Well, first and foremost, it was about wanting to set up a business with my two closest friends, Adam and John, who… we all met at college, and for as long as we’d known each other, always talked about how much we’d love to set up a business together. And, after having this conversation for seven years in a row, we finally said, and we were on a snowballing weekend at the time, look, let’s either stop having this conversation or get on with it, otherwise we’ll drive ourselves completely nuts. And it was then we said, look, we’re young, we don’t have families to support, we don’t have a mortgage to pay, now is as good a time as we’ll ever get to have a go at setting up a business. Why don’t we give it a crack?
We came back into our regular jobs and we worked every weekend and evening trying out different recipes, trying to find out as much about fruit as we possibly could, literally putting smoothies into bottles and asking people what they thought of them. We didn’t have the confidence to give up our jobs full-time until the August of ’98 where we did a test market which literally consisted of buying £500 worth of fruit, turning it into our favourite smoothie recipe, and setting up a little stall at a music festival selling these bottles of smoothies. And above the stall we put up a big sign that said, should we give up our jobs and make these smoothies, and put out a bin that said yes and a bin that said no, and asked people to buy the bottles and put the empty ones in the respective bin.
Unfortunately, at the end of the weekend, the yes bin was full, so we went in the next day and resigned. But even then, that’s even when it got harder, because we figured, well, we’ve done that little test, how difficult can it be to do it each day, day in, day out. But, of course, the difference between doing it in a kitchen to doing it commercially at scale, without compromising on the integrity of the ingredients, which is what Innocent’s all about, was incredibly difficult. And we gave ourselves a month to do it, and it ended up taking nine months. And so that was definitely the bleakest period. We completely ran out of money, we were doing nothing but eating breakfast cereal three times a day, totally reliant on our friends and families for buying us beers and for going out for the night, and by the end of those nine months of overdrafts and credit card bills were looking pretty damn scary.