Not Innocent
by Shane on 15/09/06 at 4:26 pm
1 comment
If you aren’t familiar with the Innocent Drinks then read the whole story here. Here’s a peek:
In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying ‘Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ and put out a bin saying ‘YES’ and a bin saying ‘NO’ and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the ‘YES’ bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned.
- They started off with 3 employees in 1999 and now have 105!
- They started off with 1 retailer and now have over 7,000!
- They sold 20 smoothies on day one and now sell a million a week!
- £0 Turnover on day 1 and now £75 million!
- In 1999 they had 1 Innocent T-Shirt and now they have 4!
I am sure this has all the budding SA entrepeneurs drooling at the mouth. This is a good indication of why these guys are doing so well.
How many of you have started planning for 2007?
Shane Dryden is the 'Maven' at Ideate. The driving-force of Yuppiechef, Shane loves to write on advertising and innovation. He spots the non-obvious stuff behind the obvious, which seems obvious, but isn’t really that obvious (obviously). View more articles by Shane.
Freddy Rodrigues
Sep 17th, 2006
Awesome. I dig the story of how they started (on their website – where they ask people to vote for whether they should give up their day-job).
There is nothing ordinary about this company.