4 Researching and Pitching Your Idea

You might spend years on developing your product, tinkering away in your garden shed perfecting a prototype to show to your first big potential customers. On the other hand, you might well have everything in place to start approaching customers within a few weeks, depending on what kind of product or service you've come up with. No matter what business idea you have, there are a few lessons I've learned from the long and difficult journey of getting SuperJam into the major supermarkets, which will help you through the process of researching and pitching your idea to move to the next stage of getting your product out there.

Getting to Know the Competition

In my mind, you should begin the process of developing your product by trying to understand everything you can about your customers and also everything you can about what the competition is already doing. That way, you can get a picture of what your customer wants from your product that the competition isn't quite delivering on; that will be what you might call your ‘unique selling point’.

In reality, the world is full of millions of products so you don't need to worry too much about yours being truly unique. But you will certainly have to offer your customers one simple and compelling reason for buying your brand over the competition.

It is really easy to find out what your competitors are up to: they're shouting about it in their advertising and press coverage! Try the products yourself, read articles about them, visit their stores, talk to their staff and download their company accounts. You should try to understand where each of your competitors sits in the market. Who makes the most money and why? What kind of people buy their products? Try to figure out what they do well and what they don't do so well.

Understanding Your Customers

Understanding your customers isn't always quite as easy. You will need to build an image in your mind of who is likely to buy your product and where the bulk of your sales will come from. It could be housewives or it might be sausage factories, it will depend on your product.

There's a fair chance that the first prototype you make won't hit the nail on the head; show it to people and see what they think you should change. You should do everything you can to perfect your concept before taking it to market. It's a huge amount easier to make changes now compared to when your brand is on the shelves.

Try to spend time with your potential customers, under-standing why they buy the brand they do at the moment. Is it because it is good value for money or because it is reliable? You need to talk to them, asking what they think is missing from the brand and what they wished it would do. What would make them use more of it? Maybe they think it should be in the colour blue, that it should come in a bigger container, or that it should be cheaper. All of this information will give you a picture of what your product needs to be.

Getting the Pricing Right

Coming up with a price for your product will be one of the defining decisions that you make and it shouldn't be taken lightly. Once you have launched your brand at a certain price, it is usually very difficult to change it, especially if you are supplying big companies. The only direction the buyers want your price to go is down.

It goes without saying that to get a sense of what you should be charging for your product, you're going to have to be competitive against what other people are charging. But the challenge will be making sure that you can make a decent margin at that price; if not, perhaps you're going to need to rethink some part of your concept, otherwise you could launch at a price that is so low you won't have a business for long.

There are all kinds of approaches that you can take to pricing other than simply charging something similar to what the competition does. You can think about blowing the competition out of the water by giving your product or service away for free; why not try to make money from selling advertising or upgrades to premium versions? Look at the Metro newspaper or Google, for example, brands that we come in contact with every day without paying a penny.

If you have a good picture of what you think the customer is going to be willing to pay for your product, you'll be in a good position when it comes to negotiating with manufacturers and figuring out if you stand to make a profit when you find out what it costs to produce.

What you'll be able to charge for your products will have a lot to do with where you plan on selling them. Whatever price you decide to offer your product at will determine what kind of outlets will be interested in stocking your brand and which ones won't. Getting the price right will be critical to the success of your brand.

Finding Outlets for Your Product

In my case the most logical place to start selling SuperJam was supermarkets and up-market independent stores, but you might want to sell direct on your own website, through a catalogue, on home shopping channels or on a market stall. The benefits of selling through a large retailer like Waitrose are that you can reach almost every postcode in the country right away, millions of people walk past your product on the shelves every week (hopefully some of them stop and pick it up!) and the volumes can be astronomical.

Having said that, there is something beautiful about having a direct relationship with your customer, something that can be lost if you sell through someone else's stores. The closer you are to your customers, the more you can understand them and hopefully that can help you to improve what you are offering.

There's a lot to be said for focusing on one market before trying to take over the world, so try to figure out where the easiest place is going to be for you to sell in order to get your product off the ground. I'm a big believer in starting small, maybe even on a market stall or by selling online to start with, to let you test the waters before leaping in.

Researching My Super Idea

Having left school at the age of 16 so that I could cook jam in my parents' tiny kitchen all day every day, I soon found myself cooking up to 1,000 jars of homemade jam every week, selling them at farmers' markets and to small shops all over Scotland.

It soon got to the point where my parents simply couldn't get into the kitchen to cook the dinner any more and I realized that if I wanted to grow my business any further, I would need to come up with a big idea in order to make the leap into factory production.

So I began doing a lot of research, online and by getting market research reports from the library, only to discover that the jam market was in a dismal state.

Sales had been in decline for decades, mostly because jam is usually incredibly unhealthy, sometimes containing 70% or even 80% sugar, but also because it has a very old-fashioned image. Usually when people think of jam, they think of old women and church fêtes.

I decided that I was going to set myself the ambition of changing all of that. It became an obsession and I researched jam in every way I could. I'd read recipe books and experiment in my parent's tiny kitchen for days on end, sometimes staying up all night if I thought I was on to something. If friends went on holiday to an exotic place, I'd ask them to bring home jam for me to try. I wanted to reinvent the world of jam by coming up with a healthier and more modern brand.

I began to focus more and more on the idea of making jam entirely from fruit, without adding any sugar at all. I tried making jam sweetened with honey, but it proved too expensive and I didn't like the consistency. I tried adding fruits that were particularly sweet, experimenting with all kinds of processes and endless different cooking times.

One afternoon, after literally hundreds of batches and dozens of failed concepts, I created a batch of jam entirely from fruit and fruit juice. It tasted beautiful, really fruity and natural, the way jam is supposed to be.

Having come up with the recipe, I was now more excited than ever that I could reinvent the world of jam and reverse the fortunes of the industry.

And that was the birth of SuperJam.

Of course, before I could start banging down the doors of supermarkets or any other kind of retailer, I had to give some thought to how I planned to get the word out about my brand and beat the existing jam brands at their own game.

Getting Your Brand Out There

It's all very well putting something out into the world that is the best thing since sliced bread at a bargain price, but if nobody knows about it, you're going nowhere. So, right from the start, you're going to have to develop a clear plan for promoting your business.

You should really be looking into promotion methods that are very different to what your competitors are already doing. You might even be able to reinvigorate your industry, by attracting people to buy your products who wouldn't normally even consider buying from your competitors.

You're the new guy in town, and you have the innovative new product that is going to take over the market and beat the incumbent players at their game. Stand out from all of them by talking in a different tone in your marketing materials, don't take yourself too seriously and do everything you can to relate to your customers. You know the reasons they have for not buying your kind of product in the past, so talk to them about how you've solved their gripe. ‘Don't you just hate how this product only ever comes in blue? Well, so did we, until we set up our own business offering it in every colour of the rainbow.’

There are all kinds of types of promotions that you can consider using to tell people about your brand: advertising, money-off promotions, sampling, PR and events. I'm going to talk in more depth about all of them later in the book but, at this stage, you should have an idea about what you think will work for your brand. You'll need to convince buyers or investors to believe in your idea and if you don't have a good promotional plan, they know that you'll be dead in the water. And the best way to get buyers, investors, banks or anyone else on board is to show them what you plan to do to make your business work.

Writing a Business Plan

Once you've come up with an idea, there's a lot to be said for writing down all of your aspirations and ideas in a plan, backed up by the research that you have done into why anyone will ever buy your product.

You will need to write a convincing business plan if you hope to raise bank funding, grants and, of course, investment from outsiders. Although it might seem tedious, by putting your ideas down on paper, you can clarify them in your own mind as well. If you are totally honest about the shortcomings of each aspect of the idea, you will hopefully be pretty sure of what you need to work on.

I've never written a massive business plan with dozens and dozens of pages. It can be easy to get bogged down planning and researching your idea. There is a risk that if you keep planning, you'll end up never getting the business started. You should bear in mind that the people you're going to be showing your business plan to are likely to be very busy. So it will be in your best interests to keep the document as short and simple as possible.

In your business plan, there are four things that you need to cover, explaining them as clearly and simply as you can:

1. The benefits of your product over the alternatives. Why should anyone buy it?
2. Who is going to buy your product. Where will it be sold and what kind of person will end up spending their hard-earned money on it?
3. That the commercial elements stack up. Is the pricing competitive? Will you and your retailers both make a decent margin?
4. What you are going to do to get the name out there. How do you plan on promoting your business and getting those vital first orders?

In my experience, if you can explain those four things clearly and demonstrate truthfully that your product stacks up on all fronts, you will be able to put together a business plan that gives a bank, investor or anyone else faith in your idea.

Once you've finished writing your business plan and you've done everything you can to develop your product ready for the market, it might well be time to pitch your idea . This could be to a retailer or investor, or to whoever else it is that you need to convince to make the whole thing happen. You're really going to have to prepare and know everything you can about the market, your product and how you're going to promote your brand, and do your best to get them excited about the journey ahead of you.

Pitching Your Product

Throughout the development of your business, you will no doubt have to pitch your ideas, your products and yourself to customers, bankers, investors or any number of other people who can hopefully help you take things to the next level. You're going to be invited to share your story with them, telling them about what you've done to get to where you are now, what the plans are for the future and how you want them to help you get there.

Whoever you are pitching to, they will no doubt be extremely busy, especially if you're trying to show your products to the buyer for a large retailer.

The first step, of course, will be to make contact with the buyer, which is sometimes easier said than done. Find out who the buyer is by calling the retailer's head office. Send them some samples of your product and a simple outline of your story, what you're planning to do and how you're going to make your product sell in their stores. Of course, if you have any testimonials or press clippings, send them along too.

Give the buyer a couple of weeks to have a chance to look at what you've sent them and follow up with a phone call; ask if you can come and meet them to tell them more about your product. With any luck, they'll invite you in to pitch for their business.

Now's your big chance, so make sure you do your homework. Don't write a great speech or expect to be presenting to a hundred people; it is most likely going to be you telling your story to one or two buyers, which isn't as scary as you might imagine.

Whoever you are pitching to will no doubt have plenty of questions about how you plan on promoting the brand, what you're doing to generate publicity around the launch and so on. Hopefully, if you do a good job of telling them everything they need to know, they'll be willing to give it a shot. This could be on a trial basis in a few stores, or they might just take on one of your products and see how it performs.

Pitching to Waitrose

In the newspaper one day, I read that the much-loved British supermarket chain ‘The Food Stores of the John Lewis Partnership’, Waitrose, was to open its first two stores in Scotland.

They would be in Edinburgh, my home town, and the company was encouraging local food producers to come along to an event; a ‘Meet The Buyer Day’, to pitch their ideas to the supermarket's most senior buyers.

I figured that this would be my big break and I wanted to do everything I could to impress Waitrose. I saw it as the perfect outlet for my product, since its ethos was supporting small suppliers.

The type of people who shop at Waitrose generally have a little extra money to spend on premium food products. I figured that they were probably likely to be interested in SuperJam, because it was an upmarket brand of 100% fruit jams.

I was pretty nervous about pitching my ideas to Waitrose, as I felt like I had entered ‘The X-Factor of Supplying Groceries to Supermarkets’. I felt like one of those amateur singers who stands in a line with hundreds of others waiting to give the five-minute performance that might just change their life.

The only difference was that the people in this queue were holding boxes of homemade cakes and chutneys, and some had brought vegetables from their small farms or beer from their microbrewery.

After what felt like a decade, my time came and I walked into a small room where sat the senior jam buyer, a friendly guy by the name of Michael Simpson-Jones.

He waited patiently as I told him how I had learned to make jam with my gran, my early successes of selling my home-made produce at farmers markets and to local shops, and about all of the research I had done. I listed all of the statistics I had read about the decline in jam sales, presented SuperJam as the solution to jam's unpopularity and offered him the chance to try my homemade jams.

I explained that SuperJam was better than what was already on the shelves of his stores because it was made entirely from fruit and was all natural. I told him that I thought the brand would appeal to exactly the type of people who shop in Waitrose, people who earn good money and enjoy eating well. I also gave him an idea of what I thought SuperJam should retail for and what Waitrose might expect to make from it. It also seemed like a good idea to tell him all about my ideas for how we could promote the brand: that I would be happy to stand in some of the stores, handing out samples and telling people all about the products myself.

After listening to my pitch and trying everything I had brought along, Mike explained that, although it was very refreshing for him to see a teenager coming along with a dream to reinvent the world of jam, there was a long way to go until I would have a product that could sit on the shelves of a leading supermarket like Waitrose. I'd have to set up production in a factory and be able to produce SuperJam at a comptitive price. I would have to create a brand that people loved and do a lot more work on my recipes before he would be happy.

Although there was a long way to go, Mike promised that if I could do a good job of those three things, I'd be welcome to go back, in say a year, and he'd consider launching the products in Waitrose stores.

I reflected on everything that he had suggested to me. The challenge of getting SuperJam into Waitrose stores was going to be much bigger than I had imagined. I had no idea how I was going to convince a factory to work with me or how I would go about creating a brand that people would love. But with such great feedback about the overall concept from the buyer, I figured that these were challenges I could overcome, and I committed to giving it a shot. So on the back of that meeting, I decided to put everything I had into trying to create a product that Waitrose would be happy with.

Creating the Brand

By that time I was a student at the University of Strathclyde, studying Accountancy and Marketing. Obviously, as a student and a teenager, I didn't have access to a huge amount of money to fund the creation of the SuperJam brand.

I contacted a number of design agencies around Scotland and some in London, telling them all about my idea to reinvent the world of jam. I asked for a quote to create the SuperJam branding: the logo, the packaging, the website and some promotional materials such as leaflets and posters.

Soon the quotes started to trickle back. Some were £10,000, others £20,000 and some were even as much as £40,000! Needless to say, the quotes were all a lot more than I could afford.

Eventually, I came across a local advertising agency called IASmarts, who mostly worked on advertising for huge companies and the government and won a lot of awards for what it produced. The director of the company said that it was a really fun idea and a project that he figured his designers would enjoy working on.

He also really believed in the SuperJam idea, so he agreed to work on my branding for free, as long as I gave the agency some repeat business if everything became the huge success that we all hoped it would be.

Super Heroes

All fired up about the prospect of working together to create the next big thing in the world of jam, the designers and I sat down and had a think about what the packaging should look like.

The head designer, a mega talented and witty guy called Simon Shaw, came up with the thought that there was a link between ‘SuperJam’ and ‘SuperMan’, so we began to develop the concept of creating a super hero-style brand. It was an idea that I loved.

We had a huge amount of fun writing jokes on the labels and we excitedly spoke of creating a superheroesque costume for me, the ‘Jam Boy’, to wear at the launch of the whole thing.

The leaflets were designed to look like a comic book, with the ‘Jam Boy’ character coming to the rescue in Jam Land. The website was to be equally wacky.

Having come up with a brand that I thought was super funny and really cool, I began work on solving the small problem of how I was going to produce hundreds of thousands of jars of SuperJam to sell to the big supermarkets .

Finding a Factory

Of course, as a teenager I didn't have enough money lying around to build my own jam factory. I also wasn't realistically in a position to ask a bank to lend me that kind of money either.

So I was going to have to convince an existing jam factory to work with me to produce SuperJam on a big scale. This was a search that would prove to be a lot more challenging than I immediately thought. Not only was I going to have to convince a factory to work with me, I was going to have to give its owners good reason to risk their resources backing my idea.

Since I had so little finance behind me, I was going to have to find a factory willing to put up the working capital to buy fruit, jars and labels to make the first batch of tens of thousands of jars. I would then agree with the factory that they would be paid back for all of that initial outlay, plus their margin, as soon as we had sold the finished product to the supermarkets. The factory would also have to wait to be paid until the supermarket had paid me; typically a month or two after we delivered the jam to them.

All in all, I was asking them to risk £50,000 or maybe even £100,000 on my idea, with no guarantee that they would ever see a penny of it again.

So I travelled around the country, from the tiny islands off the north coast of Scotland to the big cities of England, trying to find someone to work with me to produce this SuperJam.

As you can probably imagine, most of these huge food companies, some of them publicly listed on the stock market, were somewhat sceptical of a teenager showing up with no money, no experience and in fact nothing more than just some recipes and a vague ambition to transform the world of jam.

Although most of the jam factories were not willing to give my ideas a shot, I came across one that had suffered from the decline in jam sales, had a lot of spare capacity and figured that, just maybe, SuperJam would be the answer to their problems. Its owners were excited about my idea because I had told them about how much Waitrose liked the concept and my story.

A few months later and after some successful and not-so-successful factory trials, they had figured out how to make SuperJam on the large scale I needed in order to supply Waitrose.

I decided I was ready to go back to Mike and pitch the final concepts to him.

Pitching Again

I showed the new labels to Mike and told him about the factory I had found to produce the range. I gave him an indication of the price at which we would be able to sell the products to him, and the price at which we would end up retailing on the shelf.

Although Mike still liked the idea of making jam entirely from fruit, he explained to me that the fact that SuperJam was so healthy had been completely lost in the humour of the comic book labels.

He explained that the factory I had chosen to work with would end up being far too expensive and he didn't really like the flavours we had come up with either. Basically, everything I had spent a year working on would have to be thrown in the bin!

When Waitrose also turned down the labels that we had created, I learned how crucial the design of products is to their success. People don't really buy products because they look cool or funny, they buy them because the packaging communicates really clearly why they should. The labels we had created didn't do a very good job of telling people that SuperJam was all fruit and all natural; it was probably so colourful that it didn't look very natural at all.

It was very clear how important it was going to be to look after the costs of making the product, otherwise we could end up setting on the shelf with a price ticket much higher than people would be willing to pay. I wanted SuperJam to be a brand that people could buy every week and feel it was good value for money.

The response from Waitrose was terrible news. Not only was I disappointed by it, but the factory and designers were devastated that all of the hard work they had put in was going to be thrown away. The designers were really proud of the comic book labels and were sad to see them go. When it became clear that it wasn't going to be possible for me to continue working with the factory, because they worked out to be too expensive, they were upset no longer to be a part of the SuperJam adventure.

That was probably the lowest point of the whole adventure, the moment when I wasn't sure if it would ever work, when I asked myself if I had been wasting my time all along.

Family and friends admitted that this is where they probably would have given up. ‘You've put six months into this and it hasn't worked out, so why not cut your losses and try something new?’. Everyone who was supporting me was wondering whether this was the end of the SuperJam dream.

Picking Myself Up to Try Again

You've probably already guessed what happened next.

Although things hadn't really worked out, I still completely believed in the idea of reinventing the world of jam. I took Waitrose's comments on board as advice for how I could make SuperJam even better. All I had to do was create a brand that was a lot simpler and would get the message across more clearly. I also needed to set up production in a factory that could meet Waitrose's quality but also come in at a competitive price and really perfect the recipes.

I took a deep breath and decided that I would be short changing myself if I didn't do what I believed in and give the idea another shot.

In getting your business off the ground, you can be sure that there will be moments when things don't work, when people let you down or you face rejection. Starting a business isn't easy and it is moments like these that show you what makes it so hard. There will be moments when you consider giving up, when you want to walk away from your idea because you can't quite see how to overcome the challenge you face. But I can assure you that when you try again, find a way forward and make everything work out, the feeling at the end will be all the more satisfying.

Solving the Branding Problem

I met again with the designer, Simon, who had created the super hero branding. He was pretty devastated by the news that the comic book idea, his ‘baby’, hadn't captured the minds of the supermarket buyers in the same way as it had ours.

We spent some time trying to figure out what had gone wrong and realized that we had never really asked ourselves what our target market would want and expect SuperJam to look like.

‘Who is going to buy SuperJam?’ was the question that we should have been asking ourselves all along. We clarified to ourselves that it wasn't kids and teenagers, my friends, who may well have found the comic book idea funny: it was adults.

We'd have a matter of seconds to communicate to the supermarket shopper why they should buy SuperJam. We needed to decide in our own minds exactly why they should and how we could tell them.

Around this time, I visited the headquarters of Innocent, ‘Fruit Towers’ as it is called, one of my all-time favourite companies. They were in the relatively early days of taking over the world of fruit smoothies, and their packaging, ethics and the way they were so open with the consumer massively inspired me.

I was lucky enough to meet with a guy called Dan Germain, who was responsible for creating the Innocent brand. His view was that packaging should talk to consumers in the same way as friends talk to one another down the pub.

He hated the way that big food companies spoke about how ‘your statutory rights are not affected’ on their packaging and talked to consumers without having any personality and without being straight-forward.

He also spoke about the fact that the most enduring grocery brands, like Marmite, Heinz ketchup, Campbell's soup and Coca-Cola, don't change the look and feel of their brand with fashion, they stay consistent. By being so consistent, they remain brands we love, brands we remember from childhood and brands we trust.

I think probably one of the best pieces of advice anyone has given me was from Dan. He said that a brand should only have one thing it wants to say. It should say it in a really simple way and keep saying it over and over again.

Armed with this advice, I realized that, like Innocent, our message should be ‘100% fruit’ and that we should aim to create a brand and packaging that got that message across really simply.

Having taking this new approach, Simon came up with a number of different ideas for the packaging and ultimately we settled on the branding that you see on the products today. The labels are very simple and mostly white, with a clear description of the product inside and some nice colourful patterns to bring them to life. No pictures of farms or of the fruits themselves, which is so common in jam brands. And no superheroes!

Finding a New Factory

Now that we had packaging that everyone was happy with, I set out to find a new factory. This time, I would need to find a factory that could make the products to Waitrose's high standards and be able to cut some costs from the process so that we could offer the buyer a price that would work.

I travelled around the country a bit more, knocking on the doors of 150-year-old family businesses who had been making jam for generations. ‘How could this kid from Scotland have possibly come up with an idea we haven't?’ was no doubt how they felt.

When I was beginning to doubt whether anyone would ever work with me, I came across a factory that specialized in making high-quality own-brand jams for the likes of Waitrose and Marks & Spencer. I met with a guy called David Smith, who knew just about everything there was to know about the jam industry and he got really excited about my idea.

He invited me for a tour of their factory. It was very Willy Wonka and, for me, an amazing sight. When I visited, in the height of summer, they were making hundreds of thousands of jars of mincemeat: the whole place smelled like Christmas!

It was much bigger and more efficient than the previous factory and had machines for putting labels onto jars and jars into cases. At the previous place, jobs like that were done by hand. Seeing the labelling equipment was almost heart-breaking: watching a machine do in seconds what used to take me an afternoon in my parents' kitchen.

Des and his team set to work right away on figuring out how his factory could work with me to make SuperJam on a big scale and at a price that would work for the supermarkets. They had never made a product as complex as SuperJam. Not adding any sugar makes it a lot trickier to get the jam to set, especially when you're making thousands of jars at a time.

Eventually, we had figured out how to produce SuperJam at a price that we could offer Waitrose, leaving enough margin to cover promotional costs, distribution and hopefully profit for the factory and for me.

The Final Pitch

We presented the new packaging designs and our prices to the Waitrose buyer, who absolutely loved the clean, modern and simple design of the packaging and said that we were‘ almost there’ on the pricing.

The buyer explained that, at the cost we had suggested to him, the retail price of a jar of SuperJam would end up at almost £2.50, when realistically it should be £1.50 if we wanted to be competitive with other brands of jam in the category.

I wasn't willing to compromise on the quality of SuperJam, so we had to figure out how to get about 50p of cost out of each jar, while maintaining the best-tasting and healthiest jam possible.

The factory suggested that if I was able to commit to producing really large batches of jam at a time, something like 50,000 jars, there would be some considerable cost savings. This was mostly because if the factory can make one big batch of jam a day instead of lots of smaller ones, there is less time wasted between batches on cleaning equipment.

It was a huge gamble to consider, because I would be liable for stumping up the cash for the cost of producing 50,000 jars if they didn't sell. However, it also meant that I'd be able to go back to Waitrose with a price it would be happy with. We would be competitive with other brands in the market, the supermarket would make a decent margin and so would the factory. With all this in mind, I took this as my last shot, and agreed with the factory to push the ‘Go’ button.