Hello everybody. And welcome to the eCommerce Impact Podcast today on the podcast, we have Krisi Smith co-founder and creative director of Bird & Blend tea. She's a visionary behind the incredible tea innovation at Bird & Blend tea, starting the business from back from a back bedroom and learning to code her first website and she's, and she continues to lead their now multimillion dollar eCommerce store with passionate team around her.

So welcome to the show Krisi. No worries at all. So my first question to you is how did it start and where are you now? And then what are the wins have been the wins and challenges along the way. Great question. So, yeah, as I, as you mentioned in my intro, it started with that classic, proper hustle startup story.

So from my mum's back bedroom but if we FA, if we rewind another year before that I was actually. Out in Canada. I'm a ski instructor and I was trying to avoid getting any sort of proper job in, in Airmark. You know, I pretty academic, but I'm also creative and there was a lot of pressure from my family and friends to sort of, I don't know, get on a grad scheme in London and be a banker or a lawyer.

And I was like, Nope, I'm gonna I'm gonna go. And ski Yeah. So I was out there and I was looking for a business idea, to be honest. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. Yeah. And I. It's funny because in the food and drink industry in particular, a lot of companies have started from a passion for the product.

Yeah. And although I am passionate about tea and I'm an expert in the industry now at the time, it was more about looking for a great opportunity to start a business. So I happened upon the north American tea market while I was out there and just thought to myself, why is no one in the UK doing tea in this innovative way so much you can do with it?

We're, we're a nation of tea lovers, and yet it's all linked. It was back then all linked to origins health, and quite a lot of sort of very premium. You know, you, you, if you like tea, you had to go to sort of a tea Cono and you had to know all the, the. Language or you enjoyed like afternoon tea with, you know, chintzy and, and north America just kinda like that.

They're just really innovative. So I thought, right. Let's, let's go and give this a shot for, for the summer when I had no work. So I moved me and my partner business partner and partner at the time, moved back to the UK in with my mom and she said, oh, you can have six months and then you've gotta get a proper job.

I think she was joking. She was like, great. Chris is coming home. And then I said, oh, by the way. I'm. And she was like . Yeah. And is, are you, is anyone in your family, an entrepreneur? No. No. I was actually the first person to go to uni of my family as well. Oh, wow. So, yeah. And um, yeah, it, I don't think I knew I.

An entrepreneur. I think I got described a lot as being, you know, troublesome and, you know, awkward and asking questions. And as a teenager, that was really tricky, but as I've grown up and sort of owned it, I've realized that they're all the things that you should, you do describe an entrepreneur as, so yeah.

You know, being criticized for it as a teenager and now praised for it as a, as an adult, which is a, which is a strange yeah. But yeah, but I noticed in your, when I was doing some research prior to the interview that you've had quite a lot of jobs, I'm the similar actually person that's had quite a lot of jobs, even my sort of uni jobs, I would, they would just never last mm-hmm I think again, I had that like similar kind of asking too many questions, trying to do it in a different way and that I was actually a frustrated entrepreneur, but I'm, I'm interested in people.

Entrepreneurs so soon, like you had, you know, those part-time jobs around or those travel jobs, were there any kind of serious jobs that you had before you started on this venture? Or was, or was this kind of, this was it. This is what you threw yourself into. Pretty much. I mean, I was 23 when I, you know, we made that decision to move back, to start the business.

And I had done a lot of traveling before as well, and a lot of jobs. So, you know, I had a lot of world experience for a young person looking back now. I can't believe it really, but I didn't have any proper jobs. Now. I, I had jobs, some jobs where my employers thought that that. That, that it was a proper, you know, life, life.

And I sort of found myself in my one to one saying, yes, I absolutely want to be a production assistant for the rest of my life or, or yes, I want to be Declan. That's absolutely. My passion thinking is absolutely not my passion. Not oh God, I've been there. So so you started this business in your mom's back spare bedroom and she gave you six months.

Yeah. I mean, starting a product business and making it profitable is definitely not a six month endeavor generally. Yeah. How, how long did it take you to get to a point where it was you know, a business that was gonna pay it, pay its way for you at least and kind of be a serious business that your mom would take seriously?

well, they're two different questions, I think, but yeah, just. So we bootstrapped massively in the first year. Yeah. So everything, you know, we would just call up and down the country for any festivals or markets or anything that was last minute, say, have you got a free spot? Welcome down. Like I said, in my mom's back bedroom, sleeping there, making the tea there didn't spend any money on anything really.

Yeah. Other than the product and did all of the hours ourselves, the two of. Wow. We did make a profit, but back then, you know, you're reinvesting it all into the business and it's not paying a decent wage. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a bit of a false economy. Yeah, I think we properly hit a, a turning point when we opened the first store in 2014.

So that was two years in that's when we moved to Brighton to open the first door chose a really cool spot down in the lanes, really independent and lots of cool stuff going on. The landlord and land lady took a chance on us cause we didn't have any, you know, proper accounts or anything. And I look back now, I think that was.

That was a really lucky break actually, when we, and then this weird thing happened that, you know, we had the website, it was wasn't turning over huge amounts, but probably six figures probably by then. Yeah. And so we thought we were running a, you know, a, a successful ish business from zero on five grand savings is all we'd spend of our own money.

It wasn't until we opened the store that everybody started sort of went, wow, like you have a proper business. And it's so strange that the concept of having a, an actual high street location, suddenly it's such a traditional view, but everyone sort of went, oh, wow. Like you've got a shop. You, you, you serious now.

And I was kind of like, well, we've been serious for two years, you know? . Yeah, no. So yeah, probably 2014 was the, was the turning point where people realized. We were serious about this, and that was two years in. So we were just about over that risk period of starting a new business and everything was looking pretty good.

The signs were looking good, so, yeah. Yeah. And so prior to the store opening, had you seen it as being, was the plan to be bricks and mortar, or were you trying to make it work as a website and promoting yourselves at kind of like events and things and, and trying to drive an audience that way? What, was there a strategy to kind of being bricks and mortar or being e-com or.

Yeah. Yeah. We, again, uniquely to us, we were always set out on being a bricks and mortar business. Yeah. Um, We had loads of advice at the beginning saying you've got a cracking product, just get it on the supermarket shelves. Don't open stores, the heat, the high street is dying. You'll have to recruit hundreds of people.

It'll be a nightmare. And we just, yeah, we ignored that. But, but mainly because both Mike and I have stuck to our guns on what we're passionate about and it was about. Building a business that we wanted to be in and it was always about people and yeah. You know, our mission statement at the start wasn't anything to do with tea.

It was about building a profitable business that put people first. Yeah. And. You know, by having retail stores, we were able to employ more people. We were able to create the types of jobs that we wish we'd had when we were, you know, scrabbling around on part-time circuit. And we were able to create spaces where, you know, people could, our customers could come and interact with us.

We, we started in stores, so we loved the immediate feedback you get from your customers. And I certainly believe that that strategy, although it wasn. Well thought out, other than what I've just described is what has made the E eCommside of things so popular and so profitable because we did two to three years solid in front of our customers.

So every piece of feedback gave us, went into the product, went into the econ. Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah. And so now here you are with 14 stores. Yes. And what's the mix now between revenue that's come from, that comes from online and comes from the bricks and mortar. Yeah. We're about 55% online at the moment in terms of revenue.

Yeah. Which I'm chuffed about, and I'm gonna keep. That's my that's my area. So I'm, I'm, I'm the goal over the next couple of years is to keep growing, you know, really quickly on the, on the digital side. Yeah. We are to open a couple of new stores a year, but we wanna keep that mix predominantly yeah.

Line. A lot of our customers come and hang out with us in the store if they're local or they'll come and visit a certain desk. So we try to open the stores and destinations, and then they get their. The real experience, the theater that demos the team in the store, they feel like they're a part of the brand.

And then they go on to shop with us. Online. So the store amazing to our eCommerce customer's lifetime value. They they're like a, a massive part of the strategy. So even though I'm driving digital growth and digital acquisition, we still put a lot of our effort and energy in the marketing to make sure that a customer, even if we've acquired them digitally and they'll spend the most of their money digitally that we.

Inspire them to get in store at some point, because it's so valuable. Commercially so fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. So do you do a lot of work to kind of cross cross pollinate? The two kind of channels if you were so, like, are you like in store kind of getting the email address or online kind of telling them about the stores that are near them?

Like, what are you doing to kind of move people across the two sides? Yeah, both of those things. So we do some quite direct. Bits and pieces around targeting through marketing and yeah, everyone in store gets asked to, to join up. So we, you know, they get added to our marketing and they've got, you know, personalized marketing based on where they signed up.

So if they signed up in the brighten store we, we, we speak to them differently and try and figure out where they're from and whether they've just been visiting or whether they live in Brighton and they would. Right. We also use our website very much as a and our mailing list. Very much as a sort of here.

First, you hear about things first, all the drops happen there first. So we have a lot of store customers that get their information from our website and from our marketing. So if there's a big drop happening, you know, on a Sunday morning, they'll, they'll wait, they'll, they'll look at it on the site.

They'll research it, they'll get their email. And then. Literally queue outside their local store to get whatever it is that they've, you know, researched. So. Wow. Wow. It's interesting. Yeah. So you've got like a sort of apple approach to to the kind of the product product launches. Yeah. Yeah. And then we, for the, you know, the rest of the marketing, we just make sure that, you know, I just try and make sure that the team, although the team are very eCommfocused that their marketing is.

Providing a lot of content of what's going on in the stores. We have awesome events loads of community UGC coming in, pouring in, and we just make sure we share that and make sure we are putting out that we're a, you know, an in person community that they could be a part of. Yeah. I also try and recruit into my entry level roles over.

Digital marketing from the stores if I can. So I've, you know, I, I pull them over, which is, which is again, fantastic for the business, but also. that desire to create a business where, you know, jobs can be what you want them to be. I would've loved if some of my jobs, you know, on shop floors back in the day, you had an opportunity to be lifted into the marketing department.

You know, that would've been awesome. So yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit more about like how your values have shaped your, the way you've shaped the business. Like both for you and your business partner. Yeah. So Mike and I are very different people. We, we, we have different outlooks.

We have different ways of working. We have different strengths and weaknesses, which. On the whole a complimentary, but I'm not gonna lie over the years. It has been challenging. I think it's challenging to run a business with anyone imagine, and you share all the highs together, but you share all the lows and it can be really tricky.

And I think the thing that's kept us on the straight and narrows that we've never wavered from what, you know, the core. Purpose of what we're doing and our values. Yeah. And I think that's because when we started, we didn't, we didn't use like a, you know, a marketing or a branding agency that said like, what's your story?

What are your values? We just, we just did it. And the, the, when we left Canada, we sat in a pub and wrote on a back, literally on a back of a napkin, like four things that were important to us. And then they remain, they remain the sort of four values that we. That we that we follow and like have never waved from that.

Which has been like the, did the DNA that we fall back on. If, if everything gets a bit wobbly out there, like, right. Yeah. Do we still believe in this? Yes. Are you still passionate about this? Yes. Okay. Right. Well, let's keep going and find a different way of doing it. Yeah, that's so fascinating. So do you bring your values into your, like overtly into say the recruitment process?

Are you checking whether people kind of share your Val values before you hire them? Or do you have a way of doing that? Yeah, we do. We have a cultural round on our interviews specifically for that reason where they get to meet a random selection of people across the business. Mm. Cause you know, if I'm interviewing someone, I'm gonna give you the, the, you know, the pitch of bird and blend, but it's really important that they see.

Behind the scenes and, and meet some people. And, and we also throw them onto a shop floor as well. And see, you know, whether they, cause if they're not mad about the customers and, you know, love people and, you know, care about the world around us, then they're not gonna be that type of person. That said we do try our best to be as open to different types of people as.

And I think that's something that's really important that just because someone doesn't work in the way that you work or maybe see the world in a different way, doesn't mean that they can value. But those sort of values underpinning what we're about. You kind of have to have them. If you don't have them, it's not like we'd likes you or anything.

You just wouldn't, you just wouldn't enjoy it. So, you know yeah. You wouldn't thrive. Yeah. If you. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Isn't it like to have the values written down is so important because then you've got like a kind of framework to base the decision on rather than what entrepreneurs can sometimes tend to do when they're in a hurry is just base it on their gut.

And that's where you get people just hiring their likeness over and over. And like you said, if we wanna promote diversity, We need to have, you know, different types of people and like maybe challenge our own assumptions about who we wanna work with. But if you have a framework in terms of, they must have a certain type of value underpinning them, even though they're a different sort of person that can really help.

That's what we have found as well in the agency, like really being clear about like making sure we test and kind of find a way to tease out the people's values to make sure they're a fit has really helped us. Yeah. Cool. So so there's a stat I found recently, which kind of surprised me, 96% of E eCommstores fail.

I mean, and I know you are not technically an E eCom store, but I think business failure rate is probably around those sort of numbers. So why do you think you've been so successful? You've been 10 years in business now and you know, clearly across all the markers, a really successful business, what do you think has, has made you different from those businesses that haven't made it along the way?

Yeah, great question. I think it's not, there's not just one magic solution. And I think looking back on it, it's easy to with hindsight pick out the things, but at the time you just feel like there's a mountain in the head and you're just taking like one little step at a time. That's the only way you can start a business.

If you thought about the. You know that what was up coming up, if you knew what was coming up? I don't think anyone would get started. But I think that we were in the right pace at the right time. You know, the market that we chose was was, was taking a turn and booming, and we noticed that and we checked that we didn't do extensive market research in terms of the more formal channels.

Cause we didn't have any money, but we did. Research. And in the early days with the stores, the locations, you know, we went and sat and we counted people walking past whether they had shopping bags, whether they had buggies, whether they, you know, we went and visited the unis that were local and like, got to know the students.

We'd try and. Do events in the areas to make sure that, you know, those areas were the right types of people used our eCommdata data as well to see where people were. So we, we did try to back as much as we could in research and data, even in the early days. And we bootstrapped everything which was really difficult, but actually meant that Mike and I.

L learn all of the aspects of setting our business up. And because we did that every day, day in, day out, when we started growing or thinking about growing, we had a really strong, you know, knowledge underpinning, not only of our business and what was passionate we were passionate about, but the actual fundamentals, you know, Mike was running our finances.

I was doing, I, I learned to build the first website. You know, we didn't use any external agencies at that time. We didn't have any money. And it meant that we got really under the hood and it was an invaluable start to business. Yeah. And I cannot, you know, promote it more. It is a hustle. We worked seven days a week, you know, 16, 17, 18 hours a day, some days for two years.

When we opened the first door, You know, I manage the shop floor in the day. And then I do, you know, the e-com overnight because I wanted to know whether or not this model was gonna work and I needed to be there firsthand to, to make that call. And then once we'd proven those points, we then started investing in.

Money external health, especially. Yeah. But from a place of knowing what you were talking about and being able to like hold them to account and talk the talk. Yeah, I think that's so interesting. I give that's the advice I give to early stage eCommfounders is like, you have to learn on the marketing side, you have to learn the fundamentals of like media buying and email marketing.

And, you know, branding to an extent because otherwise, you know, your agency's not gonna know as, and as much about your business as you are. And if you are kind of working with an agency that doesn't know and necessarily care you're gonna potentially throw away a ton of money before you get to the result that you need to.

Whereas if you learn it fundamentally yourself, then when you do get to the stage of being able to hire an agency, you're talking to them, you know, on their level. So I think that is really a really interesting that you had that experience as well. It's just as well. Like it's not, it's very accessible.

You know, I just learned through the internet, you know, there's loads of really cool courses and resources that you can do for free reading. You know, we've always had a massive stash of. Of books and then just asking people, you know, we, we, in the early days we had a mantra that we would just say yes to everything, because you don't know who you're gonna meet and when that's gonna come back around and we started building this of cool people, and if I'd met someone that had something interesting to say, I'd literally like, I can remember being at networking and awards in the first couple of years and just cheering people's ears off.

Like, please tell me about this. Like, what's going on in this, you know? Yeah. What you tend to find is that if someone's an expert at something or passionate about something and they're happy to talk to you it lights them up. So. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's cool. Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting.

And in terms of like mentors, have you like paid, have you had, you know, business coaches, have you paid mentors to like give you advice or has it tended to be more just online courses, that kind of thing. And then networking? We have got a really cool, like small group of. Kind of mentors advisors. We don't, we have never paid for it, Mike and I but we are fortunate to have attracted some cool people along the way who were very.

Willing to give their advice and support. And we've been able to be a little bit, you know, picky about who we keep in that sort of circle. We've got people from different industries, you know, e-com logistics, finance, private equity, and amazing whatever. So you, so you created like your own kind of mini mastermind pretty much.

And I guess kind of like a board, but we we've never had a board and we didn't know that what was, what that was, and it just meant. You know, we can take their advice and, or not. And that's the, that's the key thing there. And we weren't, we never sort of hit, we haven't hit the stage yet where we felt like we needed to pay for that or bring someone on in a more formal.

And I think, again, that's just because we're inquisitive. We are like, we are passionate. People are believe in the business, so they're happy to, you know, help you along the way. In the very early days, it was difficult to. Cut through the noise of, you know, there's vast amounts of people out there that, that want to be your mentor, that would charge you for that, or that perhaps give you advice that you don't know is right or wrong.

And has said, we did told a lot at the beginning, don't run. A massive people, business outsource everything, you know, be a supermarket brand. And it was difficult cuz you're sitting there thinking, well, this person's a really successful business person, so I should probably listen. They must go way more than I do because I've only been doing this 18 months, but.

Rather than it being that I thought that I knew better. Cause I didn't have more experience it's that I had those fundamental values and the, the mission statement of growing a people business that was gonna do some good in the world. But when I circled back on that and was like, does this advice fit with that?

The answer was no. So even though it may have got a more revenue quicker, you know, probably would be a much more, you know, profitable. Or valuable business. It didn't fit with what we wanted to do. And because it was about building a business that we were, you know, really happy to be in day in, day out that stopped us from taking advice that perhaps would take us off that tangent.

Mm. Because ultimately we're in business. You know, to have the life that we wanna have. Like, we're not, if we're in business just for the money, then we're gonna be very unhappy people. I think there's only very few people that are made happy just by like financial success. So I think it's something that as business people, we need to remind ourselves all the time, like, why am I here?

Why am I doing this? And am I, is this decision gonna lead me towards what I actually want? Yeah, it's often a really tricky one. To pin down. It is, I think it can be done. And there are some examples, especially in the E eCommspace where, you know, you can do it with just a really small team and some cracking agencies and you know, you, but you do have to spend a fair amount in advance to sort of get yourself up and running on that.

And I've got a couple of peers that have, you know, outsourced the whole of their branding and literally. You know, I've got a vague idea. Please come up with my brand, come up with my strapline, come up with my mission statement, sort, my packaging out, build my store and. Yeah. I mean, it, it's just not the type of business that I wanted to, to do at that time that didn't excite me.

Yeah. And I think that there's a little bit of a, a sort of a thing at the moment that building an eCommbusiness in particular, especially at coming out of COVID is it's really trendy. It's like this, you know, you see these really big brands like Jim shark and they're kind of like lifestyle influence across with e-com and people think like, yeah, like let's, let's do that.

And. Actually, if you're not passionate about it, then you're gonna come unstuck pretty soon, I think. Yeah. Completely. Yeah. But yeah, not to, not to discourage anyone from giving it a go cause I absolutely think anyone can do it and that if you wanna do it, you, you should. But it's. Yeah, it's a weird, well, you must be seeing this as well, Jessie, like it's a weird world out there at the moment with coming out of COVID and everyone started an E eComm business and all, all of marketing stuff going off haywire and we're.

Yeah, but what's, I mean, yeah, I guess in some ways it's never been easier to start a business than ever before, but actually we we're hitting these headwinds now that I think E you know, e-com as a whole, as an industry, although as an industry it's still growing. It's much more challenging. It's so much more competitive, like post COVID.

I think, you know, all these people that just don't wanna work for the man anymore. They're figuring out different ways of doing it and maybe thinking it's easier than than it actually is. It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint to grow an eCommbrand. And I think it is tough for brands getting started right now.

If they were started in the beginning of 2020, they might have. Like a bit of tailwind behind them, like, you know, pushing them forward. But but now would be pretty tough. I think you have to have a bit of capital to, to start up, you know, probably more than five grand, I would say. So I, I have no idea how anyone's, if you have started eCommbusiness or any business during COVID.

I have no idea how people are navigating sussing out. I mean, we are finding it hard enough and we have 10 years of, well, eight years. You know, fairly stable trends, you know? Yeah. Is pretty solid. We know what our, we knew what our business was going into COVID we knew the economics of it and decisions.

And then we had this 18 months of mayhem, which you're just scrambling to keep up. And it's alright to say, oh, well, eCommwas booming. It was boom. but you, we lost 18 months of, you know, really knowing our customers. And then we've come out the other side and realized that our customers have fundamentally changed.

Their, their desires have changed the way they shop has changed and how a new business could go from having, like, if you imagine if your first year was a COVID year and then your second year was this year, I, I, you have no idea how you would go. Decided. I know. I mean, looking at year on year, data is just impossible at the moment.

And like, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of businesses that we've seen come to us who kind of like, oh, we started, you know, we've been running for two years and we dunno what's happened. Our, our business isn't really working anymore. Well, if you started in the middle of the pandemic, you know, you've got a long way to go to kind of become a solid business in the real world after that, I think, yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's challenging for sure. What, what about for you guys? What, what do you feel is the biggest challenge you're facing in terms of the marketing? You know, is it, is it iOS 14? Is it the ad costs? Is it competition? What do you think is kind of making it hard for you at the moment? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think obviously it's bonkers out there with paid media. You, you know, better than I do it is. I think that. For a brand like ours, we are fairly lucky because we are still pretty lean. We're innovative. You know, I drive, I'm still very hands on and I drive, you know, a very start startup, still mentality of like, The team are all really empowered.

If something's not working, let's change it. Let's test stuff. Let's be really quick about, you know, stopping things that are failing and doubling down on things that are doing well. Yeah. So being able to reassess where to spend marketing spend this year the, the attitude we've got, which is great. And it's just been a lot of.

Learning, you know, we've gone into three we're in three sprints at the moment, testing new channels, which we've never done three sprints at a time in new channels. And it's a bit of discovery figuring out where to, you know, spare spend your money. That's difficult, it's fun, but it's difficult. I think that the biggest challenge we're facing to be perfectly honest, People in terms of recruitment and retention, which is not something we've had before.

You know, we are a really decent employer. We're a living wage employer. We've got tons and tons of benefits on top of that in terms of learning and development, empowerment. We're great place to work. I think the majority of people you could ask that work for us would say that they love their. Most of the time.

It's never had a problem recruiting. We get hundreds of applicants on every job, but in the last six months, we've really, really struggled in both retail and digital marketing and. Problem just seems to be that again, people have just reassessed their lives over COVID and people that are were in retail have either moved out of retail because they can't afford it anymore.

Or they've started a family or they've changed industry and additional marketing, a lot of the. More senior and, you know, experienced people are, it's basically their market. They can pick and choose whatever they, they want. There's so many brands out there wanting to supercharge their digital marketing, that decent people are li you know, the majority of people I've chatted to have, have become.

Contractors or freelancers, and they're not interested in being in house and a brand anymore because they can have a much better work life balance. They can dip and out dip and out in and out of really cool brands and getting bombs and seats has. Yeah, it's, it's gone a bit bonkers, to be honest. Yeah. So I'm just trying to navigate that storm at the moment and improve, you know, the way that we talk to people, the way we recruit people improve basically taking the recruitment side back into my team a little bit in the marketing.

So like we've gotta market our business. We've got to, we have got to market our business. It's not, we are not interviewing them anymore. They're interviewing us. And yeah, that's a new way of thinking about it. And actually, although it's a nuisance for me as an employer, it's probably a lot better for employees.

Like, do you not think that's a better way of doing it? That. Employers should be, you know, working hard to, if you are valuable and you've got a lot to offer, we should be working hard to get you. You should, you are worth it. So I think, yeah, we quite like it. Not as necessarily as a business owner, but I like it as in general.

I think it's a, as a trend in the world. Yeah. And also I think it probably does hold you to account as a business owner, you know, like, yes. I feel like in my agency, like my main job as CEO is actually. Making, you know, winning over the hearts and minds of my team so that they feel like this is something they care about.

And if I can do that, then, then they'll serve the clients and all of that work will happen naturally. So that's kind of what keeps me up at night is thinking of how I motivate them and how I inspire them really, as a leader and you know, other ways we can make the role as attractive as possible. You know, we, we are exploring like the four hour work, sorry, four hour work week, four day work week.

We're looking at all the other benefits. I mean, and we are surveying. Like we surveyed our team the other day and asked them like what their most important values were like in life. And the top value that came up from, for like half the team members was meaningful. Work with purpose. And I guess that's natural.

Cause we are the kind of agency that works with purposeful brands and we, we like we are we're all about that. So we're gonna naturally attract those kind of people. I think there's a lot of people, you know, that are moving that way. That work is not just work for money anymore because actually they could, if they wanted money, they could work anywhere.

But actually feeling like the work is meaningful. So I think it's a huge, huge trend. I think I also went to Brighton Ted the other day, and they did a whole piece on this, about happiness and fulfillment at work. And there was some Bonker statistics. Something like 92% of people surveyed had said they would consider leaving their job in the last three months had, had like considered it at some point.

And it's just, yeah, I think, wow. I thought it was gonna be high, but I didn't think it was gonna be that high. And I think, yeah, it's just. People have been forced to reassess what's important to them. And I think that's a good, yeah. And it's gonna change fundamentally the way that we recruit people, work with people, your work life is, has never been more joined, but also you've seen that you can have more of a work life balance and the world went quiet for a while.

And why would we not wanna, you know, try and pull some of the good stuff out of that. Yeah, the business exactly got to keep up. And that's something that we have to do even even 10 years in, as an established business, we are, you know, paying a lot of attention to this. We have to keep up with it. We have to evolve because if we don't, you know, the people are fundamental.

So if we don't evolve and get the right people, our business is built on great people. So it's a massive risk factor. . Yeah, certainly. Cool. So changing tack a little bit, I'd love to hear what has been your most precarious kind of, we almost died moment in business. I mean, if you guys were bootstrapping in those early days, opening those stores, were there some moments when you thought, you know, you got so close to the why that it, it might not, you might not survive.

Yeah. We had a couple Touch wood, only a couple, which is great. We we had a real tight cash flow issue in 2016. Which so, no, it was a bit of a, it caught us by surprise. It shouldn't have done, we were fairly established by then, but we just I dunno, just took our eye off a little bit and realized that we, you know, we had a bit of a cash issue and we weren't sure if we were gonna make payroll.

And that was absolutely terrifying. We'd never missed payroll and you know, we'd have to be at doomsday situation that to ever happen. Uh, Yeah, it speak to me when people, you hear stories of people that say, oh, you know, I was paid late this month because you know, they didn't, whatever. I feel like no number one, you pay, you pay your team first.

Like that. Absolutely. Number one. But yeah, that was really a bit of a shock for Mike and I, I think we'd been we'd, we'd both started paying quite a lot of attention to growing the business and the, the fundamentals of the finances that Mike had been doing, you know, day in, day out he'd he'd recruited some people and it just, we just took our eye off a little bit, but it was all fine.

It worked out fine. But it was a good four months getting us back on track. And then that knocked us out, going into Christmas. Cause this happened in the. And our business is very season based. We make all of our profit over the Christmas months, so we learn a really solid and it knocked our Christmas out as well.

So we learn a really, really valuable, less lesson about you know, cash flow and making sure we had money in the bank to last us through those quieter times in the summer, we also pulled out some learnings around how to boost revenue. In the summer. So we now do a midyear sale, which is the only sale we run and we do a massive cold brew tea campaign.

We kind of own that in the UK to cause it makes sense. No one wants to be buying hot tea online. Yeah. holiday in August. So up the number of events we were doing in store and we basically evolved from that learning so good. Stuff's come out of it and touch wood. We've never had a problem. . Mm. So knowing your numbers, knowing your seasonality really well, and having like a kind of marketing plan around those, that seasonality to kind of boys bolster yourself in the low season.

That's really interesting. Just mention, and you mentioned earlier, sorry, go ahead. No, no, it's cool. I was gone. Yeah. Go on. yeah. You mentioned earlier about drop, like product drops and, and creating quite a lot of buzz around them and people queuing up outside the store. Because you do have quite a big product range and you are constantly kind of innovating on, on like flavors and, and different kind of ways of approaching the product.

Yeah. How, how does that work? And like, how do, how do you kind of link that to the marketing strategy and is it basically fundamentally a marketing strategy to constantly be releasing new products? . Yeah, I think in the early days it was, it was just, it was the only marketing we did. We, we had a small range in the early days, 21 T blends, and I wanted to grow the range and it kind of just made sense to me to have these seasonal drops, you know, every Easter we'd launch four new blends and, you know, then I realized that.

Okay, cool. This people are getting very excited about this. So what if we made them just the Easter and at the beginning, it was kind of like, well, nobody's gonna be wanting to buy Easter egg tea in. August anyway, so let's limit edition, pull it back. And then, you know, a couple of customers were like, oh, is there any way we can get 'em to return?

So then we started doing things like vote backs, where our community could vote back a limited edition onto thet wall permanently. So we started this cycle of releasing like maybe four or five collections a year. That was the only marketing we did. We'd do some vote backs to get them onto the wall.

And then the range started growing, And then. We really amped that up in 20 18, 20 19. So our calendar, our marketing calendar was all seasonality. We did Valentine's stuff. We did pancakes, collections, you know, all sorts of stuff. That was really cool. But very distracting for both us as marketers and also for the customer, because.

We were noticing as our audience grew, it was becoming harder and harder to explain to them what a limited edition was, what it meant. If they, you know, they were missing, that things were going, they were missing the drops. And so two years we've actually changed the model up a little bit, where we have our TWA, it's got a hundred blends on it now that are permanent and across all different categories.

And you can go online or go in store and choose your favorites from this massive range. The range is a bit of a nuisance in terms of stock and all of that, you know, the more screws you have, it's, it's, it's a nuisance, but we wanted to have this experience where you've got all of these amazing, colorful, flavorful teas to choose from like, like a pick mix type experience.

That's the us P we have. And then rather than doing loads and loads and loads of seasonal drops, we do maybe four a year and we launch just one or two. teas. So for Easter we just did cream egg, and then we build product innovation around that for our super fans. So we did a T infused Easter egg. We did T infused chocolate.

We did tea infused candles. So those we then market heavily to all. Like committed fan base that love that, but the sort of core range of great tees, we only really talk about those in our like wider audience outreach, because if you imagine no with an ad or something, you know, someone's seeing a T infused Easter egg, like we might get your attention, but it's kind of confusing to a.

Prospect. What do you do? Interesting company. Are you, what, what is this? So we'll try to, you know, I've been trying to get the team. You are all really creative, really innovative, and they're excited about this Easter egg, because it's so cool to them, but we're trying to remind them actually for our wider audience, if we're trying to gain new customers, They probably don't know what it is.

Don't care. They're not ready for that yet. Let's just focus on some of the, a game, regular teas that are out of this world. Like our chocolate digestive tea, like a breakfast tea that tastes a little bit like biscuit. Like, it's great. If you've had the, I think one of the big BrandScript is off, cuz it, technically someone's done it's on the supermarket shelf, but as is better, I promise.

But that entry level, if you like English breakfast, you like your tea with milk. It's got a little bit. Chocolate digestive, like, why are we not talking about this? That's gonna get people's attention. It's a little bit less scary than tea infused Easter eggs, you know, and we can do it all year round. So yeah, that's been what we've been focusing on.

So still living space for innovation, but making sure it's not alienating our, you know, growth, the, the audiences we need to attract for growth. Yeah. That's so fascinating. Yeah. Wow. And in terms of the, so just going back to you, you mentioned about kind of that hairy moment you had with the with the finances and you, you mentioned that you bootstrapped from the early days, but at a certain point you did raise some money, some investment.

Yes. I think from a crowd cube, is that right? Have you. Was that, was there also investor private investors involved as well? Or was it, has it always just been crowdfunding for you guys? Yeah, we've done two crowd fundraise. One is 20 17 1 last year. We do have a handful of, of investors that have put in slightly more money.

But they also invested. You know, we, we arranged it in advance, but they still invest it through the crowd. So they have the same you know, same setup. We haven't done anything with PE or anything yet. Maybe in the future, that could be cool. But we chose to do the crowd funding because we have this really active base of fans that were happy to, you know, Put a little bit of money in to be able to own a bit of the brand that they love, and also to help us on our journey.

We've always tell, told the growth story and been very authentic and personable. We've built a community that's that are invested in our. Progression and growth. So crowdfunding made sense for us at that time. And also they become brand ambassadors overnight. You know, we've got 1,500 investors, Mike and I still own the, by a long way, the majority stake and there's 1,500 people out there in the world saying why I own a little bit of burning brand, you know, and they talk about it and they tell their friends.

So in terms of free marketing, I mean, it's not free. Yes, but yeah. You know, yeah, that's awesome. And so, cuz you've mentioned a few times super fans and people lining up outside the stores and now these kind of like thousand plus investors, what have you guys done proactively in terms of, from a marketing sense to To nurture that kind of community and involve them in, in your business.

It sounds like you've done a great job of it. So I'd be interested to hear kind of what, what were the kind of techniques you used? Yeah, we, we loved, we loved it. We loved the people. So we made those connections with the earlier, you know, the early adopters at the beginning. I still recognize, you know, when people's names come through.

From writing notes, we wrote notes on every single fulfillment online order. And I got to know, you know, the customers and over the years, that's now, you know, smart segmentation and stuff. And, but back then, I would literally notice that. So, and so was the same name of the person that I chat in the store last week.

They'd already had this tea. Okay. What should they have next? So figuring out those customer journeys and segmentation, I was doing that, but I didn't know I was doing. The other thing we did is that we. , we've always stuck to those original principles of the experience you get in store. It's still very similar to the experience that we did on the market stores.

The handwritten notes, the free samples and the orders that's still happening. You know, we could save a lot of money in our fulfillment room if we. You know, cause we do it all in house. If we didn't ask the team to write those notes, but they do, they, they draw pictures, they tell jokes, they, yeah, there's still a very, you know, human element to that.

And then we also. have always built that mailing list up to be like a V I P space. So they always get treated to drops first and information and news. And in the last couple of years, we've set up a private group on Facebook actually called brew society. So the team members in store can invite.

Anyone they want to join Bruce society. If they want to, they give them a little card that says, join, join the club. And it's about 3000 in there at the moment. And there's just a community of tea lovers. We, we don't market to them. Really. They just chat to each other about the teas, not even Vernon blend all the time and that's fine.

They, they arranged to be up with each other to go into store. You know, they. Walk their teas with each other, post them all over the place. Yeah. It's just a really active community and we don't manage it in terms of it being a marketing strategy. We just kind of created the environment where people can just be a part of that community.

We've facilitated that. It's really cool. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, it is really great and I think. You could be led to believe that the value of our business is solely in the, that group. And, and I mean, it is to this point and they spend the most money. They are the most passionate, they are incredibly valuable.

We love them, but when you're trying to grow a business and scale a business quickly, you know, you've gotta make sure that you are maintaining that culture with that super, you know, fan group, but also your growth's gonna come out of reaching as many new people as possible. And yeah, all of. They might not become a fan, a super fan.

And that's okay. And how do you make sure that you don't, again, alienate those people by. You know, some, quite a lot of our customers don't wanna join a private Facebook group about tea. They just love some of the flavors and that's fine, you know? So you just gotta keep half an eye on, on not losing track of, of that.

I think as you grow. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it's challenging, isn't it? In this current environment where you. Kind of on the face of it, you're a low average order value brand compared to a lot of e-com S mm-hmm and compared to the price of requiring a customer now. So you are actually.

Spending money on marketing. You're actually betting on that repeat purchase. So you need as many people as possible to become super fans or at least fans of some sort. But you're right. You know, not, everyone's gonna love you. So I guess you just keep working on the ones that do and make them super super fans.

Yeah. Cool. So I had only one more question, which is, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners? I mean, thinking about people that are a little bit earlier. E eCommjourney or even people were in a similar place to you, like lessons learned or advice from, you know, from word from the Wises.

Yeah. The best piece of advice I got given in the early days was to, if you're gonna build a business, that's got any people in it. And I think even E eCom, you know, in, you're still gonna have people around you, whether it's working with agencies like yourself or whether it's employees was to remember that you are not leading.

Hands you're leading hearts and that stuck with me. And I think, I thought, well, I'm a, I'm a nice person. I'm a, I'm a people person. I, I have no problem, you know, leading people and communicating with people, but actually it's a constant, you know, I'm constantly working on bettering that and I have done for the last 10 years.

And like you said earlier, the role changes from doing. To setting people up to be able to teach them to do, to then being inspiring and building. And I have, I've gone through each of those, you know, iterations over the years and done a lot of self-reflection and learning to make sure that I'm ahead of that.

And I think sometimes, especially as entrepreneurs, we can forget that we've gotta keep learning. Ourselves. And we've got a, although we know our business the best and we're at the top of the pyramid in theory, you know, we own the business and all of that. I still, you know, challenge myself. You know, most dayss to think about how I could be better with, with the people, how I could be better.

How could stay ahead of the industry. And eCommerce is just changing time, just in a year's time, no thing you have to evolve. And that takes a lot of effort and energy. So that would be my first one. The second one would just be to be kind to yourself. It's really brutal out there, especially if you. Running a business on your own.

I would advise, you know, build a network of people around you that will lift you up when you're down. And that really understand what you're doing. I don't mean the, the technical side of things, but you know, your family and friends that you have going into business might not be, may not understand, you know, quite what your reality is.

And yeah, you can build a community around you of people that, you know, if you're having a really rubbish day that they just. You know, they build you up and they remind you that you're doing a really good job. Or, you know, if you're in a bit of a dip, they give you a talking to and they say, come on, you know, you're doing great things, you know, get back to it.

I think that's invaluable. You need it. Yeah. You need a community around you, in my opinion. So. Yeah. And thank you for sharing that too, because I think so often in business, there's like this toxic positivity around, you know, like everyone has to shout about their success. Me as an agency only have to shout about the success all the time.

But actually when you hear from other business owners that they do have those low periods, it makes you feel so much more understood that actually, you know, I'm not alone and that like, there's, you know, other people that are like struggling with what I'm struggling with right now. And I think, yeah, as business owners, we have to be real and honest so that we.

Make sure other business owners don't give up when the, you know, when it gets tough. So yeah, I think that's a really, really great piece of advice. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We'll end the recording now and and there we go. Brilliant. Thanks Jessie.