
Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small - vincentchan
http://warstory.co/innocent-drinks-dont-be-afraid-to-start-small/
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jiggy2011
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.

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Mahn
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.

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qompiler
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.

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mseebach
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?

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gav
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.

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mseebach
I'm sure it's a tough and dirty business to be in - but the GP is still
completely wrong when they suggest that Innocent somehow benefits unfairly
from being part of Coca-Cola when, in fact, they weren't for the first ten
years of their life.

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grumblepeet
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.

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pja
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.

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objclxt
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).

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shrikant
See also The Body Shop and L'Oreal.

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nate
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.

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vincentchan
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.

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nate
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.

~~~
vincentchan
Yup, totally agree. Running a blog is definitely a marathon. I did make the
mistake of giving up too early in previous projects. So I will take this
lesson to heart. Thanks so much for reminding me this.

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huhtenberg
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.

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

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vincentchan
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.

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pja
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.

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unwind
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?

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pja
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.

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

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markyc
actually shipping is order of degrees harder than starting small

