This guy was full of energy. And in his office, with him, we tasted more than 100 of the best coffees from around Colombia. We found one that we particularly loved – it was perfect for what we were looking for. So we decided that we would shake hands with the farmer, cut out the middlemen and buy the coffee directly from him. A simple idea, or so we thought.
We soon found ourselves in an unfamiliar country about which we had heard all kinds of horror stories. Two flights into the Andes later and an eight-hour drive along a treacherous cliff-face of a road, we found ourselves in the most beautiful little village I’ve ever seen. It was situated 1,200 metres above sea level – very high up in the mountains. The village was at the foot of a volcano, so the soil was incredibly fertile, perfect for growing coffee. The fruit was falling out of the trees and there was coffee growing everywhere – Lennie was in coffee heaven!
There were over 1,000 people living in the village, all completely reliant on the coffee harvest for their livelihoods. And they were very happy to see us. Until relatively recently the area hadn’t been safe enough for international coffee buyers like us to visit – mostly because of cocaine production, smuggling and guerrilla activity endemic to the area.
But now it was safe for people like us to explore the fields, and the farmers showed us their plots with pride. We found a particular farm that we really liked – the plants were very well taken care of, with plenty of shade, and the family who owned them were wonderful. We stayed in their home for a few days and enjoyed eating the local cuisine – although we did turn down their offer of barbecued guinea-pig.
In the end, we bought their beans and shipped them to Scotland for roasting. Not only did we have some of the world’s best coffee on our hands, we also had this great story to tell about the people we’d bought it from and the beautiful place where they’d grown it.
I was so confident that people would like our coffee that we offered anyone their first bag ‘on the house’. I placed vouchers in hundreds of thousands of magazines that I thought the right kind of people would buy. We rewarded customers who shared our offer with their friends.
Over the course of a few months, around 10,000 coffee-lovers signed up for our club. The reviews for our Colombian coffee were outstanding. Our business soon attracted the attention of a larger competitor, who offered to buy us out.
By this point, my own time was so stretched between SuperJam and other projects that this seemed like the best option. I wasn’t putting the kind of time into Envelope that would be needed to take it from a lifestyle business into a ‘real company’. I was, however, very proud of this fantastic product that we made.
I definitely now believe in the importance of focusing on one idea at a time. As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to be like a magpie. Always distracted by the latest shiny idea.
What amazed me about this experience of starting Envelope was that I managed to go from having an idea with my friend in the pub to having a great product in people’s hands in a remarkably short space of time. Not only had we done it fast, we’d also done it well. Anyone looking at our site wouldn’t have thought the company has been started in only a few weeks – our photography was beautiful, our packaging was just as good as any of our competitors’ and, most importantly, the product was delicious.
BEER52
A similar business that I was involved in starting is Beer52, a craft beer club. My now business partner James Brown had been on a motorcycle road trip around Europe with his dad, during which they’d stopped at craft beer bars and breweries, refreshing themselves along the way.
The way I tell that makes it sound like they were drink-driving but I promise you they weren’t!
This trip ignited James’s passion for craft beer and on his return to Scotland he started to learn more and more about the beers and breweries he had found on his trip. With the help of some quick internet research, he learned that there are more than 14,000 microbreweries in the world. They are literally popping up everywhere, with new ones opening every week. The craft beer trend is a well-documented success story all over the world.
But with so many breweries out there, how could anyone even begin to discover the best ones? Most of them are just selling in their local area on a small scale.
James decided that he wanted to do something about this – create a way for people to discover some of these great beers and also a way for the breweries to get their beers out to a wider audience.
We met up and threw some ideas around. Wouldn’t it be cool to make a sort of tasting club, we figured. We could ring up breweries and ask for samples, then together we could have fun tasting the hundreds of bottles that came in and pick the best ones. Once we’d figured out which were the best, we’d order a whole batch to send out to our members. Sounds like a fun business!
And so the idea for Beer52 was born. We would produce a monthly selection of craft beers from around the world and deliver a mixed case of bottles directly to our customers’ doors. They’d pay a monthly subscription to be in the club and we’d produce tasting notes and content about the beers, so that people could learn all about what they were drinking.
Selling beer on the internet
Neither of us really knew how to build a full-on subscription website from scratch, but the great thing was that we didn’t have to. We used a service called Shopify to make a very simple website (there are lots of these services available, so check out which one is best for you).
We hired a freelance designer to create a simple logo, then mocked up an example of how we wanted our boxes to look and booked a photographer to create some images for the site. Within almost no time we had gone from having an idea to creating a website that gave the impression we were an established brand.
With the basic building blocks in place, we immediately started calling up breweries to ask if they’d sell us, say, 100 bottles of beer for us to send out in our deliveries to our customers. For the most part, they didn’t return our calls. It wasn’t a large enough size of order for them.
So we tried a different angle. We rang breweries and asked if they would send us 1,000 bottles of their beer for free. In return, we’d get it out into the hands of people who love craft beer. The breweries found these kinds of numbers much more exciting and agreed to give it a shot.
Samples started arriving within days and we had the oh-so-difficult task of deciding which were our favourites to put into our inaugural selection box. We arranged for the beer to be delivered to a third-party fulfilment centre – a place that had the ability to store and pack our orders as they came through, simply charging us a small fee for each one that went out the door.
In the end, we produced 1,500 cases for our launch. It was a bold move but we knew that for a subscription business we would need to attract a critical mass of members – only some of those who took up our initial offer would go on to become loyal members.
To attract this initial critical mass we knew we would have to do something more than just hand out some fliers in the street; it would take a bolder and more unconventional initiative to get 1,500 people to sign up for our club in the first month. We came up with the idea of using Groupon.
Normally, people would say that using a discount website to launch your business amounts to suicide. Surely that’s the sort of place that great brands go to face their deaths, not their births.
But the way we saw it was that there was no better way to get our launch into the email inboxes of millions of people from day one. By giving them a special deal on their first box – just £9 instead of the usual £24, hopefully