Hugo Box

12:28Hugo Barrette:Well, and it's been led by the customer, I guess.

12:30Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, not led by the customer. It's been led by the supermarket needing more profit.

12:34Hugo Barrette:Right. Right. And they will think lots of customers have been going to these discounters of late. Even whether it's what you get when you walk in the shop or the way the discounters, I call them that now, you know, that's quite an old name for them, isn't it? But the way the likes of Aldi and Lidl who mixed up the market, where they work behind the scenes, is that how supermarkets are? Is that almost more what you're saying?

12:57Hugo Spritz Creator:Yeah, but I don't think it's behind the scenes and on shelf as well. But I don't think the customer necessarily wants it. I think we're getting so many emails, a couple of retailers we've come out of, we've gone in and out three times of one particular one. And we know we're going to go back in next year. So it's just kind of exhausting. It is like the hokey-cokey. And we know we'll go back in. You get another CEO come in, they decide they don't want to be like a discounter, they want a point of difference. And then we're listed again. So it's been fascinating kind of sitting back and looking.

13:28Hugo Spritz Creator:And if we get a delist, I don't get worried anymore because, you know, we are different. we've got that point of difference and we know the customer wants it.

13:36Hugo Barrette:And that ability, so just to explain a little bit, people are familiar, I would describe you and I'll let you correct this, but in the new wave of soaps of recent times, not that traditional soap that many sort of would have grown up with.

13:52Hugo Spritz Creator:Makes you skin tight. Ours isn't like that.

13:56Hugo Barrette:That's one way of explaining it. And so there's a lot of competition out there. People will recognise the different designs of these new soaps on supermarket shelves and in the health shops and beauty shops as well. So is that also extremely competitive right now?

14:13Hugo Spritz Creator:It's massively competitive. And when I set the business up, people were going, what on earth are you doing entering a market that's massively, you know, there's no room for you. But there was no organic, let alone natural soap on shelf. So we were the first organic soap to hit a UK supermarket. We were the first natural soap. We're in a category that's reducing, reducing, but we're massively outperforming it, which is really exciting. So we know the customer wants us. It's a real tricky one.

14:41Hugo Barrette:And that ability to sell direct to customer, then if you've got the energy that you have, I mean, to what extent can that make up?

14:50Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, we don't need to. I mean, we have a massive account. Amazon, of course, has taken. That's our biggest account now. I never, ever thought that. I used to hand deliver boxes to the post office when we first started on Amazon. So Amazon's our biggest account, but Waitrose, Tesco, Morrison's all of the main supermarkets. So 90 % of our sales are through the supermarket still. It's just we'll end up swapping one line in, one line out.

15:13Hugo Barrette:Interesting. Well, we're going to talk more about Amazon and its growth, everlasting growth, it seems, as it becomes the latest company to break through a$3 trillion market value. All these big numbers are blurring into one a little bit on there, but it just shows that the value of these businesses continues to go up, up and up. Fascinating hearing about that growth of a business. Maybe you're somebody else who's working to get your product into a supermarket. Maybe you have done in the past. Maybe walking in and seeing all of those brands and different selections that are on offer. Have you noticed a change that there's been a range?

15:51Hugo Barrette:What was the phrase? Range?

15:52Hugo Spritz Creator:Range rationalisation. Range rationalisation. Or simplification.

15:55Hugo Barrette:Yeah, have you noticed a bit of that going into your supermarkets compared to years before? 85058. Wake Up To Money from BBC 5 Live. Good morning to you. It's Wake Up To Money on BBC 5 Live. As I said, Amazon, the latest company to break through a$3 trillion market value. Jane Foley with us this morning, head of FX Strategy at Rabobank. Jane, can you put this one in a bit of context for us? Because every trillion dollar increase in market value, you sort of lose track a little bit of where these companies are, what the size of them really means. If you're jumping from one to two to three to five trillion dollars in worth as some companies have, what's the significance of Amazon passing this latest level?

16:44Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, it's only the fifth company ever to do that. And of course, we'll all be familiar with the names of the others, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple already there. But this just really does signify the size of these companies. I think for most people, you talk about, you know, two billion, three trillion and the mind really boggles. So this is huge. But what's really quite interesting is that, you know, all year, really, we've been hearing about a lot of the downs as opposed to the ups for the AI trade. And we know that, for instance, stocks linked to the AI trade have underperformed, like more general shares in the S &P 500 this year.

17:17Hugo Spritz Creator:So tech, for instance, up just over 2 % in the year to date, but 10 % for some of the broader shares within the S &P. So AI have really struggled as people have sort of debated whether or not there's overinvestment by these companies, whether the share price has gone up too much. But a lot of those fares for Amazon really eased last week because they reported really quite strong revenues. And we saw massive bounce in those shares last week, a biggest one day jump actually in over 14 years. So that's what's been happening for them.

17:48Hugo Barrette:And in terms of the retail aspect, what it is Amazon are particularly doing? Because as Emma was talking about, Jane, many will still see Amazon selling things to their door as the main thing Amazon are doing. Is that still much of the driving force of the business? We know it has the cloud business and the techie side that other businesses are able to take advantage of themselves. But Amazon is a retail force. Does that keep growing and growing?

18:20Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, I mean, it does and it keeps changing in terms of the offering on the platform, for instance. However, if we look at what really drove the gains last week, this is about cloud computing. and the cloud computing is of course more separate from the point of view of retailers and you know you and I think of Amazon we think about the doorstep delivery but actually the cloud computing is what really drove this growth and the cloud computing is is what this is all about this is where the over-investment story comes in the AI trade story comes in and the Q2 earnings really did show accelerated cloud computing revenue and and that's really what eased some of those AI over investment fears and that's really what drove the jump last week.

19:03Hugo Barrette:Emma, Amazon's role from your perspective as a retailer, as somebody who runs, founded Little Soap Company, does it feel to you like its dominance just gets ever bigger?

19:14Hugo Spritz Creator:A hundred percent and Amazon is about convenience. We sell very small bars of soap. So someone runs out of a bar, it's much easier just to click on your phone, order a bar from Amazon. So you were asking about our website. We've done things back to front. We were selling into the supermarkets before we paid attention to our website because websites didn't exist in 2008 people couldn't buy online so we do do b2c amazon is like business to customers yeah sorry sorry yeah um and yeah amazon has grown and grown and grown i mean phenomenal percentage year on year which we never put that in our business plans that's an amazing bonus um yeah it's we have two three four pound items so if people go to our website we have pick pack and ship rates we can't absorb that you know someone's going to buy one bar of soap we're going to be in massive deficit if we send it out with free pmp so our website tends to be for bulk for gifting for cases at a time a lot of people buy 12 bars at a time etc amazon tends to be more individual bars but we are selling more bulk on there america amazon is very much into bulk buys right that's slowly coming in over here so we do do cases of six cases of 12 households thinking like that yeah yeah yeah like you know buying more toothpaste buying you know like like you know people buy toilet roll in big big kind of like bundles people are doing that more and more now with soaps to save money to save money and just so you've got it there convenience again right so people have got their

20:37Hugo Barrette:own little warehouses somewhere little cupboards exactly yeah yeah fascinating that people are changing their habits like that there'd have been of time when if we were talking uh lots about some delivery of individual items where the environmental impact of that sustainability of that would come into question now clearly the product you're making that is a big focus for you and you know a lot of the the these newer soap offerings that people see that that will sort of that pitch will come hand in hand so how does that tally what have you learned from how amazon do this stuff?

21:11Hugo Spritz Creator:It's fascinating and it's something I've personally wrangled with going oh I think we should stay off Amazon you know we spent two or three years before I went on Amazon because I was really grappling with it and then we realized it's a marketplace you can't ignore you know I had a grapple before I went to Tesco going Tesco is not great I think we should just be selling from our website and in the very early days and then one in three people shop there you know you can't you've got to kind of play with them it's really difficult if you want to have a viable business because that's where the customer's going.

21:38Hugo Spritz Creator:So sustainability, we've just won in May, yay, the King's Award for Enterprise for sustainability, which is something I've wanted for the last three years. Every single year we've applied, we've bettered the business, bettered the business. It's been such a brilliant thing to have done.

21:52Hugo Barrette:But do even, say, those awards, for example, where there'll be a long, long list of nominees who are, you know, going for these sustainability titles, do those awards, do they just assume that, no you know amazon and the likes are you know we just have to use them yeah it's a real difficult

22:08Hugo Spritz Creator:one you know sustainability isn't just an add-on for us it's something that i did from day one it's in our dna we the business is the most sustainable business not just the products i'm talking about the business and the way that we run it our strategy you know our products everything so yeah it's it's a very kind of blinkered thing to say amazon are the bad boys you know it's a real difficult one. If we sell liquid soaps, we have to put them in a plastic bag because the customer doesn't want it arriving leaking. So there's a lot of questions regarding sustainability. I don't know how we answer that in the next half an hour.

22:43Hugo Barrette:We won't do today, but it is fascinating to hear the different things that will have to go through people's minds. Running businesses, buying these products as well. Right, let us cross to Singapore and speak to our correspondent correspondent Maura Fogarty, who has been looking at HSBC's latest financial results. Maura, good morning. I mean, one of the biggest banks in the UK, but huge bank across Asia. What have you learned from their latest numbers?

23:14Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, I just spent a few minutes digging through their annual, their interim report that they just released. Interesting. They actually came in with slightly better than expected results. And by that, I mean, the market was expecting a certain number. Revenue for the bank in the second quarter of this year, that's the April to June period, came in at 19 billion U.S. dollars. So I'm using dollar terms here. If you look at pre-tax profit, it was at 10.3 billion dollars. And again, that's the number that was slightly better than expected. You know, the new CEO, George Azel Heldry, has been spending a lot of time trying to streamline the bank, trying to reduce costs and trying to what he calls simplify a lot of the operations in the bank.

23:56Hugo Spritz Creator:And it looks like what he's been doing has come to fruition. I should also mention that most of their profits have come from Asia because that's where most of their business is. And they announced a bit of a goodie for investors. They've announced a share buyback of up to a billion U.S. dollars.

24:15Hugo Barrette:Maura, thank you for that update. Maura Fogarty there with the latest on HSBC. Jane, another bank making profits with increased returns to shareholders. How are you viewing the sort of the UK banking sector at the moment? And what are investors thinking is going to be the next major moves for them?

24:38Hugo Spritz Creator:Well, of course, we've already had Lloyd's and Barclay shares out and they both had really quite strong profits. So, you know, that's really very encouraging from the banking sector. But, you know, interest rates are a bit higher than they used to be. And, you know, rule of thumb is, is that if interest rates are a little bit higher, it's a lot easier for banks to turn a profit. So from that point of view, that puts them on a, you know, on a stronger footing. But it is quite encouraging to see these HSB shares coming in strong. But we must say, you know, the bar was high, really, because shares were trading really quite close to an all time high.

25:13Hugo Spritz Creator:And that is because of the better environment for banking, et cetera. and because in HSBC particularly, the management had sort of raised its guidance for net interest income twice already this year. So stocks already up around about 36 % in the year to date. We have to see this morning when the FTSE 100 opens to see how they do. But again, another good set of results. So, you know, they should be really quite well supported, I would expect.

25:39Hugo Barrette:And just on AstraZeneca, Jane, Will was chatting yesterday morning about the reports in the Financial Times about the big drugs company being in talks over a merger with a US rival. And then over the course of the day, after investors had had their breakfast in the UK and around Europe, the share price in AstraZeneca fell a fair bit, not convinced that it's the merger that should be happening, perhaps.

26:06Hugo Spritz Creator:No, that's right. The AstraZeneca investors are concerned that the company that AstraZeneca are looking to buy might be about to lose some of its revenues. And that's because the patents that it owns are due to expire in the coming years. So that's really what's worrying investors. Obviously, there hasn't been an awful lot of detail on that really given away at this point in time. So it's something to watch. But that is the basis of some of these concerns.

26:35Hugo Barrette:Bristol-Myers Squibb is the American business. And it's not often you see the word baffles in a business headline, but the times they're going with AstraZeneca deal baffles both markets and analysts. So there we go. We'll see where AstraZeneca goes next with that. Plenty more to come. We've got our big conversations to have about Xbox and Xbox prices with the person who came up with the Xbox all those years ago and Spritz as well. I noticed we've had a few messages coming in again about the world of Spritzes. Paul says, hi, wake up to money. Next time you're in Malta, try a Kinney Spritz, a bitter orange style Spritz.

27:11Hugo Barrette:It's an amazing, refreshing drink. Just what you need on a beach there. 85058 as we delve into the foundations of the Hugo Spritz. Where has that growth come from? I'm going to speak to people right at the heart of it. That all coming up. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind.

27:49Hugo Barrette:Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. Wake Up To Money with Sean Farrington. Good morning to you. Wake Up To Money on BBC Five Live. It's Tuesday morning, the 4th of August. We're right at the height of summer, aren't we? Just wonder what your summer drinks tastes have been. alcoholic, non-alcoholic, whatever that might be, first thing in the morning, fruity tea, English breakfast, builders. In the evening, we're going to be talking more about spritzes late in the show and how some of the sales of a certain type of spritz have really shot up and how on earth that comes about. Where does a trend come from like that and how is it capitalised upon?

28:30Hugo Barrette:But there will be, we know there are, because we talk about beverages right throughout the year. It's such a changing story at the moment, whether it's soft drinks companies being bought out by some of the world's biggest drinks companies of late. So just let us know, 85058, your summer drinking practices and how have they changed in recent years? Let me know your thoughts there. We're going to be talking now about the price of the Xbox. So Microsoft has confirmed that if we take, say, the Xbox Series X, That is going to increase by£170 from£500 to£670. Microsoft saying the reasons behind it, the increase in the rising costs of console storage and memory, largely due to the AI boon that Jay was talking about a little earlier when we were talking about the size of Amazon at the moment.

29:22Hugo Barrette:But some of these things having a real ripple effect onto the costs of day-to-day or year-to-year products people will be buying and looking out for themselves, for their kids. Emma Heathcote James, who's with us this morning, who is the boss of the Little Soap Company. Emma, are you gaming in your life at all? Xbox consoles and the like?

29:41Hugo Spritz Creator:Not in my personal life, but our son's a big gamer.

29:43Hugo Barrette:Right, and so you'd be familiar with the cost of this stuff. Yeah, it's expensive. And so£170 increase from£500.

29:52Hugo Spritz Creator:It's massive.

29:53Hugo Barrette:Feels like quite a jolt. Have you noticed particularly, I don't know if you chat to your son about this stuff, about changes in gaming habits, because of price changes or the way the gaming industry's got?

30:04Hugo Spritz Creator:Gaming's expensive, so it's all the streamed games. And I think what's really interesting with Gen Z is a lot of the games are streamed, and he gets very upset when suddenly it's taken off. So he's really into a game, and then it's taken off the streaming service. So there's a real pullback to physical, hard games, you know, that you can't, you know, like buying a cassette, because that's an old-fashioned word, whatever they are these days.

30:24Hugo Barrette:I'm just thinking, you spent the first half of Wake Up to Money saying the frustrations around when a soap is there and it gets taken away. I know more about soap than Xboxes. And now your son's getting frustrated when a game is there and that gets removed. The Heathcote James family just want a bit of consistency in these products that are for sale. But it's very interesting because it's all part of the developments in where the gaming industry has been going lately. Microsoft have started cuts to its workforce of more than 3 ,000 people in July. They called that the most significant restructure in Xbox history.

30:55Hugo Barrette:So what does this mean for the future of the Xbox? Well, Seamus Blackley is widely known as the father of the Xbox due to his role in designing and creating the original console back in 2001. Seamus, thank you so much for joining us on Wake Up To Money. Oh, and thank you for reminding me how old I am. 2001. Wow. I know. Well, Seamus, it'll be all those customers as well will be feeling the same way when they hear that and thinking. No, no, no. Playing Xbox keeps you young. Don't you know anything? Of course, of course it does. And we'll get on to how long it might well do that for Seamus. Just first up, when you sort of see that price difference, that change from£500 to£170, chunky increase, your reaction to that?

31:41Hugo Barrette:Oh, it's a lot. You know, one of the things that was really on my mind when we were trying to launch the original product was that, you know, at that time it was, you know, I think we launched it for£400. pounds. I can't remember how much, but it was clear, you know, that's the entire disposable income of most people. And so they're taking a bet for much of their entertainment on you delivering something good. And I felt a lot of pressure about that. And as the prices have gone up, it just seems increasingly difficult for me to understand, you know, how it all works. The prices have gone up. But just when you talk about, you know, that 400 pounds the price that it might have been all those years ago.

32:22Hugo Barrette:And people will remember the Xbox being available for, you know, 200, 300 pounds, depending on what packages. I think we launched it. Yeah, 299, I think we launched that. And that was pounds for dollars, which at the time I also felt was pretty unfair. Right. Well, yeah, that has been a debate that's been had over the years as well for various products that people are buying here in the UK. But when you think, you know, before this latest launch, it was 500 pounds. It sort of implies that there hasn't been a lot of inflation over the 25 years of consoles. And people have been used to a price in their mind and thinking, you know, I'm not really going to pay much more than that.

33:02Hugo Barrette:Well, we've experienced over the past couple of decades a really unique period in the history of technology in which the progress of chip technology really has allowed performance to increase drastically with costs not really increasing them. much. And this new environment with all of the hunger from data centers and business people to buy up a lot of memory and processing power has caused an economic pressure to break that pattern for the first time. And most people have spent the majority of their adult lives seeing technology improve without a real cost increase. And now that's changing. It's very traumatic.

33:41Hugo Barrette:People compare to the, say, the PlayStation, for example, prices have gone up at the PlayStation. So we heard a few months ago that Sony was saying PlayStation 5 was going to go up by£90. So that was from£480, but not by as much. Do you see, is there a valid reason for that if you're a customer looking at the price changes? Yeah, it highlights the fact that Sony is a consumer electronics company and Microsoft is a software company. So Sony has its own supply lines. It has semiconductor foundries. It has relationships with the people who make memory chips, you make processors that enable it to control those costs much better than Microsoft, who depends on partnerships for all that stuff.

34:23Hugo Barrette:So back in the day when you were looking at designing and creating this kind of stuff, was that kind of thing a battle internally at Microsoft when you had big rivals? Maybe at that point they weren't even viewed as rivals, you know, making the likes of the PlayStation in a sort of very different way to the way Microsoft went on to do the Xbox. Yeah, it was an interesting mix because Xbox's advantage was that games are easier to develop for it because all of the development tools ran on the PC anyway. So keeping the architecture the same gave the people who make games a big advantage. But it gave Microsoft a disadvantage because, you know, for instance, the original PlayStation, I think, had like 19 chips in it or something.

35:08Hugo Barrette:And by the time you got to the later stages, it had three maybe. And Sony were charging the same price for it because they could leverage the fact they were a consumer electronics company to cheapen it. And we could never do that because we didn't own any part of the supply chain. And that was a real worry. It was a thing that young Seamus got yelled at by the likes of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates about a few times. Right. What were those conversations like? I'm interested in their view of the idea of gaming? Steve Bomber and Bill Gates, of course. Those conversations were sweaty and loud. But the view that they had was that it was good for Microsoft because games is fundamentally a software business.

35:50Hugo Barrette:The difficulty for a company like Microsoft is that games is a hits business, kind of like the music business, and not a steady business like the operating system business. So it's sort of feast or famine. This was nervous for them. And then taking a big foray into consumer electronics, really, when the company's previous hardware had been mice or a game controller of some kind, was a really big worry because the infrastructure that you need to be successful, there's a lot. And they were betting on, I think I was 29 at the time. And I remember thinking, oh my God, what have I promised I could do?

36:25Hugo Barrette:Well, how did you feel about where it went in the years after? Oh, really proud of it. You know, I disagreed and agreed with things that did or didn't happen. And, you know, now we're where we are in this new world. And I think they've just laid off more people than I than worked for me at the height of my Xbox powers. So very interesting times. Interesting times. What does that mean? Where do you think Xbox is heading? Well, look, a lot of people were very critical of Asha Sharma. I went to go meet with her. The chief executive of Xbox. Yes, the new CEO of Xbox, Sasha Sharma, who doesn't come from a games background.

37:04Hugo Barrette:And I was pretty skeptical. I actually gave an interview with an influential gaming website where I was very skeptical about her. And it became so viral that my son came to me one morning and said, it's on my hip hop news feed, dad. And so she actually invited me to come meet with her. And I talked with her pretty extensively. She asked for a lot of advice. And we've kept in touch. and she's been given a very hard problem. Xbox was very sick and fixing it is very hard. And so I think she's doing an okay job, but the future's uncertain. And it's not just uncertain for Xbox, it's uncertain for all the consoles.

37:40Hugo Barrette:The thing a games console used to do is it could do something that no other device in your home could do. It could give you a type of content that nothing else could give you. So you had to buy one to get that content. And now games like that, just because games want to be on every computer are on every computer. And so now the real question is, what is a console? And that affects all of them. Could it be one of those products that we're talking about as being a product of yesteryear as the likes of Netflix just increases its efforts in the gaming world where you've just watched one of your episodes of a box set and then the next thing you can do, You can use your smartphone to just flick to a game and play, use your smartphone as the controller and you're onto a game there.

38:30Hugo Barrette:Yeah, but they're crap games, aren't they? You know, there's a difference between a really finely crafted entertainment experience and something that's sort of exploitative of the fact that you're sitting there as an audience member. Well, just to give the other side of that, of course, Netflix wouldn't have that opinion. But I think, you know, they are increasing their investment in that realm. Yeah, of course they are because it's an audience that they could monetize. And so really the question is, you know, can game consoles make a move similar to what Netflix did when the DVD by mail business went away and people moved to streaming?

39:08Hugo Barrette:And Netflix was pretty slow to move to streaming. And then they did pretty definitively. And, you know, there were all sorts of articles for the better part of a year about how Netflix was dead. And then suddenly they weren't. And then they're a market leader. So these things move up and down based on who has the courage to really take the next step to offer entertainment you can only get in one place. And, you know, all of the consoles, but I think especially Xbox, have the opportunity to do that. And I hope they do because it pushes the medium forward and it increases the quality of entertainment.

39:41Hugo Barrette:What are the consequences, you know, for gamers out there? One of our guests on the show today, a 21-year-old son, is a big gamer. What are the consequences if that doesn't materialize? If one of those players grabs a hold of the on's gank? Sorry, go on. No, no, it's fine. I just wanted to say, make sure to say hello for me if he's an Xbox gamer. And if not, just tell him, eh, whatever. He is, he is.

40:04Hugo Spritz Creator:It'll be very chuffed hearing this.

40:06Hugo Barrette:Well, listen, he is obviously a gentleman of distinction. I want to make sure you understand.

40:11Hugo Spritz Creator:I think he'd agree with you.

40:13Hugo Barrette:Well, I think that I would not be surprised if in Kyoto at Nintendo and in Tokyo at Sony, they're thinking this exact thought. They're thinking, well, what if these other two guys drop out or one of them drops out? How could we take advantage of the vacuum? And there's also just a sort of a conceptual vacuum of gamers who want the days back when there would be big, like super lovely, beautiful experiences that would come to these consoles. You could only get there. that would give them a type of entertainment that couldn't exist anywhere else. And whether or not that's technically possible right now or whether or not somebody has the wherewithal to essentially subsidize and finance a new piece of hardware that can do that is the question.

40:55Hugo Barrette:And Seamus, just finally, just as we talk about the AI boom every single day at the moment, as somebody who has been a real part of the creative side of the growth in technology over the decades, How do you view what's going on with AI and the impact that's having at the moment? Well, so I'm fundamentally a theoretical physicist, and so mathematics is my thing. So I know how these transformer-based large language model AIs work. And, you know, there are interesting tools in some sets of work and not in others. But currently in the business climate, business leaders are selling them all across the board as being these miracle machines, which they're just not.

41:41Hugo Barrette:It's a tool. So there's going to be a period of weirdness we're going through right now. And then there'll be a period of crashing or whatever companies going out of business because the things they're selling are just not true. But there is a core utility. And there's definitely a core utility of these large language models that can help creatives be more effective and do more interesting stuff. And so I'm really just waiting for it to shake out until people start making genuinely useful tools, specifically for games that can make it easier to make cooler environments. But right now it's being sold like, oh, it's going to replace humans.

42:16Hugo Barrette:And that's just unfortunately not true or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. Well, yeah, exactly. Many people in jobs will think, OK, that's a relief. But many investors who have put a lot of money into this stuff might be questioning. I said earlier it's a hits business. I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to make sure to make this point that the thing that drives people to entertainment is a connection to a storyteller, connection to a musician, connection to a game designer, connection to a filmmaker, connection to a writer. To have that human experience, to have a story told to us, you know, that's as old as the human race and it's built into us.

42:51Hugo Barrette:and so you know things that aid that succeed and things that try to get in the way of that and there have been many many many throughout history always fail because they get in between what the audience is willing to pay for and is looking to pay for and what their service should be. Seamus nice point to leave it could have asked many more a question hopefully we get to speak to you again sometime Seamus Blackley there widely known as the father of the Xbox when he designed and created the original console, was part of the team that did that back in 2001. 850582, keep your thoughts coming, whether it's about the change in the world of gaming, the change in your drinking tastes.

43:33Hugo Barrette:This has become the drink of the summer.

43:36Hugo Spritz Creator:If you're truly not basic, you need to start ordering a Hugo Spritz. It's tastier, it's more niche, so once you order it, everyone immediately will be like, oh my God, they're so cool and different. Let's make a Hugo Spritz. This has been my favorite drink recently.

43:50Hugo Barrette:We are going to make you a Hugo Spritz. This is insane. Do you need some of this stuff? I don't know where it is.

43:59Hugo Spritz Creator:Elderflower liqueur. And if you don't know what elderflower tastes like, that's okay because neither do I. Guys, everyone is raving on about Hugo Spritz. I'm going to try my first one. Right now, I'm on holiday. Oh, it's nice. It's nice.

44:12Hugo Barrette:So there you go, a taste of the worldwide social media sensation, the Hugo Spritz, which was actually, you know, somebody came up with it in Italy in 2005. That demand for elderflower liqueur, as we heard a little bit of there, that is one of the key ingredients in a Hugo Spritz, has been surging. Saint-Germain, which is the most common type, has seen sales jump year on year. And I've got William Seymour with us, who's the Earl of Yarmouth, direct descendant, as it happens, of the family of Jane Seymour, and the producer, crucially for us on Wake Up To Money Today, of San Moor, the elderflower liqueur.

44:49Hugo Barrette:And that is actually the winner of the world's best floral liqueur at the World Drinks Award in 2024. Got award winners galore on Wake Up To Money Today. William, very good morning to you. And a very good morning to you. Thank you for your time. Just explain a little bit about how the world of the Hugo Spritz, which people might think of there's a company making Hugo Spritz when we talk about it like that. There isn't. It's a drink that people are making around the world with various ingredients. Tell us how that sort of changed what you do at Sam Moore. It's really our flagship in terms of the cocktail now.

45:28Hugo Barrette:Everyone knows about the Hugo and it is an extraordinary rise. We didn't set off our elderflower liqueur company based on that. We actually made Sam Moore for our own wedding day. and your previous speaker actually he made a fantastic point which is people connect with the story and for us at St. Moore we're all about the story we're all about the moment and making it your moment our drink we started as our moment for our wedding day back in 2018 and we served it with English sparkling wine we realized we actually may have a pretty good drink when this drink got a standing ovation and we did not so we decided well hold on maybe there's something there and what happened was that people were asking well how do you drink us a quick study online shows that the number one cocktail that people want to be associated with the hugo uh it was the hugo spritz and so that really allowed us to capitalize on it and be part of this trend be part of this wave of this amazing spritz that people are talking about because it's the new Aperol.

46:34Hugo Barrette:It's popular, it's refreshing, it is people wanting to be with the drink of choice because they're drinking more consciously now more than ever before. Well, and there is the sort of the pitch to the world if people haven't tried it yet. When I say somebody invented this in Italy in 2005, well, we have Roland Gruber, A.K. Roland Grupper, he's known as A.K. to many, now runs a restaurant in Valbavere Valley in Switzerland and was at the heart of this back in 2005. A.K., thank you for your time, for joining us on Wake Up To Money. Hello, good morning from Switzerland. Can you explain, A.K., what happened back in 2005?

47:22Hugo Barrette:five we need to hear this story as as we've been hearing on wake up to money it's all about the story uh yeah the idea actually was very simple so back then everyone was drinking upper spritz and i want to create an alternative that was fresh and minty and the light so an easy summer drink that was the first idea So how did you come about this specific combination? I would say it was luck because I tried to find some drink which is minty and fresh and not that heavy So more for the ladies, for my customers, for the ladies. And yes, so I bought in a botanic shop, I bought not the elderflower syrup, but lemon palm syrup.

48:34Hugo Barrette:and I mix this with prosecco and soda water and some mint leaves and ice cubes, of course, and lemon slice. And yeah, that works. And my customers like this that much. And yeah, at the end, Hugo was born. So we don't have the name of this drink. so and we we we had to find a name and uh we make some some some brain brainstorming i say and then uh after after many names hugo was the name what that match and they say okay then let us call this drink hugo and that was in june 2005 in south tyrol in my cocktail bar samdeno Well, I've got a couple of questions there. Firstly, that was 2005, 21 years ago.

49:33Hugo Barrette:What happened in recent years that has meant we've got to this point this summer? actually have no idea and i'm so so surprised so to be honest i still completely surprised that it is amazed that after more than 20 years the hugo is making such a splash so it has truly become the ultimate cool drink in america so in new york to and I was surprised to even see an article about the Hugo and myself in the New York Times last week. So it's just incredible for me. It blows my mind that a drink mixed in 2005, it's now trending in Manhattan, for example. So I don't know what happens. Not bad. It's a crazy story.

50:29Hugo Barrette:AK, the other question I had is you talked about lemon balm syrup there. But of course, today, you know, we have the boss of an elderflower liqueur company on the program. So what do you say? Why do you think is elderflower instead of that lemon balm? And what do you say to those making it like that? I think that the elderflower syrup, it's a great syrup. That's not the discussion. But together with the mint, with the mint leaves, the alden flour, for my thinking, it's to have a too strong taste for the mint. So the alden flour cover the mint. So this is why I take the lemon balm syrup. Right.

51:23Hugo Barrette:So what's your plan, AK? After 21 years, you're now working in Switzerland, running a restaurant there. This is going viral all over the world. We've got, say, William on the show with us here, William Seymour, who runs the elderflower liqueur company, Sam Moore. What do you say to the likes of William? Sorry, I don't understand. Would you have an idea of a next business idea to think about where the spritz goes next? This is not so simple. So I always compare it to a band trying to write a global hit, for example. So it's almost impossible to try this. So a global smash hit just happens. So the same with the Hugo.

52:20Hugo Barrette:It's about being at the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And then stuff like this happens. And I just want, AK, William, to just respond to your incredible story there. William, what do you make of that? By the way, AK, big fan. In fact, we have a dog named after your cocktail, Hugo. That's definitely named after cocktail rather than any family connection, I have to say. Thanks so much. The Hugo Spritz is an amazing cocktail based on a number of things. Simplicity, it's deliciousness. I would say the trend for people is almost is revival in this country is that people are wanting to drink less, but drink better.

53:16Hugo Barrette:And it connects to the story. And it connects, I think, elderflower in particular, is something that's always been grown in this country. So there's almost a halcyon moment for people when they try an elderflower liqueur, they go, you know what, this reminds me of picking elderflower with my grandparents in the summertime. and there is this tangible moment where they go, I'm now connecting to this in my own way. And that's where the Hugo comes into play because it is a drink of celebration. It's a drink of a moment where you can make a moment into your moment. We're going to have to wrap it up there, William.

53:54Hugo Barrette:William Seymour, a.k.a. Roland Groomer, Emma Heathcote-James, James Foley, everybody who's been in touch. That is it from Wake Up To Money. Wake Up To Money from BBC Five Live. That's it from Wake Up To Money. You can download the podcast every Monday to Friday, so please make sure you subscribe. We'd also love it if you left us a review when you do. Get in touch. Keep the conversation going any time as well on social media. Use the hashtag WakeUpToMoney. Five lights full. So here's the first ball of this series. All the cricket you'd have. Check for LBW. Ouch. Lives on BBC Sounds. Smash straight back down the ground, this girl.

54:32Hugo Barrette:Hear ball-by-ball coverage of the biggest competitions on the domestic and international circuits. It's a ball cricket and it's the huge one. Jeez, wash. Settle down, tough. Sorry, mate. Cricket on Five Live Sport. Oh, I've living every ball of this. Listen on BBC Sounds.

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