Hello and welcome to the eCommerce Impact Podcast. So today I've got Ed from Candy Kittens joining us. So Ed is the co-founder and CEO of Candy Kittens. The UK's fastest growing confectionary brand who have now had a, a really great milestone of being in their 10th year in operation, which is no mean feat for a, for a product and a food brand at that.

So without further ado, Ed. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the brand and some of your recent achievements. Hi, Jessie. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat to you this morning and, and I guess kind of recap some of those achievements when you get to that 10 year milestone, it's a bit of a strange one because you sort of think.

one. How did we get here? And then also, how has it been 10 years? So it is kind of, yeah, feels long, a long time and a short time all in one go. Yeah, but rolling back to 2012, we set out to launch a brand that could disrupt what we could see as boring sweets at the time. So we felt that the sweets that were on the shelves were aimed at children in the main.

Covered in cheap packaging, really poor ingredients and cartoon characters. And then at the other end, maybe you had like a tin of sweets that your grandma has in her front of her car and nothing in between. And we really couldn't understand why. And we set out, I suppose, from that point to add something new and exciting, we pushed that under, there are phrase of gourmet sweets.

So really adding gourmet to the category sweets are supposed to be interesting and in an indulgence and actually a lot of the sweets that people were reading would just. A bit of a cheap sugar hit. So we, we really wanted to do something different, make sweets more enjoyable. So that's kind of where it started.

I was introduced to a guy called Jamie who was Has a, a slightly bigger reputation than me and people have seen him on their TV screens. I'm sure. But Jamie at the time was on a TV show called made in Chelsea, which was a really great kind of brand platform for us to, to launch from, or a marketing platform from which to launch a brand.

And we used that moment to launch Candy Kittens. And as I say, challenge all the big guys that were on the confectionary shells at that time. Yeah. It's an amazing story. And so. you started with not, not a huge amount of startup capital, even though even though Jamie had some fame and some followers behind him.

Mm-hmm tell me a little bit more about that. Like, what was it like in those early years you were, you really, were you bootstrapping? Did you have investors involved? How did that all work? Yeah, it's funny because I think Jamie's reality TV. Presence was all about PO kids, rich kids in London, kind of living the dream.

So the assumption a lot of the time is that Jamie had lows and loads of money and we were able to do it without much trouble. But actually that couldn't be further from the truth. I don't believe everything you watch on TV. Yeah. And there was a lot of boots strapping, so we initially launched the brand through, through social media, purely through social media.

We had a Twitter account and sort of a Facebook group. Back before kind of pages or other things on Facebook. And we had those things before we had any websites. So we were building the website and started teasing the website out through our Twitter account. And we had lots of people kind of interested, loads of interactions saying, when's the website gonna launch, et cetera, people getting quite excited.

And we decided that if we were gonna launch this website, which at that point, by the way, Was a website designed to sort of tell the story and where we were going with the brand. We had no product and we were quite a long way off having a product. Yeah. But we wanted to put a website out there to kind of document the journey and the development of this, of this brand.

Yeah. And we said, okay, well, if the website's gonna launch. And all these people are gonna visit it, which is what they were telling us on Twitter. We should maybe put something on there that they can buy. So the night before we launched the website, we mocked up a t-shirt on Photoshop and it was just a plain white t-shirt that said I'm a candy kitten on the front.

We launched the website and we sold 20,000 t-shirts in the first day. Which in hindsight, sounds like a genius move, but actually it was, it was completely from a point of naivety. And. Thinking scratching our heads. What could we put on? Okay. Let's make this thing up in about 10 minutes and, and we got very, very lucky and I think it shows you how far the world's come in terms of.

How difficult it would be to do that these days. I think you, you, wow. You would never be able to do that from scratch now, but at that time, the kind of organic reach that you could get on Twitter particularly was really powerful. And the conversion of those followers to, to purchase was like nothing that we could replicate today.

But that initial sale of those t-shirts is really what funded the business and got us up. And. amazing. So it was kind of like a Crowdfunder in a way in a sort of your own way. Yeah, yeah. In a, yeah, definitely in a kind of UN unsophisticated non-planned way that, yeah, this is kind of what it turned out to be.

And so that Twitter that you launched was under the Twitter. It was a brand, it was under the, the brand name of the sweets, but I guess it was using Jamie's following. Like he used that his following to grow the following of the brand. Is that how it worked? Yeah, definitely. And he did lots of, kind of silly things as well.

So he was able to talk about the brand probably more than he should have perhaps on the TV show, which was quite another advantage that we really kind of squeezed every last bit out of that we could even to the point where in one episode he got the logo tattooed on himself for and didn't really want the tattoo, but it was a good excuse to get the cameras on the logo.

So did everything we possibly could to kind of grab attention and put the name out there. And I think that's something that. we probably would do again, if we were starting fresh, you know, certain things we did by accidents, certain things, we got very lucky, but that's one thing we were really conscious of is let's talk and talk and talk about candy hiddens and let everybody know what we're trying to achieve.

Yeah. And your background prior to launching the brand was working in was well being, being an entrepreneur really in marketing. So you had a marketing agency or were a marketing freelancer, was it. yeah, so started sort of on a freelance basis, kind of, sort of alongside my studies at university, I was doing a design degree.

And with that quite naturally kind of people approach you for, can you design my business card? Can you design this flyer and whatever, and it sort of snowballed into trying to help businesses. Market towards students because I was a student. I understood that audience. I thought generally businesses were doing quite a bad job of talking to that, that audience.

So started helping businesses do that. And then that snowballed into sort of a small agency where we were working with clients on a national level all sorts of products, to be honest, a real kind of random mix. Yeah. And then met Jamie and Jamie with candy kit. It was gonna be a client, but actually then that turned into 10 years later and still.

Yeah. And was it mostly products you were working with in the digital agency? Like we, did you, or did you were doing all sorts of different types of businesses? Yeah, mainly products. I think that's the thing that's always interested me is how you apply a brand to a product, to, to sort of sell and yeah, and I think that connection then between, you know, brand and marketing, marketing, really being about selling is the thing that kind of gets me going.

I. Yeah. And so what were the early kind of moves you made in marketing that you, that were successful that kind of helped get you where you are now in those early days when you were bootstrapping as, as well as harnessing the social media, any other specifics that you think other brands could learn from or gain ideas from?

Yeah. So I suppose we actually did a lot of offline. And I still am quite a big believer in using offline to drive online. So we did an awful lot of pop-up shops. So we had no sweets for the first two years of the business, which is a bit of a challenge. When you put yourself out there as a new sweets company took us a long time to develop, develop the product.

So we went around doing various pop-up shops. So we did about 30 pop-up shops around the. and in every shop, people that came along and expected there to be sweets, but actually what we were selling was kind of more t-shirts other branded merchandise. Wow. And using the shop as a place to sort of tell the story.

So yeah, this is Candy Kittens, and this is our vision of what we are going to be. We're not there yet. And we're totally honest about that. And we've got a lot of work to do, and this is how we're doing it. But in the meantime, here's some other kind of things you can buy whilst you're waiting for the real product.

And what that did was sort of. Create this buzz and hype, I suppose, around, around what we were trying to do and get people to buy into us. So as well as buying into the brand, they were buying into the people. So us and our team and, and the way we were telling that story. And then when the sweets eventually launched, you know, we had a, an audience that was literally hungry, ready to buy the product.

Yeah. And those sales have sort of, we we've sort of been working on those first sales for that two year period. . Yeah. So that's probably in hindsight, the most, the, the most interesting thing we did, but it was all our necessity at the time. Not because it was a sort of smart strategy, I don't think.

Yeah. And were you, did you expect that to take that long to have product available or was it that you were kind of always hoping that it would be around the corner, but you got delayed at various points? Yeah, there was loads of delays and setbacks. We, we never knew they would take that long. I think that's probably just the story of our lives.

I think everything we think is gonna be quicker than , it turns out to be in reality, but actually, yeah. You know, we, I think once we really got into it, probably about six months in, we knew that we were in for quite a long road before we could have product on the shelves. And then that's where we have to come up with other ideas.

So that's sort of doing launching these shops and other things to keep the money coming in was something. Sort of made sense. Yeah, definitely. And so the challenges around the product were because you've got some key differentiators, I guess, of your product. So being vegan, is it all of your sweets of vegan or there's or most of them are vegan.

Yeah. So the entire range is vegan now. It wasn't always, but it it's something that has become a much bigger part of, sort of who we are. And I guess, yeah, in those early days in honesty, we probably could have bought some whole. Essentially kind of pick a mix sweets and repackage them into Candy Kittens bags, which is actually a way that, you know, lots of brands have had success doing that, but it wasn't for us.

We were, we always wanted to, yes, we're disrupting the category on a brand and packaging level. Yeah. But once people have bought the sweets, they need to come back and buy them again. They need to really be good and deliver. So that was why we spent so long sort of perfecting that behind the scenes. So vegan, natural colors, flavors.

Real fruit juices in all the recipes and things that are quite common in the category now, but actually at the time, nobody else was really doing that. So it was a, an uphill sort of battle to try and get manufacturers to. To listen to us and believe what we wanted to do was the right thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I can vouch for how tasty they are. Oh my God. And so addictive. So thank you. Can you can you tell me, like once you did get product in your hands, what was your go to market strategy? Were you DTC straightaway or did you hit store, you know, wholesale stores first? Or did you do the popups again? How did that work?

Was it a mixture? Yes. It was a real mix. We we did a lot of retail, so we launched a sort of high end retail, like department stores. So Selfridges, Harvey, Nichols, those kinds of places. Yeah. And really that was purely to sort of feed the volume that was required. So we really needed high volume from day one.

Yeah. When you make a bag of sweets, you're talking. At least a hundred thousand units per flavor. Yeah, so we couldn't, we couldn't launch, we wanted to launch with four flavors. That's 400,000 bags of sweets and we needed someone else to kind of help us with that volume. We did a lot through DTC as well, but in that, that launch phase for us, it was all about getting on shelves and, and physical presence in stores.

Yeah. And then I suppose that early success we'd had with DTC selling t-shirts and merchandise and other bits and pieces. Kind of pitted out for a little while, whilst we, our attention was, was taken by retail because that was another area, which we suddenly knew nothing about all this kind of knowledge we'd built in DTC for the first two years was kind of irrelevant as far as those guys were concerned.

So we had to go and learn that and we, and, and as a result probably sort of shifted the focus a little bit for, for that period. . Yeah. And what's roughly the split now for you guys between D C and wholesale. Wholesale still makes up a, a big, big chunk of the business. We work with all of the main grocers and supermarkets in the UK.

So they have a huge reach and, and I suppose that's the, the reason why you continue to work with them. But probably about 20% of ourselves online. Yeah. Cool. What has surprised you most about growing and running at the e-com side of the business versus the retail side?

I think I, it is interesting, I think with the retail, you obviously, as I say, have that reach, which is invaluable and it's a nice kind of instant access to the market. Yeah. The problem with it is that you are never in control of your own. Sort of growth or your own success. You're always waiting for somebody else to say you can.

Yeah. And I think with, with DTC, the thing that we absolutely love is that nobody can tell us that we're not allowed to do that. So we're not very good at hearing the word no, as it is. Yeah. And with DTC, if we have an idea, we can test that this afternoon and we can make that happen and we, and it's fully in control.

So we absolutely love that. I think the most surprising. element probably is similar to another point I've already mentioned, but how long things take to build. So whilst there is that instant ability to turn things on and test, you do have to sort of wait, I think, to kind of prove a concept and build things over time.

Yes. And, and you've really gotta give consumers a good reason to come and shop at your website. You know, there's an awful lot of competition out there. Certainly really, really attracting that traffic is, is sort of takes the time to build up. Yeah. And what, just changing tack a little bit. What was your tech stack in the beginning?

I know now you guys are Shopify Klaviyo. As your main kind of, you know, roots to market for DTC. So, yeah. Did you start off, straight away with Shopify or did you build your own custom site or where? No, we didn't so origin at the very, very beginning. We had a site. And I don't even know if it runs anymore, but something called big cartel.

Oh, yeah. Which was kind of like a very sort of DIY storefront that we managed to run. And, and we bolted that onto a site that, that I built myself. And we then sort of moved around a few different things. We had a Magento site for a while, which was super complicated and gave me lots of headaches.

So I'm glad to put that behind us. And then Shopify, which for now I think is, you know, The perfect solution for, for us and where we are. And particularly when we plug in with our warehouses or other agencies that support what we're doing, you know, it seems to be the universal kind of language now, and, and that's makes life so much easier.

And, and. Our impatience is helped by that. I think because things just become quicker. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We find that with clients, like the ones that are on Shopify, we can just move a lot faster in terms of like, you know, adding an app to, you know, adding an upsell or yeah. And actually that's one, I mean, you talk about surprising things is I can't believe how many apps there are to help Shopify run and, and work.

You know, a standard website is so much more now isn't it than just that one provider. Yeah, we've probably got. I don't know, getting on for a hundred different plugins and things that are used for different occasions. Yeah, but that's the beauty of it and I think, yeah. Works really well for us. Yeah.

What are your favorite, any recommended or favorite apps for Shopify that have made your life easier or been a kind of marketing turning point for you guys? I don't actually know the specifics, which is a bit embarrassing, but I do know that some of the messaging stuff that we're doing at the moment with customers is really interesting.

So the kind of chat bot, whatever app we're using there is, is performing really, really well and has improved our ability to offer that kind of great customer experience. I think one of the things we're challenged on now is how do we make. The Candy Kittens D to C experience much better than buying a bag of Candy Kittens at TECA.

Because if you can just walk down the road and buy a bag of sweets off the shelf, why buy them from us? So that's all about experience. And, and I think if we can do that through a more sort of personal delivery, then all the better. So those kind of chat bot things are really, really good. We're also trying to integrate a lot more sort of WhatsApp now as well, which is interesting.

So we're trialing that right now. So yeah, those personal interactions are important to. that's cool. So is that like an app, which allows people to basically open WhatsApp on your website and chat chat directly? Yeah, exactly. That, and you can ask questions, specifics about ingredients or about the product, and rather than just sort of get into a standard FAQ page, you're able to sort of talk to somebody in the team, get their opinion on that rather than a sort of.

you know, kind of computer says no attitude, and I think that's, that's exciting. And it's so interesting, like with something that's low average order value in a fairly simple decision, like one thing I always noticed about Food brands is the, actually the conversion rates tend to be really high because my belief is that people make visceral decisions around food.

Like it's like a biological need. So we make the quick decisions. So it surprises me that you would, that people would wanna chat about it. But I guess anything you can do to. You know, to leave no question unanswered or to get people to any friction that they have around the purchase decision, you take that away and you increase your conversion rate and therefore increase, increase your RA ROAS.

Right? Definitely. I mean, I think if you think about sort of traditional retail, and if you went into a shop, you might chat to somebody and say, oh, which what's your favorite flavor? Which one do you think I should go for? Or whatever it may be, or you might say, could you gift wrap this for me? Or could you put card in for whatever it may be.

Those little interactions obviously are hard to recreate online, but if we can do that in a, in a sort of modern way then I think there's quite a lot of scope there. So one of the things we are pushing quite hard online to differentiate from in store is the gifting and the sort of extra experience on top that you, that you just can't get at a supermarket.

Yeah. Yeah. You guys have got some cool personalization, which is, yeah. It's an awesome idea for a gift that makes it just a bit more fun. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. So what, what was, so you guys were bootstrapping and, you know, trying to get money to come in so that you could develop the product. And then you launched and you probably had quite a tough journey to get into those certain stores, but was there a moment where.

Everything nearly fell apart and, you know, you nearly failed . Yeah, definitely. I mean, , there's probably been quite a few to be honest. And one that, that really stands out in my mind is all of them probably relate to cash in honesty.

Yeah. So I think it's uh, fairly typical that a business fails because they're all run outta cash. But in our case, it's always been a challenge, particularly when you're, as I mentioned, talking about these large, large quantities of sweets that you have to commit to when you're manufacturing. So a lot of our money is always tied up in stock.

And I think one of the things that we did in the early days, which is really silly, Was to hire some very expensive lawyers who helped us sort of with our trademark and all of our IP to, to, to secure that. And whilst they did a, a good job we went out there and got a bit ahead of ourselves and hired a very expensive lawyer to do that.

So we felt very, very fancy when we would go into the meetings and there. Posh offices in the city and having their nice bottles of water, et cetera. Yeah, but actually when we received their bill, it, that one bill alone almost crippled us. So we'd, we'd run out a, I think like a 65,000 pound bill with some lawyers without really knowing about that at all, we'd sort of just.

Assumed one thing and they'd assumed another. And it took us probably about three years to pay that off. And lots and lots of back and forth with them. And in the end, they very kindly kind of agreed to help us and agreed that sort of payment plan. But if that, if that they hadn't been so generous, they could have sort of insisted we pay them back.

And we would've definitely gone at that point, but we learned our lesson early days there that, you know, , you don't always have to go out and, and work. The biggest people or the, you know, the sort of, yeah. The recommendations that you get it has to be fit for the size of the business and where you are, I think at the time.

And, and yeah, those guys definitely weren't. Yeah. And was that bill like, did it all come at once and you just opened it up in there? It was, or, yeah, there's just huge bill. One day landed in the inbox and yeah, I needed fell off the chair, but that was quite a scary moment. But I think, you know, in that case we'd been recommended to work with.

By somebody at another, a bigger business and they were great. And we just hadn't, the penny hadn't dropped to us that, you know, a big business is probably paying big fees that we don't have. So yeah, we learned the hard way. Yeah, definitely. Cool. So I was gonna ask you as well, who has been, have you had a, kind of a mentor or someone who's inspired you that's kind of helped you along the way with it directly or indirectly?

Yeah, definitely. So our our chairman is a guy called Jonathan and he is also Jamie's stepdad. So when Jamie and I first started the business, I think Jamie's parents and well everybody's parents were all thinking, what the hell are these two doing? But Jamie's mum I think got particularly nervous and then sent Jonathan along to find out what we were up to.

And we'd meet Jonathan every Monday night to sort of report on what we've been up to for the last week and sort of update on progress. and he would essentially give us a big telling off every Monday night and tell us that we were doing it all wrong and point us in the right direction. And he's very old school.

Businessman was sort of in the head hunting and financial sectors. No experience in FMCG or DTC or any of the areas we're working. But what Jonathan's given to us has been, I think, a sense of organization and professionalism. So whilst we had this energy and excitement of a young, small business, we were able to sort of bottle that into a, a, a straight line and a process that made sense and made us easy to work with.

I think so then when we came to the point of bringing on investors or working with big retailers or whoever it. We were organized and structured in a way that was probably quite unusual for a business of our size. So little things like every meeting we ran, we always will have an agenda. We'll always produce minutes from that meeting.

We'll always sort of save that down properly. We'll also, we'll always email people in the correct manner and all of the kind of basics I suppose, of running a business, but actually. They're so often missed in, in that early stage, I think, where everything's so chaotic and frantic. Yes. So Jonathan's been a great, a great mentor, I suppose, that brings that old school approach to a very new and different business.

Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, you guys had that energy and the, I, the understanding of your target market and understanding of branding, marketing and the product, but then he had that, I guess wiseness around and experience of just running businesses and probably looking at the numbers and scrutinizing the decisions a bit more closer.

Yeah. And really, and being really, really strict on us as well, in all honesty. So, you know, I think you need that sometimes. Cause it's so easy to get carried away by your own. Your own ego on these things, right. And you think, oh yeah, we're gonna go and change the world. And actually he can sort of quite quickly bring us back down to earth and tell us where we're going wrong or whatever.

And if you can be hard on yourselves, I think that's a really good practice, but then facing hard criticism or hard feedback in the outside world. Yeah. You know, there's no, There's no danger of us kind of being upset by something that anybody else could tell us, because Jonathan's probably already told us that a hundred times before.

And I think that's kind of a, a useful. . Yeah, definitely. So why do you think you've been successful? I mean, there's been a few threads coming through here, but like in a nutshell, how would you, what would you credit with your overall success as a brand and getting to where you are now?

The fastest growing confectionary brand in the UK? Yeah, it's a difficult one, I think for me, because. I'm not sure, entirely sure that we do consider ourselves yet to be successful, but perhaps that's part of the, the, the recipe that, that has got us 10 years later, I think not, not ever giving up and feeling like we've, we've got, there is a big part of that.

So we absolutely don't take no for an answer and a determined. To go out there and knock the big guys off their perch in our category. Yeah, we didn't, we didn't launch a brand just to sort of sell at our local farmer's market or to launch in a niche way. We really do believe that we can go out there and be a, a national household name in the UK and then hopefully beyond.

So I think that's a big part of it. I think sort of aiming big, a lot of people that we speak to say chat to somebody that maybe has an idea to launch a business. I say, well, where do you want to take it? And they say, oh, we haven't really thought about that yet. Or they don't know, they've got an idea for a concept of a product, but they don't see where that product is eventually.

And I think we've always known where we want it to go. So that's a, probably a useful part of that. And then lots and lots of hard work behind that. So, you know, just tirelessly going after that goal and making sure. We'll do anything we possibly can to get closer to where we want to be. So yeah. That's the, the unglamorous answer, I suppose, but yeah, like everything in life, you know, there's no sort of overnight success there's no.

Yeah. So talking about that kind of hustle and grind side, I'm always fascinated to talk to entrepreneurs about like how long, the hard part of that lasted. Like you, you've got to a point now. No one could go for 10 years working, you know, hundreds of hours a week. And you've probably hopefully got to a point where there's a bit more balance where you know, what the important things are that need you and which things to delegate.

Like how, how much of, how much has that changed from the early days and how long, how, what were those early days? Like in terms of that kind of working like crazy. Yeah. I, I mean, I think the biggest change probably is the benefit of experience and not just the, our own experience, but bringing in experienced people.

Yeah. So we now, you know, hire people that bring something else to the table, other than just being a nice guy. And in the early days we would just work with our friends and family and anybody that was kind of close to us. Could have a job and now it's about, you know, what, what does that person know from their previous company?

What specific skill set are they bringing that helps us get to that next level? So that's been really, really helpful, I think is we now are surrounded by a team that know a lot, lot more about this industry and what we're trying to do than we have ever known. Yeah, so that's exciting. And I think our job is to just.

Keep the Candy Kittens vision and brand alive. So we're the, we're the ones that really, really know what that original vision and, and purpose was. So if we can keep bringing it back to that then yeah. And let everybody else do all the technical stuff that we don't know how to do then I think that's a good mix, hopefully.

And yeah, in the early days, because we had no experience, it was sort. Headless chicken time. Really? We were running around trying to do everything. You spend a lot of time trying to figure stuff out and actually probably more energy working out how to do the task than doing the task. So yeah, when you take that bit out, that's, that's probably the biggest saving in time.

You, you sort of much more efficient because you just tick things off rather than staring at a blank piece of paper. Every time you start a new task. Yeah. Realizing you've coded the whole website completely wrong, and you need to start again. Exactly, exactly. That. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I can, I can definitely relate to that.

Yeah, it's that moment when you can start taking those hats off and be focusing on what you are really, really good at that things can start to really move. I feel I think so. And I think now, so having a, having a sort of, almost like consumer lens, because you, you can sort of zoom out a bit from the business and, and look back in and so easy when you're right up against the, the cold face of it to just.

Stuck into thinking about one, one narrow part of the site or the, the customer journey. Whereas actually if you zoom out a bit and think, oh, why, why haven't we thought about that thing or that the overall impact of the, the site I think is more important. Yeah. What would be your, what would be your advice to someone who's starting now?

Like starting now is very different from starting when you started, but knowing what you know about the kind. Product marketing space and especially around kind of the food space as well. What would be your advice to an entrepreneur who was getting started? It may sound really obvious, but I would really, really question.

Why, why, why is your thing, your idea, your product important? Why are people gonna buy it? And you know, particularly when you think about D to C, why are they gonna come to you to buy that? Because I it's. So it's such a big world. There is so much competition. There's so much going on and that's not to be negative or try and put anybody off because we launched a sweets brand.

Nobody was asking for more sweets, nobody was asking for a new sweet and it can, so it can definitely be done in any category, but I think really understanding why and having that really clear. And I think from the off, just assuming that people are gonna say. so lots and lots of people go into things thinking everybody's gonna love this.

Oh my God, it's the next big thing everybody's gonna say, yes, everybody's gonna visit my site. Everybody's gonna buy . If you take the complete opposite attitude, then you're trying to flip that from the beginning. And I think that's a good place to start because then you're gonna work much harder and also be a lot more resilient to.

The kickbacks and challenges that inevitably are gonna come your way. So yeah, yeah. Go into it. Thinking that it's not gonna work. And then you see your job to try and turn that ship. . Yeah, that's so interesting. I think you're so right though. I mean, so many people think a lot of people think they can just build a, me too business and make loads of money.

Yeah. Which I just don't understand. I always thought I had to come up with like, be some kind of inventor and come up with some kind of crazy original thing. I started an agency, which isn't original at all, but I had a, a different way of doing it. Yeah. But I also think people think they can, if they build.

People will come. So I'll build a website and I'll have a product. And then that's it. There's no marketing strategy. Like a lot of people who start product businesses, I would call them like product printers. They like, they have a product idea, but they don't really care or aren't interested in marketing.

So I would say probably that's. One of the reasons you have been successful is you came at it from that marketing angle from the start and you were probably be before you even had a product, you were thinking about how you were gonna get an audience. So I think that's pretty fascinating. I think we've said it a few times, but it sweets just happens to be the thing that we're selling.

And that actually you're absolutely right. We're a brand and marketing business from, at its core. Yeah, it could end, it could be socks or pencils or anything else. Really. It just so happens to be sweets. Yeah. So yeah, focus on how you're gonna sell the product. Not necessarily what you're gonna. . Yeah, that's interesting.

Changing tech again. So you guys are a B Corp or you're we are gonna become a B Corp. You're looking to become one aren't you? Yeah, so I don't wanna jinx anything, but we are going through the audit process at the moment. So it's been quite a long road for us, probably with COVID and everything in between.

Probably the best part of two or three years. Yeah. And we've been in the queue for signoff for quite a while. But there's lots of questions being fired back and forth at the moment. So it feels like we're getting very, very close now. So fingers crossed within the next couple of months, we will be.

Yeah. Exciting. So yeah. Tell me a bit more about that process and what you've had to do to change the business, to make it compliant. And also about your kind of other sustainability initiatives. I'm sure the audience will love to hear. Yeah, absolutely. So for those that don't know, B Corp is a certification that says your business puts people and planet ahead of profit.

And that's it in a nutshell, but there's so many layers behind that that essentially are standards that your business is sticking to and hold into to, to be the best it can possibly be. And I think when we started the business, we always had dreams of becoming a great business, a great place to work, a great company to work with.

And you think you're doing all the right things, but it's not until you go through that kind of B court process, which is hundreds and hundreds of different questions that scrutinize every level of the business, the really kind of stress test that. So for me, yeah, it's a great thing to go through and it's a good checklist for anybody that's run in or starting a business.

And I think the earlier you can do it the better because You know, just by default, you have less policies and things in place at the early stages. So a really, really great thing to do. And, and hopefully it's something now that is becoming more and more sort of front of mind for consumers as well.

So I think it's, it's sort of, people are aware of it. People know what that means. There's some really great brands that have champion. That space. Yeah. And we're excited to have that sort of seal of approval that we're not just saying we're a good business, but we've actually got the sort of data and everything to back it up.

And here's the BCO stamp. Yeah. We're doing, we're doing a lot in the sustainability. Area around, first of all, our sweets being vegan is a big, big step forward for the category. So taking out the animal product has a huge impact on, on the sort of CO2 levels. And then that allows us in part to be carbon neutral.

so we're a carbon neutral brand now, which is partly due to the vegan thing. Some other manufacturing processes our packaging is currently recyclable, but it is still a plastic. So we, we know that that's not the best it can be and we're working to find other solutions. We've just trialed a compostable pouch glass Andary festival last week, which is quite exciting.

So it there's lows in those of little things that we're doing there and just constantly pushing ourselves. To be better, I suppose, and, and search for a better way of doing things. Yeah. And was it mostly I'm intrigued because we are going through the process as an agency. And I guess we don't have, we don't have to certify our production process or anything like that.

So in some ways, I think it's easier for you guys. Was that like the bulk of the kind of work and changes you had to make was around the impact of your production and delivery, or did you also have to make quite a few changes around people and, and how you kind of look after your staff? Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, you're right.

I think it is probably easier. And I'd recommend, you know, if you're in an agency or similar positions where you don't have third party input into the business, then it's actually probably a more straightforward thing to do. But yeah, for us, you are relying on the suppliers kind of towing the same line, which is, is also a good thing to check that actually our suppliers are as good as we thought they were and say they are.

So that's helped. The internal changes we've made are very simple things. So a lot of it was sort of in place already, but actually very simple things like not having a maternity policy, because nobody in our team had ever been on maternity leave or, or gone through that was something that we added and, you know, you then think about, okay, what do we want that to look like?

So we sat and we have a meeting and consult the team and we talk about that and we put something really good in place. We've added. Insurance for the whole team now and something that we wanted to do, but you just never got round to it because it wasn't, you know, top of the list or front of mind.

So it just forces you to think about these things and, and reexamine kind of what, what you stand for and what you wanna give people, I think. Yeah. Cool time for one more question. What has been your most successful marketing campaign strategy or even tactic? You know, in the 10 years in business, you thought moved the needle the most.

Ooh, there's been lots of little things. I think probably the thing that we're most proud of recently is our collaboration. So we are now partnering with lots of different different businesses from all sorts of different unexpected categories. And I suppose the most. Recent has been a collaboration with BrewDog, the brewery up in Scotland.

And we created a Candy Kittens beer, which is really exciting. So I don't think anybody expected or knew they needed a Candy Kittens beer, but that's what we created. We've got a Candy Kittens IPA. That's been really, really exciting for us for brand awareness. BrewDog are huge in the sustainability and environmental.

Yeah, so it's teaming up with them to shout about the similar sort of message. And we've now got that beer on sale online on the BrewDog website, through their subscription, through our website out and also in Sansbury stores. So actually it's sort of given this reach to a completely new demographic that candy kitten haven't had before.

And how is that product? Like has it, so has, because it's been what a year or so since you launched it, right? Yeah 📍 . Yeah, so it's, it's become one of their, one of their flavors. Yeah. It's become, yeah, it's become really popular. And I think that we've now launched a, we launched a first edition and then we've launched a second edition, which is slightly different flavor profile.

But it's performing really, really well. And I think what's nice about every time you collaborate with a new business, you kind of bring their audience and our audience together. So they benefit from our audience. We benefit from theirs and it's a really nice way to. also shout about the things that are important by picking those messages that are aligned between the two brands.

So, you know, yeah. In this case, BrewDog and their environmental credentials gives us a chance to talk more about that. They're a carbon neutral brewery. We're a carbon neutral sweets brand and whatever else it may be. You know, we have other collaborations in the pipeline that talk about other things that are really important to the brand.

That's so cool. So yeah, watch this space, I suppose. Yeah. And what lies in the future for can kittens what's what are you, what are you seeing on the horizon over the next sort of year or so? We're really, really focused on the UK and we want to dominate that UK market so that we we're sort of, we're not gonna stop until we've got there.

I don't think, and there's lots of different elements for us. Personalization. You mentioned already is an exciting space. And whether that's in the sort of traditional sense of personalizing a product and putting someone's name on it, or actually just being able to offer a. personalized experience through the website and being able to gift somebody and talk to different occasions is something that we're looking at at the moment.

So how do you have sweets that work for all sorts of different occasions, whether they're a hen party and a wedding or. You know, the obvious ones like Christmas and mother's day and father's day and birthdays and all those big things. Yeah. All the little ones like graduations and other celebrations along the way.

So being able to sort of drill into all of those is something that we're currently playing with. Smart. Great. Well, unless you've got anything else to add, we can wrap up and thanks a lot. Thanks so much for coming along. Great. No, it's really good. Thank you so much. I enjoyed it. Thanks Jessie.