Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small

http://warstory.co/innocent-drinks-dont-be-afraid-to-start-small/

by vincentchan • 13 years ago

41 25 13 years ago

I loved the start up feel of the company and the fact they had a sense or humour. They also listened to customers, once when I had a minor complaint about one of their drinks they brought in an entire tray of smoothies for the people in my office. Way cool.

It is a shame however that they also took the startup route of selling out to Coca Cola, and from then on in my opinion their product has gone downhill in quality and the new drinks they do are just crap bottled under the Innocent brand.

pja3• 13 years ago

Either the "ethical" marketing was always just that, or Coca Cola offered them one of those old-school Microsoft "take the offer, or we use our distribution network to crush you" style deals.

objclxt• 13 years ago

Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi don't have great track records launching home-grown premium smoothie/juice offerings. Many of the premium brands they run - Naked, Odwalla, etc - came via acquisitions.

Given that Coke started with a ~15% stake in Innnocent before building it up to 90% I think it's rather more likely they simply rolled up with a huge barrow of money. It's hard to maintain your 'ethical' stance when somebody is trying to give you millions of dollars (see also, Ben & Jerry's).

gadders• 13 years ago

See also Green and Black chocolate, now part of Kraft.

pja3• 13 years ago

Real-world A/B testing in action :)

This is pretty much the founding myth of Innocent though: it's the story everyone tells about them.

unwind• 13 years ago

Yes, it's a famous story. And a nice company!

Isn't this completely different from A/B testing, though?

I'm certainly no web developer, but my understanding is that "A/B testing" refers to the practice of fielding two separate implementations of the same feature, and measuring which works best. Then that is kept as an improvement.

For Innocent I guess A/B testing would be to launch two different smoothies under the same name, and see which "wins" by tracking sales ... And who knows, perhaps they alread do that?

pja3• 13 years ago

True, it's not really A/B testing. But it is sampling the "real-world" customer view of your product in an interesting way that avoids many of the selection problems you get with a survey-type approach.

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

It's a very nice anecdote, but the title is basically a random string of words that makes no sense.

"Starting small" is not a fear that any budding entrepreneur has.

crusso• 13 years ago

They should have left off the "small", and it would have made more sense.

vincentchan3• 13 years ago

Since I've read that "innocent" book, I'd like to give another perspective. Many entrepreneurs are not willing to get into the consumer goods business because of the giant competitors like P&G, Unilever and Coca Cola. That's why innocent's founders emphasised starting "small" in their book. They started the business in a kitchen and eventually won the battle (sort of) by creativity. That's why stories like innocent and Method are so inspiring.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

It's a nice story, but "Do you think we should make a smoothie company?" seems like the wrong question to ask and one that's likely to get a self affirming response. So more likely the benefit was psychological for the founders to justify to themselves that they should take the risk of starting up.

I mean, I'm sure I could make smoothies or bake cookies that people would think were awesome. Just use good ingredients and follow the recipe , that part isn't hard. OTOH knowing whether there is an oversupply of smoothies in the market already and knowing how to sell them in large enough quantities, manage production etc is another question entirely.

Mahn• 13 years ago

But then again they would have never been able to remove the risk of doing it no matter what they asked, so it's probably understandable they chose to ask for a psychological tap on the back.

markyc• 13 years ago

actually shipping is order of degrees harder than starting small

qompiler• 13 years ago

Overpriced processed juice. Only reason this company is still alive is because it's owned by the Coca-Cola company.

Try to do the same and watch your company go bankrupt within 2 months.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

They launched in 1999 and sold the first stake to Coca-Cola in 2009. They somehow managed to scrape by for 120 months with no Coca-Cola ownership. Start-ups can't have an exit after 10 years?

gav• 13 years ago

The soft drink market is tough, you are fighting against two huge incumbents with a lot of power and money. Being purchased be one of them after you achieve a certain level of (local) success is one of the few options for a successful exit.

I've worked with a small soda company that folded after a dozen years. The incumbents did everything from buy their space out from their retailers to scoring a monopoly with towns for public areas and schools.

Selling low-margin (often with seasonal swings) products that have to be kept cool, with a limited shelf-life, and overcoming the retail and distribution hurdles is an achievement.

TheAnimus• 13 years ago

I don't think that's really fair.

They knew the advertising business, identified a target demographic and created a product with an image that appealed to them.

I remember back in 2003, they where visiting most universities which where campus kind, with a van decked out in astroturf. The obvious hypocrisy of their brand and message were plane staring you in the face. Take an old in-efficent desiel van, deck it in plastic stuff which looks like grass and you've a product.

It was almost emotive, and whilst it didn't appeal to me, they obviously really understood their target.

As such to dismiss it as overpriced juice, is akin to Balmer dismissing the iPhone as overpriced.

nate2• 13 years ago

I'm hooked on this entire site now. Nice find. There's a bunch of good stories here. Is this a Hacker News reader who made this site?

Keep it up please if you're reading this.

vincentchan3• 13 years ago

Thanks so much for your encouragement! Your comment made my day. I've saved tons of interesting business stories after reading many books and blog posts over the years. Would like to share them on this site going forward.

nate2• 13 years ago

You probably don't need this bit at all, but I feel unsolicity advisey. And in case it helps anyone else: One of the top 3 decisions I've made this year was simply to blog once a week.

This post today is on Hacker News and doing awesome. Tomorrow's likely won't be so lucky. Or next week's. Sometimes the Twitter followers grow a ton, and then it stalls for weeks.

Just keep doing it. Sometimes someone very important and influential finds that old post everyone else seemed to ignore months ago. Sometimes it's just a single email that says, "This really helped me today."

After doing it long enough, you realize looking back, it all built on itself. None of it was wasted.

seferphier• 13 years ago

I love the blog. bookmarked. I love the lego story especially - the founder was truly relentlessly resourceful.

Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small

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