From idea to £25m exit - Jimmy's Iced Coffee Founder, Jim Cregan

0:00Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, as you all know, I'm a massive fan of founders and listening to entrepreneurial stories of people that have made it themselves. Now, one drink I'm a really big fan of, which people on the show will probably know already, is Jimmy's Ice Coffee. And in this episode, I'm joined by their founder, Jim Cregan, to tell me all about what it took to make a success out of Jimmy's and what happened after he sold his Brickmix.

0:29It was really good to meet you and thanks for coming on the show.

0:32Jim Cregan:Thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And what I love about this is I followed you and your brand literally since you started because, you know, as people listening to the show will know, I started my career in soft drinks, 13 years at Britvik. And what makes me smile about this is that I tried to convince the nation to drink iced tea. Right. So that was my kind of crowning moment at Britvik. when I managed Lipton iced tea, and I'm like, convincing British people to drink their tea cold was a bit of a challenge. But I guess, you know, iced coffee is quite popular now, but it wasn't always popular.

1:02So where did your idea come from? And how did you end up deciding that this was going to be the thing?

1:07Jim Cregan:So there was, without me knowing, you're basically right. There was a category in the UK for iced coffee, but I'd never seen it. And that's because the products on the shelf were really, really boring, and nothing was eye-catching. So I really thought it was it just didn't exist at all um and i had some crazy jobs kind of growing up in after university and stuff i basically was a festival host for festivals like shouting at people on stage and introducing bands and acts in very very random outfits and then my winter time i'd be a laborer just digging holes building beach huts really really boring stuff and i i'm an avid hater of winter and i remember just one winter just completely caving and being like i just need to get the hell out of here because this is really really crap i'm earning like 50 pounds a day in the summer I'm dressed up as a mermaid telling people on microphones this is rub you know all these sorts of things and I remember just kind of like slow clapping my existence one day on a cold November thinking I'm kind of 28 or 27 years old and I'm just earning 50 pounds a day and the only good thing I've got going for me is my amazing girlfriend who's now my wife so I went home in tears this one day and Soph said are you all right and I was like no we are leaving we're getting out of here so we we buggered off to Oz had one-way tickets because I'd never wanted to come home again and see a gray cloud in my life and um while we were there you know we drank loads of goon that like white wine in a box that gives you monstrous hangovers and uh remember just driving down this long road as they all are in Oz and uh I dipped into the LinkedIn jargon of consumer need states basically I'm hung over as balls I need to fill up the car I need to fill myself up.

2:44Jim Cregan:I used to work for Red Bull as a student brand manager for a year at uni. So I knew a little bit about like what kind of drinks I needed and all these sort of things. And I went into the shop in this petrol station and there was this fridge. It's kind of like that story in the deep dark woods. There was a dark, dark house. There was this, that, and the other. And in this fridge was this box or these cartons of farmer's union iced coffee. And that was a nice coffee that I looked at and was like, I need you in my life. I just, the branding and the packaging just made me reach for it straight away, which is one of the hardest things to do, right?

3:13Jim Cregan:Getting someone just to take your product off the shelf took it out took it out the fridge bought it went outside chugged this thing in the blazing sun with this monstrous hangover and was like oh my god this is like this is actually already changing my life went back in bought another one and then i ended up these are 600 mil cartons and i had about two or three a day so it's like 1.8 liters of milk and coffee absolutely buzzing and i've done like bits and pieces in my past of like trying to start little businesses I sold like fake surf bags to schoolmates and stuff when I was much younger so I always had this hunger of trying to do something I remember writing to National Foods which is the owner of Farmers Union in Oz and uh it came from my Hotmail address at the time which was Jimbo Cregan at hotmail.com so really unprofessional and I was basically just like dudes I'm in your country I'm guzzling your Farmers Union how do I get your brand and your ingredients and take it back to the UK and they're like dear Mr Cregan thanks very much for your inquiry but we're not doing it and I remember replying just going oh come on like this is ridiculous you need you need to help me out here because if I have to go back to the UK I don't want to go back with without taking anything with me and they said no no no it's not going to happen so um our trip got cut short and we uh Soph and I both came home and um I got phone calls to say like come back on the festival circuit and I just binned all of my stupid costumes that I used to wear and was like I just need to get into doing this iced coffee thing so got in touch with my sister she was running a coffee shop at the time and then i was like right you're going to be my business partner because you're like you like getting stuff done i really love brandy kind of stuff and uh i just remember writing an a4 sheet with kingdom iced coffee that was the name we called it in the first place that was a very first name with like a picture of a lorry a picture of a coffee bean a picture of milk just kind of like how are we going to shape all this put a gun to mom and dad's head to get some money off them for a loan which we did and uh they lent us some money and we also made them shareholders.

5:07Jim Cregan:So we paid back the money and made them shareholders, which was great. And we just set to work. And we found, you know, we found a co-packer, got a friend of ours who had a little agency to do our kind of initial brand work. And we launched it. It took us from, what was it, November 2010. We formed Jimmy's Limited. And then four months later, we launched in Selfridges on April the 7th, 2011. Wow, that's a really good turnaround. And that was it. We were in. That's amazing. It was, you know, we were so naive. We had no idea what we were doing. I mean, even to the point where, like, I wouldn't have a clue where to get a barcode from.

5:42Jim Cregan:Like, is there a barcode shop where you go and buy them? How does it work? What's the deal? And eventually you just have to go and ask questions and just find all this information out by yourself. Because when you're founding something, you have to literally do everything. You can't rely on anyone to do anything because there's no one around you. So that was it. That was the launch. And then from there, it was just sprinting so fast to get to, you know, 12 years later to them doing an exit. Amazing. It's interesting about need state because you're absolutely right about the energy thing. I was in Japan.

6:11I worked for Suntory for a short amount of time. And they've got this incredible brand called Boss Ice Coffee. Yeah. And it's bigger than Coke. Yeah. And I was blown away. And I met the, well, the founder, the person who invented Boss within Suntory that still manages it. I think it's a seven or eight billion turnover. It's incredible. And it's in so many varieties. They also do hot version on like, you go to the chiller cabinet and then there's a hot heater cabinet as well. So you can choose, do I work hot or cold? We were looking at those in Jimmy's.

6:39Jim Cregan:You have like a little oven. Yeah. And you can just take the hot cans out. I think it'd be great here in like petrol station format for people who are just a little bit too, like in a hurry to go and, rather than waiting for a hot coffee, you can just bang it out of the oven. But you're right about your insight. Because the moment that Penny dropped me when I was interviewing him about, you know, the success, because we were thinking about launching it in the UK. I remember that. Yeah. You remember? Yes. I remember him talking about that. It was like, this is Red Bull for grownups. Yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah.

7:10Because Red Bull's got a very kind of narrow, kind of quite a young kind of urban target audience. But actually, like, everyone needs energy. In fact, the older you get, the more energy you need. Yeah. So I'm like, this makes complete sense. It's an energy state. but you're right about the uk at the time because i think the only couple of brands i remember were looking at the category starbucks had this weird like paper cup with a lid and a foil and a straw the most complicated original bit of packaging my mouth this is the stuff we used to pitch to

7:35Jim Cregan:supermarkets with it's like it was called starbucks discoveries and you're like what what are we discovering here and i don't really understand and you're right it's a cup with a wraparound plastic um thing and then you've got your plastic lid and then you've got a telescopic straw which is made up of two bits of plastic and the thing when you could just go drink infinitely recyclable like come on like what do you but obviously they want to replicate the cup that you get in the coffee shop and etc etc but it's a bit of a faff and then the other brand uh me cafe latte i mean they've um they're just they've been in our crosshairs forever and whenever i see them i still give them that like evil kelly's eye i mean lovely people but uh i'm just not a fan of you know i just found it just a bit mediocre and a bit like you could try harder here and that's why i've never picked it up before because i've never seen it you know i've never i've never been attracted to it nothing shouted out of me from the shelf and also actually going to coffee shops doing doing research to find out how big the iced coffee market was i remember going into like a costa and a starbucks cafe and i'm saying you know how's your iced coffee doing and they said do you know what and it was the year that i was actually talking to them they said we're going to leave our iced coffee menu boards up for the first time ever this winter which made me really think you know your point about the tea you know getting people to go you know we're a tea hot tea drinking nation to then drinking an iced coffee from a cafe where you put it in your hand and it's cold you know that that's a huge shift right and them saying that was like like a big thing because we weren't going to go and spend a million pounds on kantar data with a hundred page slide presentation i haven't got a clue about you just got to go and ask some questions and that was enough data for us to go this this is definitely moving this is not going down this is only going up totally agree yeah funnily enough actually that i had exactly the same experience i was going into costa or starbucks seeing people have an iced tea in the summer yeah with no like you know just as normal but you couldn't buy it in the shop around the corner and i'm like well why are people happy to buy it in a cafe yeah of course they're going to buy it you know but but just the buyers that like most head offices are you're not you're never going to sell iced tea to the brits i'm like well you probably walk out your office go around the corner and get an iced tea and costa quite exactly do that yeah so just follow your own behavior yeah um you casually mentioned going from you know we got the idea four months later in selfridges right how did you go about kind of designing the brand and coming up with the concept and selling it in because you know it's quite impressive you know to turn it around quite that quickly i took a couple of um nods from the farmers union design in terms of its simplicity and just its on pack just communication just saying iced coffee you're like, okay, well, at least you're just telling me what it is.

10:12Jim Cregan:You see so many products on the shelf that don't actually tell you what it is, and you've already just missed the purchase, especially if you're a first-time trier and buyer. So I was like, right, we just need the brand name. We need to tell them what the product is and which variant that it is. And we only had one at the time, which was original, which is, you know, the be-all and end-all. It's the best one, my favorite one forever until I die. We changed the name from Kingdom to Jimmy's because Kingdom was already taken. There was a company called Kingdom Coffee, and we wanted to be called Kingdom Ice Coffee, and I didn't want to go down some trademarking legal thing.

10:42Jim Cregan:And actually, Kingdom Coffee were the supplier of our actual coffee to go into the iced coffee in the first place. So Jimmy's came about because of – it was like an ode to Oz, really, because they put an E or an O on the end of everything. So you turn up to Oz and you're like, hi, I'm Jim. And they're like, Jimmy. And you're like, no, it's Jim. Jimmy. And you're like, okay, fine. What's wrong with it? And it's got a nice ring to it. So I was like, right, let's just call it Jimmy's iced coffee, call it original and then make the color palette just really really simple and know that if you want to replicate it into other formats you just change one particular part of it so it'd be the crown and the bottom kind of thing that gets changed and then we did one other rebrand which was done by nick and james at hq which you know was just so much better than the original one because it just ultimately just made it cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and you end up having a bigger kind of two-tone space rather than just a smaller blue bit at the bottom which when you're talking about shelves and you have shelf-edged labels sometimes you can't see it and it's just about making the path of least resistance for everyone and then going on to in terms of the packaging I really like the farmers union packaging because it was it was like a carton you had to peel back the cardboard and then drink and I love the nostalgia and the aesthetic of that like cardboard on your lips and holding this box just felt like being a kid again which is all part of this whole theater of drinking products so going into that plus that branding on the top was the most important part and then obviously it has to taste great so those those three things i used to go on about it at work all the time which is branding packaging and ingredients if you didn't have those together all miraculously dancing in this wonderful magician style thing you haven't got a product and that's how we uh how we got it got it on now talking about packaging i'm a huge fan of packaging and i've been on the entire journey with you so i was a subscriber so i used to get the tetras yeah and switched over to slim can yeah and then i call it the cotl but i think i'm a bit yeah cotl's original name for this like the can bottle combo yeah which if anyone's not watching this and listening it's like a combination between a can and a bottle yeah it's the coolest thing yeah and i discovered this in japan i'm like this is so freaking cool like why doesn't it exist in the uk yeah how hard was it to get get that off the ground because that's i don't know where you'd go and manufacture it for a start so we we actually call it bottle can we've never called i've I've only actually heard of it being called Cottle when you first emailed me about this podcast.

13:02Jim Cregan:So we just call it Bottle Cam. But that whole thing about branding packaging ingredients, the first carton was insane. And it was only it was like a fresh product. So it only had 60 day shelf life, had to be refrigerated. So we had quite a lot of wastage. And our BP buyer said, you're not going to be listed in that because it doesn't fit in the cup holder of a car. This box shaped one because it needs to be fairly cylindrical. So then Tetra Pak come and knock on our door and they say, hey, what do you think of the 330 Dreampack Prisma thing? And we're just like, can you just talk to me in English, please?

13:33Jim Cregan:And they gave us this thing and it gave us like nine months shelf life. It was ambient stable fitted in the cup holder and was the best thing of a relatively bad bunch for the time. And then Luke, who was MD at Jimmy's before he left, he was also operations director. and he went to Hong Kong for a jolly and brought back a bottle can, like the one that we're in, but it had Costa branding on it. And his desk was covered in different products and vessels and bits and pieces because he just loved that kind of thing. I remember just walking past his desk one day to go to the kitchen and I was like, dude, what is that?

14:08Jim Cregan:And so I just picked it up in Hong Kong. I was like, mate, give it to me now. And I went and washed it out, poured a jimmies into it, put it in our fridge and then just walked downstairs, came upstairs, pretending I was just like in the street, opened up this fridge, just reenacting kind of like a consumer's life and picked this thing up, opened it and it didn't do the cracks. It was already kind of unsealed, but the cracking part is a really nice sound when you tear it open and then just drank. And it's like 38 mil diameter on this top. So it just free pours into your mouth. Whereas the Tetra Pak was like this like whistly, glugly thing.

14:40Jim Cregan:It's just annoying. It can't get it in quick enough. And I basically just drunk this and was like, this is it. and we were kind of struggling at that point in Tetra Pak because every new Tom, Dick and Harry that was coming into the beverage market was using Tetra Pak as their go-to first vessel and it just became a bit like meh and it was just a bit flimsy. So I said, Luke, this is like A, this is going to save us and B, it's going to make us and we all just collectively agreed we're going to do this and yes, it cost us more to produce but Luke then went on a three-year, basically a mission to bring it to market So trying to knock on a Japanese door for them to do business in the UK is notoriously difficult, which is essentially why we're still the only ones doing it.

15:24Jim Cregan:Because we've spoken to other brands and they've gone, how did you do it? I know, I was one of those brands. I was looking at this for a couple of years. It's not easy to do. And a load of these brands we've spoken to, they said, oh, we would have loved to have done it. It was just too hard. And you're like, well, there you go. That's why you should do it, yeah. There you go. If you just work your ass off and you know it's going to be great, then it's fine. And I remember some of our investors were just, they were kind of going, it's really expensive. It's been done before. How do you know it's going to work?

15:51Jim Cregan:And I just said, because I just know. As soon as I saw it, I was like, that's the one. And then when you put the brand on it, and especially because it's sprayed over there, it's not, there's no plastic wrap. It's actually printed directly onto the bottle. We actually got to go and see it being manufactured in Japan, which was just incredible. And then seeing it all being done, then filled. And you're like, okay, this is the winning Combo branding packaging ingredients. And for example, we were listed in M &S and you can't do price promotions in M &S. The only thing that's going to affect your rate of sale is sunshine or rain.

16:22Jim Cregan:And we changed out the Tetra Pak into the bottle can during, I think, let's say a season where the weather was just consistent. And we pretty much doubled our rate of sale in the course of about a month once it had actually been flushed through and put all into those stores. And it was just because it was another one of those things. First customer coming along going, that looks cool. I'm going to take it off the shelf. bang you've already won the first argument and then hopefully they put it in their trolley and bugger off and go and drink it and tell other people about it yeah yeah well i think the thing it does it's a very cool format and once you've drunk it you're like that i'm not going back but the other thing is you know it's a space racing store isn't it it's like whoever owns the biggest bit of space yeah gets the highest sales and what you've done is you've just literally grown your shelf space because with a slim can they look amazing but they're quite slim aren't they so yeah you can get a bit lost in the corner exactly this it's quite wide so yeah and also now they've done the big boy as well which i think is 380 mil yeah you know that's like a that's a decent size serving and whenever one's looking at the meal deal and they always go for the most expensive drink because they feel like they're getting the biggest deal you are getting the biggest deal out of that which is awesome and i you know the 275 is fantastic but i typically have two of those in one sitting because i just i'm thirsty but the 380 bang that's enough for me it's fantastic you know i i've upgraded that one as well yeah okay for everyone watching the video this ladies and gentlemen here is what i'm talking about well i call it the cotal i don't know why jim has created me it's called the bottle can this is what it looks like it is freaking the coolest thing ever i mean look how beautiful this is and also it like feels cold which is good and as jim was talking about there that ladies and gentlemen is a 38 mil closure which is called which is in the industry is known as gluggable um you have to try it to believe it basically you'll drink it twice as fast which as jim was just saying means you buy two so it's great for rate of sale so top tip By the way, this is very hard to do, so don't try this at home.

18:13There's only about how many places in the world would manufacture this? There's a few in Japan.

18:18Jim Cregan:I think probably the US do it now. But, yeah, it's a handful. It's not many. This is quite hard to do. In fact, Scott Galloway says strategy is finding the hardest thing to do that your competitors can't replicate. Yeah. And that's exactly what you've done here, isn't it? And then also, Jimmy's Ice Coffee, this is the big boy here, 380 million, isn't it? Yeah. Because also 375. or have I that's 275 that's 380 that's a 380 there as well so even better amazing for shelf space as well so you can't miss the brand and you know what I love about the Japanese is they're so passionate about everything they they gave us a big presentation about why they love bottle can and they said due to the shape it stays colder for longer than a standard can and I think that what they've done is they just worked out maybe like an air vortex where the heat rises but it comes back into the can or whatever they've done in order to test it they were like it stays it just stays colder for longer and if you want a cold product then this needs to be in that and it might only be colder for longer for 30 seconds but that's a big tick in their box i just that kind of attitude was just like oh my god this is so refreshing it is so they're so on it actually i mean the couple places like if i was innovating i'd go either to america where there's lots of trendy unusual ingredient-led brands that pop up of you know nowhere or in terms of format innovation japan's amazing oh it's incredible like they say take this they take the bottle can i'll get it right um the bottle can idea and as we talked about earlier then they'll suddenly go we'll heat it to 56 degrees and we'll put it in this the perfect temperature to drink and not burn your hands yeah which i discovered there's there's a quite a narrow range of heating options yeah not too hot so it burns your hand not too cold so it's no longer hot when you drink it yeah it's amazing they've thought all this kind of stuff so good they are amazing at details so just back onto the distribution stuff you know first of all you go in like selfridges was literally just calling HQ and saying, my name is Jim.

20:06Jim Cregan:I used to be a mermaid on stage. I went to Australia. I found amazing iced coffee. I've come home. I've made my own. How do I get into Selfridges? And she just put me through to this lovely lady called Elizabeth. And she said, can you come in this week and discuss it? And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So I went and made up a presentation. We drove our Suzuki wagon up there and met them. And she just said, when do you want to, when do you want to launch? And I was like, are you joking? You see, you actually want to do this? and she was like, yeah, I think it's great. And I was like, just four months ago, I was literally just digging holes and now Selfridges have said yes to us putting product into their store and my head just exploded.

20:42Jim Cregan:And that was the point where we didn't have a barcode, we had nothing, so we had to get to work pretty quickly to bring it properly to market. And then when we sold one on the first day, it was the most exciting thing in the entire world. So Selfridges is the one big kind of pinnacle store you want to get into. And then the next layer down is your Whole Foods. So Whole Foods, I remember driving into their delivery bay, again in our piece of shit car, this Suzuki Wagon R. And there's a guy spraying like lettuce off the back deck of this delivery bar. And he's like, you all right? And I was like, yeah, where's the reception to the office?

21:11Jim Cregan:And he's like, it's upstairs, fourth floor. So I went up there and I said at the receptionist, she's like, who are you? I was like, my name's Jim Cregan. I started giving the story. She's like, hang on, hang on, hang on. What are you here for? And I was like, I just want to, I want to speak to someone about selling my product. And she's like, do you have a meeting? And I was like, no. so you can't just barge your way in here and i was like well i'm here now so is there anyone here she was like hang on a second and i heard this like stomping footprints coming down this hallway and i was like oh my god i actually think i'm in trouble and this lady came up to me and uh she's like hi uh what's your name i was like my name's jim uh she said what are you doing here i was like i've i've founded a nice coffee company i found it in australia and i've i've made it and i think it'd be great in whole foods and she was like um do you have any experience in food and drink i was like well i eat food and i drink drinks and she was like oh my god you are really bad and uh she i had it just i just had it in a box um these samples and i lifted one out and her eyes just went and she was like can i just see that a sec and she said i'm actually in the middle of a buyer's meeting so i need to be really really quick she took it out and she went we've been looking for something like this and i was like bang i'll leave you now this is my name i had like little business cards this is my name and number and um and left and then we got a got a listing with those guys and then it was that point then you got to go and find a wholesaler to actually do those deliveries for you so my sister and i were getting up from christ church in dorset from our house driving to shepton mallet to pick up stock at like three in the morning and then driving to central london and doing our deliveries to the likes of selfridges whole foods melrose and morgan all these wonderful delis and bits and pieces and then we're just like god we just can't do this anymore so you take that rate of sale data and all the deliveries you're doing to a wholesaler and they're like oh you've got a customer list already you've made our life quite easy and then you realize they've got another 300 stores they deliver into so I used to go up again to London and jump in the delivery vans and go with the driver to these stores so while they're wheeling their sack truck out with all of their other stuff you run in hassle the manager try and get a transfer order to sell the product over and then you get a listing in that store and then so you build up that kind of hoorah stuff and then you go after the waitrose and then all the all the other ones after that so it was just yeah a full-on mission i love that i think a lot of people don't realize how how you can basically kind of almost create a micro market in london can't you like with the wholesalers the independent cafes and the delis and the little yeah little shops and i remember like when i did seed brands at britbic launching lipton iced tea and purdy's and a few others i did the same thing we had a little van sales team got all the team would go out every morning we go in we'll put the get the stock on shelf put you know put the yeah put the point of sale up and then wait and watch is anyone gonna buy this i was telling you earlier like a funny story i was trying to get into tesco and um you can get like a regional listing in tesco where like a particular part of it will buy but you still have to go into store and convince them to do it and i went into like tesco metro the highest turnover store in the country made friends with the people that work there and said tell you what i'll come in just before lunch i'll get the stock out the back i'll put it on shelf for you and they thought this was amazing and they're like oh you're doing our job for us yeah perfect they even let us on the computers putting like the stock orders through and then they have this like calculation six more cases yeah it's like you know how many facings and how deep are the facings and how much stock do you need to you know each day so you can manipulate all this kind of stuff so all this kind of thing is happening and then i said tell you what just to make sure this sells i used to stand at lunchtime and i called myself a soft drink advisor and i go can i help you choose a soft drink sir and we'd go around to people and go can i recommend an iced tea with that prawn sandwich it's kind of like that you know what's that guy's name who wears the who wears the robe and he stands outside stores he's like madam your hair looks absolutely ravishing today you look fantastic it's kind of like doing that with your what would you like fancy to drink along with your prawn salad today that's so good then i'd go back and i'd print off the data from that day and go oh look lipton iced tea has just done 25 units which matches Coke's rate of sales.

25:08We outsold Coke in England in one store, don't tell anyone. Exactly. But this is the kind of hustle that I think people don't realise. You have to go for it.

25:15Jim Cregan:Oh man, we had a call from our Waitrose buyer and she said, look, you're in Little Waitrose stores and you're in main estate stores, but the Little Waitrose stores aren't performing very well, so what are you going to do about it? Boop! I ring my friend Charlie Cosby, who works at Farron Ball, and she just loves making stuff. She's super crafty. And she made me a carton costume out of table underlay. that was the outer and then she'd stitch the whole logo into this thing and with a cane like a bamboo cane kind of frame that sat on my shoulders and it like was the most uncomfortable thing to wear i hadn't a clue how vouchers worked at the time so i would stand outside these stores around you know mid-morning to lunchtime and just give out my business card and i'd go hi my name's jim we've just recently launched in this store take one of my business cards and they're like does this give me any money off i'm like no i haven't figured that out out yet put my numbers on there don't call me um and people just be like you know good on you i'm gonna go and give it a go and some people come out and just show me like oh i bought two for you and you're just like brilliant after a month of doing that the buyer rang me and goes what did you do i was like what do you mean what did i do is it good and she's like really good well done keep it up i'm like oh my god yes so it's it is just it's about just being a bit ballsy and being very realistic and commonsensical in your approach to just convince someone to go and do something it's amazing how many people just get lost in this like hiding behind a computer and running ads and all these things which is good in some industries and stuff but just going and talking to people and just being very truthful about what you're doing you know i'm standing here in my underlay riddled costume saying just let you know we exist in this store and they go cool get you that's absolutely fine but you look down that road and having to do that thousands and thousands of times can be quite um well that's my next question because you've got a listing in tesco which is huge i mean yeah like for anyone who doesn't know how i mean tesco is about a third of all soft drink sales in the uk go through one store pretty much one buyer yeah how did the tesco listing come about we had five separate meetings with five separate buyers to get into tesco and they all promised the world and undelivered under delivered everything until i was um on a panel at a soft drinks conference and we it was almost like a dragon's den thing me and two other brands had to kind of pitch and david beardmore who was the impulse category director for tesco was there and um finished my talk and at the end he came up to me he said hi my name's beardo um big big shot at tesco and i was like yeah i i know you and he said why haven't you uh pitched to tesco yet and i said we have and he's like what i said yeah we've been five times and he was like oh i'm really sorry i'm really really sorry that definitely shouldn't have happened and he said we found you in whole foods we and this is the whole point about building up from these places because they go to those shops for inspiration right and he's like we've seen you i'm really sorry i'm going to deal with you directly and that's how we we got in the door and i bearded messaged me the other day and he said i was at a conference chatting about suppliers and things and he said i brought jimmy's up because you were the one company that we worked with that treated us like your actual customers so you take customers on a journey for your product but suppliers or your you know your your clients like your actual supermarkets is very much transactional and you don't really let them in and he's like jimmy's used to invite us down and they'd take us for lunch and we'd go paddling in the sea and we'd be very much involved in their thing like kind of how fever tree take them on gin and tonic safaris around london it was actually like just come and play with us for a little bit just so you can feel what we're doing and he really bought into our brand and he said you did so well at that and it helped us really understand how passionate you were about making this product work and making the business work so that's it's that kind of thing was just amazing for helping our relationship grow with him as you give me a thought i should probably talk to on the podcast about how you convince a buyer to you know how you grow a relationship with tesco i think it'd be really interesting if more owners of brands and marketers understood yeah how a buyer thinks yeah i think it is about like you just have to be really you just have to be yourself um and i remember we'd go to tesco hq and we'd literally just be in like casual clothes and everyone else is there in their suits and they're like lovely leather bound laptop cases and we just i remember going to me one of the first meetings with tesco and i didn't have a laptop i had nothing and i just said i just want to talk and understand what we'd need to be in order to be listed with you so it wasn't like here's my waterfall chart we had tried that someone had made us a deck when we presented to Waitrose and I got halfway through and I was like, so with this waterfall chart, my buyer just said, shut your laptop.

29:45Jim Cregan:I was like, oh God, I'm going to shut the laptop. And she said, who made that presentation for you? Because you didn't do it, did you? And I was like, no. And she's like, can we just talk like normal human beings? And I was like, I'd love to. Is that okay? Because you think you need to be this type of person, but you don't. It's really quite simple. You're creating something, you sell it to someone and they sell it on. There's a lot of work that goes into it, but you can have a very human relationship. And I think buyers probably crave that so it's not so transactional all the time they'd be like okay that supplier's coming in quite looking forward to seeing them because we can actually talk about you know a shared relationship or a shared um love for something else other than just rate of sale promotions gondola ends you know where they just fall asleep 24 7.

30:25all right all right sorry to interrupt this conversation i promise you it's for a good cause so i've just put a rather large deposit down on a very big venue in central London called the Outernet that can hold 400 people. It's an amazing venue. Now, we're going to be doing the very first uncensored CMO, The Calling. Now, what is The Calling? The Calling is your opportunity to join us live and be inspired by the world's best founders, the most inspirational CMOs, and the best thought leaders. This is one day that will completely transform your career. I promise. It will be well worth it. I'm so excited to be doing this.

31:04And if you want to find out more details, please go to the show notes and check it out. And I really look forward to seeing you there. It's on the 21st of April. Do not miss it. Now, back to the show. Now, one unusual thing you did distribution-wise as well, and I know this because I'm a subscriber for being safe many years, is you went direct to consumer as well, didn't you?

31:24Jim Cregan:Yes, we did. I haven't seen many because the logic of, you know, high cost to deliver, low price. Yeah. You know, the economics would seem surprising. But how do you make direct to consumer work? Was it a planned thing? We did a little bit of it for those who couldn't really get it and actually really wanted to just have a stash in their garage or whatever. It made perfect sense. But we never really pushed it too much until COVID came along. And then we're like, actually, we could go under here and we need to really, really figure out other ways of getting product to people. So we just boosted our direct consumer outlet as much as we could during COVID.

31:59Jim Cregan:And then it kind of stuck. And I think, and we've got some amazing people. Well, not only, well, I don't anymore, but the crew there still do it. There's a dude called Dan Holman who basically just looks after all D2C. And the stats that he was giving me from our TikTok shop the other day, I've been on TikTok once in my life. It's like staggering. You know, sometimes I look at stuff and I'm like, there's no way that's going to work. And it works. And I remember just even rainy days at the office, mid-February, shitting it down with rain, looking out the window, thinking, I'm going to go and buy some medals.

32:29Jim Cregan:And if I find anyone buying an iced coffee today, they're going to get one because this is not the day to buy iced coffee. Look at the sales data. Oh, we've sold 20 ,000 iced coffees today. And you're like, wow, there's actually people out there that really, really want it. I've gone off on a bit of a tangent from DTC there. But COVID was the turning point for that. We had to make it work. That makes so much sense. I mean, the other thing I found, you know, with the subscription, of course, is you get loads of free stuff as well. So I was like, oh, there's a donut flavour and there's a caramel waffle flavour.

32:58And a key ring and a handwritten note. There's some stickers and there's a note from the team.

33:02Jim Cregan:Do you know what, Liv, who used to write our compliment slips, I don't know how many she wrote. It's in the tens of thousands, I'd imagine. And there would be people would place their order at the bottom. There's a little comments box for any other further requests. Can you draw me a picture of a giraffe? Send. and then it comes comes through the order okay case of original oh shit bloody picture of a giraffe how do you draw a giraffe there you go there's a giraffe and lo and behold they instagram it going oh my god the people in jimmy's did a picture of a giraffe for me and it's all of those little things that just made all the difference i remember getting an email or no someone tweeted us saying jimmy's iced coffee should be called jimmy's ice laxative because i've just had one on the train and nearly shit myself and i was like dude i'm really sorry to hear that um can i just send you some more and just don't have them on the train so i boxed up this parcel and put a roll of bog roll in there and this jimmy's and i said i hope you don't shoot yourself next time and he photographed the delivery box with the with the toilet roll in there and he said this is like customer care at its absolute finest and just became to be a really big customer of ours because he was just like you got me and i get you and now it's all cool you know you could go oh i'm so sorry that you experience that by it's literally like no i'm going to send you some bog roll so you don't shoot yourself next time and we're going to be human about this and that's it's those little touch points that really help it all grow yeah so in addition to the customer survey which i have experienced myself and is it is great uh what were the sort of most significant marketing decisions you made along the way i think predominantly just having my name on the front was really helpful in terms of our communication so we had all of our vocab laid down we had our outlook on life laid down so we're very much like loving the outdoors loving the beach being able to say certain words like we wouldn't use the word fab for example that's a word my mum uses we'd use a totally different kind of vocabulary i think just being really human with our comms i mean i remember i was running social media for probably the first seven seven years so i'd be up late at night talking to people on twitter talking to people on facebook so we're not a our customer care line is open from nine till five it would be from six o 'clock in the morning until 11 o 'clock at night or until I've literally fallen asleep.

35:12Jim Cregan:So having that very kind of fluid conversation with people was really, really helpful. I think doing things like our hip-hop music video, which I don't know if you've seen, but it's on YouTube that got us like a million views. That was one of our most iconic kind of things that we did. And then as we got into Bottle Can, Nick and James and the kind of warehouse crew bringing the Bottle Can to life in a big scale. So I'm talking like a six and a half meter bottle can that can be put on the beach. Our bottle can shower with the straws that come out that make the shower heads, a little boat, motorbikes, all these different things, because it's such a beautiful thing to look at.

35:49Jim Cregan:So why not make it massive? Because big things of small things are actually really, really cool. Those kind of things were really fun. And actually being masters of our own destiny, we never had to go to agency. It was all just done. Everything was done in-house. So we owned it. it was a lot cheaper to do a lot quicker and we could test it we could fix it um so that yeah all that kind of stuff was the best i really i'm a real kind of like physical person i like interacting with people in you know like actual real life i don't like hiding behind computers and all that kind of stuff i know that you have to do it but it's all about high-fiving the public and telling them who you are and why you exist and why they should at least try your product and if they like it they'll go and buy it again just go back to suntory just for a second um i i met one of the i think one of the family members super super senior okay and he came over to europe and he did a talk at our conference and he was talking about the the history of the company and i mean i don't know how many billions turn out i mean ridiculously big company right and he had this sort of 50 year chart and it kind of has it kind of goes north pretty quickly but it kind of bumps up and down and he spent 45 minutes and he was going we did that completely fails we tried this didn't work almost lost my job you know like we had to make 6 000 people redundant basically over the course of his 50 years he was talking about the only thing he talked about was the failures but dude the graph's going up in the right direction like yeah but i was just fascinated as you know i mean he's you know obviously you know a huge founder and very successful but what was interesting is how much failure had happened along that way yeah kind of driven him i was wondering from your point of view what have been the kind of biggest sort of failures on the journey i mean we've had loads from you know little like tiny failures to quite monumental ones you know when back in the day we thought a one liter was just going to work really really well but it ended up being there was too much volume in a one liter there's just too much of a risk for someone to take if they'd never had it before and the price was quite high so i remember and we had minimum orders at that particular point minimum production runs and we had it was refrigerated and had lasted 60 days so we ordered like a football field's worth of pallets of products and we probably got through about four of them.

37:53Jim Cregan:So we ended up having to bin a lot. And I remember one of the most painful days was actually doing trips in a van to load pallets in the back of the van, take it to commercial recycling. And then you just had this grabber picking up our product and basically just squeezing it like a sponge and then getting a double mattress and mopping up all the iced coffee on the floor of this massive commercial recycling thing. I remember that being one of the darkest days, thanks for bringing it up, where you're just like, is this yes this is still going to work it's still going to work it's going to be fine remember my sister kind of tearing her hair out i'm like just hang on in there it is going to be okay this is just one of those monumental mess ups that it's not going to take us under but it's monumental there's the standard hiring and firing of people people you're like you know when you hire someone the interview is like oh my god this is the honeymoon period you're the most amazing and then three days in you're like you're fired you know there's there's those there's those mistakes i mean they could have been us from a are we are we reading them wrong i don't really know There are things like entertaining other businesses.