48-Hour Start-up: From idea to launch in 1 weekend. Fraser MBE Doherty
it has so much sugar in it. This simple market feedback gave me an idea. What if I could create a recipe for jam that was made 100 per cent from fruit? And so I experimented in the kitchen for months and months, trying everything I could think of – making jam completely from fruit, with honey instead of sugar, until eventually I settled on a combination of fruit and fruit juice.
It became my dream to sell my latest idea – which I quickly named SuperJam – to the major supermarkets. I convinced my dad to drive me to the head office of Waitrose, having heard that they host special events called ‘Meet the Buyer Days’, where hundreds of people show up, brandishing their homemade cakes and soups and sauces. Everyone gets ten minutes to pitch their idea, in my case to the ‘Senior Jam Buyer’ – I bet you had no idea that such a job title existed!
While my dad waited in the car outside, I told the buyer all about my idea for making jam 100 per cent from fruit. He said it was an excellent idea and a lot of fun to see a 16-year-old boy presenting it. (I’d borrowed my dad’s suit for the occasion, probably two sizes too big for me, which no doubt provided the buyer with some amusement!)
Although he liked my jam, he told me very straightforwardly that the business idea is only a small part of the equation of what makes a product a success. He explained that I would have to set up production in a factory and offer him a good price. I’d have to get labels designed that explained to people why they should buy my products. And I’d have to do a bit more work on my recipes before he’d be happy.
This was my biggest rejection to date. I should have learned by then that the first time I knocked on the door of a big supermarket, they probably wouldn’t say yes. I was totally bummed out for I had absolutely no idea how to create a brand and set up production in a factory.
LESSONS LEARNED
While I had managed to start the first incarnation of my jam business quite literally in a weekend, with little more than a wooden spoon and a big helping of teenaged optimism, the next step wasn’t going to happen so fast. The task of creating a ‘real business’, a product that genuinely had the potential to make it big, seemed insurmountable. And such fears seemed confirmed when I returned to the buyer a year later to meet with another rejection. The buyer explained that the labels I had created were too silly, the factory too expensive and my recipes too unusual. Basically, I’d got everything wrong and had to start all over again!
Although I was totally devastated, I had come to accept that rejection would always be a big part of this process. I also learned that while family and friends are an extremely important source of help and support, they’re not able to give impartial advice. When they see you fail, they hate to see you get hurt and so would rather that you stopped. The person you should actually listen to, and I know it sounds cheesy, is the customer. In my case, even though I had done everything wrong, the buyer still felt that I had a good idea.
If everyone tells you that your idea stinks, including customers, you should probably reassess whether or not it is the right thing to be doing with your life. But if customers still maintain that your idea is something they’d be interested in buying, there’s a good chance that you should keep going. That glimmer of hope helped me to persevere.
And thank God, because it did turn out to be a good idea. By the time I redesigned the labels and convinced a new factory to work with me, the supermarket said ‘Yes’, and before long we had launched in more than 1,000 stores around the world and SuperJam was entered into the National Museum of Scotland as an example of an ‘Iconic Scottish Brand’.
A personal highlight of my adventure was seeing SuperJam become something of a phenomenon in South Korea. For my grandmother the biggest day out was our visit to Buckingham Palace, where we were presented with a medal by Prince Charles. But what I enjoyed most was seeing my life story made into a TV drama in Japan. In the dramatised re-enactment, I was played by a small Indian boy – something, presumably, was lost in translation, but never mind!
SuperJam has been something of an adventure and a success, but I can’t help wondering sometimes how much more quickly it could all have been achieved. During the process, I found that every facet of setting up a real business was new to me. I had no idea how to create a brand, how to work out the finances or anything else. I really knew nothing, and had to figure it all out as I went along, taking many a wrong turn and wasting priceless months as I did.
Of course, when I came to apply lessons learned to my second business and then to my third, the whole process became a lot quicker – I simply didn’t make the same mistakes again.
ENVELOPE COFFEE
One of my best friends is Lennart Clerkx; he’s Dutch, and a pretty interesting guy – able to speak seven languages. But one of the things that is a little unusual about him is that he doesn’t have any sense of smell. That’s a serious affliction. However, it’s not all bad news. Just as those who are blind sometimes have extra good hearing to sort of compensate, so Lennie has unusually good taste buds. He can pick up on the acidity or sweetness of what he’s eating better than most people.
He discovered that he had this particular talent, and subsequently became interested in coffee, when he was living in Denmark, where some of the world’s most pioneering roasters are based. Now, he’s made a whole career out of his taste buds.
Coffee roasters from around Europe send him to Africa, and Central and South America, in search of the best beans. He can tell better than anyone how acidic or sweet a particular harvest is. He’s also all about paying the growers a fair price for these incredible beans that he discovers. His company, This Side Up, helps small roasters buy beans from these far-flung places, directly from the farmers.
Not long after we first met, sharing a beer by a canal, Lennie told me all about his travels in the developing world and I became instantly fascinated. He showed me photos of the places he’d visited and told me about the lives of the farmers. More than anything, he was evangelical about how great their coffees were.
On another weekend visit to see him in Amsterdam, and no doubt after a few more beers, we decided there was a better way to do the coffee business. Why didn’t we buy the beans directly from the farmers, using Lennie’s connections, and then sell the roasted coffee directly to customers over the internet? No middlemen, no importers and no supermarkets between our customers and the people growing these incredible beans.
Within a matter of days I had come up with the name ‘Envelope Coffee’. I’d found a local coffee roaster in Glasgow who could roast and pack the beans for us and had set up a simple website to charge our customers a fortnightly subscription.
Using a list of ethically sourced beans from countries such as Rwanda and Ecuador, we soon had a product to sell. We used standard coffee envelopes, which we ordered inexpensively online, but made them look great by creating a nice label for them.
I invited a Danish photographer, Kiva Brynaa, to London to shoot the product in situ at a coffee roaster’s premises over the course of a half-day. Even though the company had been started on a shoestring in a matter of days, I wanted our customers to get the best possible impression of us. In my opinion, brilliant photography can ensure this in a way that nothing else can. I really believe that foods – especially things like coffee – are visual products. We eat with our eyes.
Within weeks of having the idea for Envelope Coffee, we sold our first bag of coffee. And it didn’t take long before we had a loyal base of subscribers – the product truly spoke for itself. Besides, coffee is a pretty addictive product – when you find one you like, you stick with it.
Buoyed by one another’s enthusiasm for the project, within weeks Lennie and I were on a flight to Colombia to find our beans. We took another Danish friend, Nick Levin, a photographer and filmmaker, to shoot a short movie about Colombian coffee.
Over there, they grow some of the best coffee in the world and they’re very proud of it. After a night in the big city of Bogotá, we headed to the countryside. When we got there, we spent some time with Juan Pablo, one of Colombia’s foremost coffee experts – a man who tastes more than 600 cups of coffee … a day!
While