and you smashed it when it was the decision was being talked about or being made was that a bit of a like oh okay well wasn't quite expecting that yeah i mean to be totally honest yes um it's a kind of unique scenario to be in a satellite office that is so far away from the head office and to be the only one so i think lots of big global brands will have like red bull for example head office in austria and then pretty much all countries have their own red bull office within them so the communication would be the same to everybody whereas for us there's the us which is where their main focus was and then there was us and you know we're eight people at that point doing good numbers but the volume is nothing close to what they're doing in the states so yeah the decision was it was really like it was really surprising and particularly as a salesperson it's like you're you've spent a year and a half like getting the trust of people on board and particularly for grocers and as i'm sure as you know that it is no mean feat getting listed in a in a grocer from from zero awareness to having a listing and we had that with with quite a few And so to call up those guys who, you know, you spend a year and a half, like convincing that this is going to be a huge brand for their category.

21:31So then I remember having moments walking around St. James' Park on FaceTime to the Sainsbury's team, like, hey, guys, so that rollout we're about to do, like, we're not going to do that anymore. And they couldn't believe it either. And they were just like, we've never had a brand that's performing this strongly do that. What's going on? And it's just like, I don't know, it kind of feels like a bit of a like surreal experience looking back on that. but you know it is what it is they've got to do what was right for the business a lot of it just came from from the fact that it was a production issue and at one point we were going to have to be shipping water over from america to get here to sell it which just makes absolutely no sense both um environmentally and you know commercially like water's heavy that's crazy so i get it i understand it but yeah it was pretty shit to be honest i think it sounded like ben very much had the same sentiment like oh okay yeah everyone had an opinion so it was a very public thing but from the the outside like not knowing what was happening with everything you've kind of said there the brand was so strong it really made a splash um and everything liquid death were doing was brilliant so i think it sounds like it's been a fun thing to to learn from but i'd love to go back to what you mentioned around ugly and having that telephone interview and going okay that's really not my best and the fact that joe then took another chance on you like how how did it go so wrong or like what went wrong was it just you were focused on your studies or i think i was just so young obviously the older you get usually the more confidence you get or the more you understand a working environment and how to be and how to be professional i just it was just awful he was asking loads of questions i think it was more like personality based because obviously you're not expected to have experience at that point because you're coming fresh out of uni so it's just personality based questions which is kind of worse because it's like that shouldn't be something that you should mess up um but I just knew I was just awkward and you know sometimes you just don't get caught in the right time and and you know that that could still happen now right we all have bad days I think obviously the older you get the more you'd probably prepare and put some time aside for that but at that moment in time I had not done that and it was just it was just bad but I could tell that I I really got on with him and I thought what they were doing was cool enough to kind of go to him with my tail between my legs and be like please give me another shot so yeah and thankfully he did and I guess like when hiring for a sales role is it and he always said it was like okay you're clearly somebody that would follow up and that is so key like if you don't do that if you take everybody's no as a no you're never gonna get anywhere when you're starting a brand nobody's like perfect okay we'll give you a listing straight away everyone wants to have a brand if that's the case right so I think yeah although it was it came out of a not very impressive interview but the actions afterwards I think gave Joe a bit of confidence in how I might be in in that role so yeah it worked no I love that like I think I think that's great and Joe's seems like a great guy we still never met in person we message all the time comment on his stuff all the time and we was like we really should catch up in real life at some point but I love what he's doing within the sector and the space and sounds like that's a very justified thing to kind of go okay actually there is something in how you've presented yourself despite that car crash of an interview like i'm willing to to go forward because i like the way you've you've re-engaged i think that's a really really positive thing to anyone listening who's like oh no i've messed it up it's like well well no like there will be sales pitches there will be things you go no i've like i've dropped the ball on that one like really sorry but um like can i have another chance because i can i can do what you need me exactly and also we're all human like a buyer is human they might feel scary but they're just a person doing their job and they'll have days where they mess up as well so i think i don't know i always just personally much rather if somebody speaks to a fuck up than to try and like cover it up or in this case just obviously you wouldn't have got a job if you didn't like do you know what i mean so yeah i'd love to know some of the lessons you've had from when say you were ugly all these other brands where you said the budgets were really small when it came to activating or marketing and ways you've got big value for money or big impact and then when you were doing the agency side working with Unilever brands, the difference between the attitudes or the learnings or kind of how you went about things.

25:35So I think that's a really key thing because what you'll often see in startup brands is you have no money in the early days. So you're going, right, save every penny. How can we think outside the box? How can we do this? They'll raise investment and go, great, now we can spend all that money on an out-of-home campaign or we can do this thing. What are some of your learnings or advice around what's worked? If there's anything within that that you think actually, yeah, the difference between a Unilever brand versus a startup these the pros and cons well i think there's a couple of questions in that so so the first thing about how do you get value out of something when you've not got a crazy amount of money we would just try and piggyback stuff with with ugly so for example i remember we went to stand outside london fashion week so it's all based around so and to be part of that or to be the sponsored drink it's like hundreds of thousands of pounds obviously because the coverage which is amazing.

26:22We had literally no money at the beginning. So we went outside and we just went up to people who were dressed like really cool. Obviously there's everyone's there and like really like out, out their outfits. And, and we'd ask them if they'd be happy to have their picture taken and everybody at fashion week wants their picture taken. They have no idea what it was, you know, that were actually like a small brand. And so we'd give them a can and we'd take a picture and we'd put it on our Instagram and I put the hashtag of the unofficial drink of, of London Fashion Week. And then because we had four or five of those pictures, that gave them the impression to people that we were much more prevalent than we were.

26:57And that, you know, we were in some way involved in Fashion Week, whereas actually reality was me and all of us just like going up to people that we thought looked cool and taking a picture with them. We could have spent loads of money and had a professional photographer and sponsored one part of it. You don't know what the return of that is really. I think some of that stuff is ambiguous, right? And it's all part of building a brand and building brand love. Those measures are hard to get. But yeah, we definitely had people then speak to us when we did trade shows being like, oh yeah, I saw you guys at Fashion Week.

27:26It's like, you definitely didn't. But you saw that Instagram picture and you thought you did. Like, it's the same about anything. I think if people talk about something enough, it feels like it's a bigger thing than it truly is, which I guess is what marketing is, right? And you just got to be seen in the right places at the right time. And then people say, you guys are everywhere, which may or may not be true on certain brands. But yeah, I think you've got to kind of be smart with how you do it early on. And then when you get bigger, I think that there's a really hard transition phase when you're in a brand or when you're manning the budget.

27:57When you've gone from that, cool, how do we do stuff on a shoestring to suddenly you've got investment. It's really it's quite hard to spend money. Like you have it, but you're in that mindset of, hold on, like if someone said this to me three years ago, there is absolutely no way we would have spent, I don't know, 100K on a trade show. like that's that's mental but actually you need to start doing that because that's how you then get to the next level like that brand build part is to make your brand relevant in the right audiences and then it's like okay we've got to go mass and to go mass you usually do have to spend a fair bit of cash and that's what Unilever and the other brands that we touched on that's what they do they're not in the part of the part of building a cool brand a lot of their brands aren't cool but they're staple items that most people either have heard of or have in the house and and they spend loads of money like they turn up in a big way at things it's not necessarily the coolest way or the most innovative but it's hard to miss whether it's at festivals or activating or tv ads or whatever they've got big buckets of cash to spend and they do and a lot of it you can see awareness versus spend is pretty like close together it's brands like liquid death they do it in kind of a slightly different way where their awareness comes from digital versus in uh in real life kind of events and advertising, like it's all about viral content, which you can do in quite a cost-effective way.

29:16But you just, again, if we all knew how to make viral content every day, then brand building would be very different. It would be a very different space. It's not an easy thing to do. It might be something you can do once, you know, it's right place, right time, cultural moments. You can't necessarily have a, you can't type into ChatGBT, make me a viral post. Like, I'm sure everyone tries that. And they might give you a good bit of copy, but, you know, it's not going to be like truly creative. So yeah, I think it's, they're all, each brand has got its own different set of ways to do it. And there is no rule book.

29:46Like that's something I've definitely learned is even if somebody's worked at a brand that's done really well, it doesn't mean that they then come to the next brand with a playbook that's going to equal the same success at all. And actually, if anything, I think when people come to a category or are new to food and drink completely, they come in with no preconceived ideas. So when they say to people, oh, I want to do this, people who have been in either a brand or even just our industry for any time will be completely jaded by their own experiences and say oh no you can't do it like that you need to do this or you can't do that it has to work like this and then i'll be like but why and you can't necessarily always answer that but you're just that's just what everybody does and says to each other you know so i think naivety is also quite a helpful tool in certain cases yeah i literally saw i think it was yesterday jamie lang had done a post around how learning from the gen z employees they have the who questioned everything saying like why are we doing this meeting why are we doing that like why does this exist he's like if we can't have a good answer then actually do we need to do that anymore is it something we can remove and i think it's a really good approach and absolutely i agree sometimes if you're too trained like no no this is the sales format and this is how you do it you only think with inside that box and for me i've i've never kind of had that corporate like unilever or abbev or any of those kind of big brand experience has always been smaller challenges kind of like so i've fumbled through it it's always just say i fell into sales like i've never been formally trained per se it's always been learning on the job but i think across all the interviews i've done i've had both ends of the spectrum of people like yourself who've kind of had a bit of that with like a red bull brand and then going into like a real challenge like ugly or going the other route and then going okay what i've learned here i'm going to take that oh okay the robot goes out the window i'm now going to do everything and obviously with now what holies are doing you recently had a lot of press um so i'd love to go into the campaign and the the follow-up lawsuit because when i saw that first coming out i was like oh wow this is a really interesting scenario because it doesn't feel like there's anything wrong here so yeah i'd love you to to share what went down sure um the team out in amsterdam we have got an in-house creative teams as i was talking about earlier which is what drew me to them in the first place the fact that they've got a group of people and cameras and the skills to actually create that content really quickly it means that we're constantly putting out videos when you've got an idea on a monday it can be posted on the tuesday the wednesday thursday and it's often centered around the the founders and like putting them in like silly scenarios or getting them to tell an important message but in a way that's like slightly comical versus it being preachy so with that in mind they started um they created a campaign called the holy sugar score so sort of in a way that we've got the traffic light system people always refer it to on products here where red for too much sugar or too much salt or too much fat um they wanted to create one that was specific just to you know it was a made-up scale so the holy sugar scale is a really simple categorization categorization hard word to say um so an a product would be anything that's under five percent sugar b would be under 10 sugar and c is 15 and above so um putting into three buckets the video starts off with one of the founders um stood in the street in his robe with a giant box of sugar that just says big brands on it um being poured onto his head and he's talking about how big brands are fucking us over and and filling filling your products full of sugar but then kind of masking those with health claims so high in fiber or high in protein but not talking about the fact that it's 30 40 sugar and so they started off with this yeah kind of viral hook starts the video and then it goes into a they built a supermarket shelf in the middle of amsterdam just like literally by the canal and they blot out all of the packs and on the packs they put the the stickers so a b or c and then they said if you want to find out how much sugar is in your favorite cereals come to our website and then when you go to the website the packs are unblurred there and it would it had a range of granolas and also bars because we do a range of crunchy bars and there's quite a lot of like the mainstream kind of market leader brands that were in that c category of over 15 of the product being made of sugar so we got served by lotus bakeries who are a big belgian brand everyone knows lotus for kind of disc off but they own they own naked and trek and various other bars and and they sued us or they told us to they they served an injunction to make us stop spreading information i think the exact same was something to do with unfair advertising standards or comparisons where in actual fact we'd i mean obviously we made up the sugar score but the whole point of the project was to show people look like are you aware of what you're actually consuming because you look at something and you think, cool, this looks healthy.

34:24I'm going to have that instead of a Kit Kat. And then the reality is that actually the trade-off is not as you think it is. It might be not added sugar, but once you've squashed down fruit or you've added in, or you've put raisins in something or that sugar content goes up and up and people like sugar is sugar once it hits your bloodstream. And I think, again, this wasn't supposed to be preachy. It was just an education piece, right? And yeah, they really didn't like it. So they sued us for that. We tried to settle and they said no. So then I actually went to court. And at that point, then the story was taken to press.

34:59And Holies carries a lot more weight in the Netherlands than it does here. Hopefully in a couple of years it'll be the same. But yeah, they're the number two brand out there. So they're pretty big. And so this was like front page news that got like huge national press. The grocer covered it here and Just Food. And we had a couple more people talking about it. And, you know, even just posting about it on LinkedIn, the support you get from people is crazy because all of us want to be a little bit healthier. And I think I've definitely picked up products thinking, cool, this is a sacrifice for having something that I'd rather have that tastes better, but actually I'm going to have this because it's healthier.

35:31And the reality is that it's not. So it was actually pretty amazing for us because the press and the coverage that we got from it was crazy. They wanted to kind of silence that campaign and then actually the opposite has happened and it's got way more eyes on i think the video had like a million views before this kicked off and and even for a small brand that's incredible but then to be in print national news across netherlands belgium and the uk is not really ideal for them but pretty good for us um and it highlights you know it starts a conversation and off the back of it they've now started a petition in the netherlands i do have um stopping sweet talk it says that's what's called stop sweet talk and it's about people basically bullshitting what's in their products with health claims that aren't necessarily that relevant and ignoring what what the actual ingredients are which again is gaining quite a lot of traction so yeah it was there was like a couple of days where we're like oh god how much is this going to cost us and at that point we can't really talk about it because we're trying to settle but as soon as they said no to the settlement we're like cool okay let's let's go with this story so yeah it's i think been very beneficial for us and it's been to court and you guys came out on top if i'm not mistaken yeah yeah so all of the all of the claims were annulled by the judge all of it was fair game so i think when i saw it was even going to court i was like you're literally just reporting what's on pack like i don't understand how you can be like no no you you can't tell the public what's on our pack yeah when you actually think about it in really simple terms it's actually crazy and sort of shows the need for for there to be a focus on it and particularly with you know like uh i mean it's been the case for a while now but the queuing systems being only healthy products that you can have there like there's no chocolate bars or anything anymore but actually some of the stuff that is in those aisles is exactly the same nutritional you know value but you know some of it's even got even more artificial stuff in rather than just like sugar and wafers it's it's got stuff you can't pronounce like pages and pages of it and it's just i i don't know i think these kind of conversations are only going to become more and more prevalent and so yeah it's a it's a good time to be at a brand like Haley's I'd say from your side obviously you said you're you're in Ocado like what what is your kind of aim for the brand is it domination in the major retailers like what is your kind of next next stepping in growing it and where can people get hold of it right now do you do DTC like what's the the way that if people go and oh I like the sound of this like it sounds really good like where where would you direct them uh if they could send a personal email to each buyer of the crazy no so yeah it's on cardo it's on amazon as well um in multi-packs and then we've actually just launched with clf so we'll be in lots of independence so places like village whole food and and then we've got self just launched in september and then we've got lots of exciting conversations happening i think people see the need for this product i think buyers don't necessarily want to be the first one to go without cold hard data from a competitor which i kind of understand obviously no one wants to take massive risks but also when you look at the shelves i mean to make the claim that we have on the back of the box in terms of us it's we've got an us versus them um on sugar protein fiber because i said that earlier to make that claim we had to build this like ginormous spreadsheet full of every product in the uk and what those three um numbers were and i'm obviously knew that cereal was sugary but when you actually put it into a spreadsheet and you're typing it out it blew my mind like i think there's such a need for an actual healthy product and particularly people think of granola as like the healthy breakfast option right like if you go out for breakfast with your mates i'm going to be healthy i'll get the granola and yogurt it's like that's that granola is probably absolutely full of sugar which is fine if people understand that it's like if you're having a bowl of cocoa pops you don't think you're being healthy but you're having granola with the thought in your head of this is the healthy option, but actually it's not necessarily that different.

39:22I think that's where something like Holies is kind of the missing piece to people's ranges. But yeah, so the job is to convince them of that. And then the plan, yeah, I think it is a real retail heavy play. Like it's not so much like on-premise or cafes and stuff. You know, when you get given granola, you don't necessarily see the brand when you order it. So for us, yeah, it is definitely a grocery play. Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm definitely going to have to get some in my weekly Ocado shop, along with my Pact, of course, like perfect little combo there, especially with our smoothie bowls. Yeah, it's a nice little topper.

39:58Might have to be getting some link deals. Yeah, get some link deals going on. But final couple of questions. This is the music one that I ask every guest. So what is one song that represents your working experience, whether it's a track from a particular brand or moment in time, one song that the lyrics mean something to you? like what what is one song you think of like yeah that that reflects my my working journey um well when you originally you sent me this question over the one that came to mind was the proclaimers but i would purely because when it started as i said we walked thousands and thousands of miles genuinely but like like ankle issues from the amount of hours that we walked um but then even now and particularly in startup phase it's yeah okay i'm not i don't have a backpack on and i'm not literally walking the streets but it's a very similar feeling you're like relentlessly knocking on doors and it's like it's constant right and it takes a real persistent attitude i think would be the right phrase to to keep going because as i say that people say no originally so i think that that song just yeah obviously it's it's it resembles a long journey but with people fucking plodding along so i'd say yeah that that probably sums it up yeah no perfect yeah you've got you've got to put in the miles you got to do the hard yards like all of those kind of analogies um are very much sales um and challenge a brand mentality so i love that and for anyone who wants to get hold of you or speak to you about stocking it if they're like oh actually that sounds great where is the best place to to find you probably linkedin yeah dm awesome yeah i will tag you in the show notes but i've absolutely loved this i think what holies are their proposition like the marketing the awareness i think it sounds like a really fun brand and exciting time to be part of that and i've been loving all the content i've been seeing as i said seeing the massive box you're walking around bread and jam where i was like oh what's this brand that's a nice way to to stand out it's just like all these little things that play into like the long game and yeah i'm excited to see how things progress me too hopefully hopefully we'll be in all supermarkets this time next year but time will tell what's this space but yeah thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure thanks for having me chat soon and to everyone listening we will see you on the next episode goodbye bye