My Adventures in Jam

If I were to meet the 14-year-old me and tell him what was in store, he would never believe it. That his tiny enterprise, started with just £5 worth of fruit, would one day be supplying Wal-Mart. He would be terrified and amazed by the thought that one day he would be invited to the most prestigious universities in the world—Columbia, Oxford and dozens of others—to share his story with other young people who dream of starting their own companies.

My story so far is an eight-year adventure that started with a eureka moment in my Gran's tiny kitchen in Glasgow, which ended up giving birth to an internationally loved brand of jam on sale on the shelves of the worlds' largest supermarket chains.

There have been incredible highlights. I have been invited to Downing Street to have dinner with the Prime Minister, after he heard about my story, and I have even seen SuperJam entered into the National Museum of Scotland as an example of an iconic Scottish Brand, alongside Irn-Bru, Baxters and Tunnock's Tea Cakes.

We've celebrated selling our millionth jar, and celebrated many more since. We've launched a cookbook and an iPhone app, sharing my Gran's and my jam-making secrets with the world. The story of SuperJam itself has travelled far and wide, been the feature of television documentaries, school textbooks in Russia and news broadcasts in China. I have found myself sharing my story in places I would never have even of dreamed of finding myself.

SuperJam challenges established brands in an industry that has been around for hundreds of years. It reinvents what jam is: rather than being sickly sweet and made without much fruit, I have created a product that is healthier, more natural and a great deal more ethical than anything that came before it in the world of preserves. It is made 100% from fruit and all natural, and I have had hundreds of letters from people thanking me for coming up with a healthier kind of jam.

Building SuperJam into a commercially successful business has given me the priceless opportunity to help others in my community. For the past couple of years we have been running our own registered charity, The SuperJam Tea Parties, organizing hundreds of free tea dances in community centres and schools for elderly people who live alone or in care. Thousands of people have come along and had a great time and, for me, doing things like that is immensely more satisfying that just running a business to get rich.

My proudest moment of all, though, has to be the day I was lucky enough to share the front page of the Susan Boyle Special Edition of The Sun, when we gave away a jar of SuperJam to all of the paper's 5.5 million readers!

There have also been huge challenges along the way. Convincing massive companies to take me seriously, to risk hundreds of thousands of pounds on my idea, was not easy—not only because I was so young, but because I had no experience and, coming from a hard-working but not very well-off family, absolutely no money behind me.

The process of getting my idea off the ground involved creating a brand that looked as good as it tasted, and then finding a factory that believed in my product enough to put it into production and lend me hundreds of thousands of pounds. Oh, and once that was done, I had to figure out how to convince supermarket buyers to stock my product, alongside the tried-and-tested brands that have been on sale for 100 years or more.

I wanted to write this book to share with you the adventure that I have been on over the past few years, the ups and downs, things I found fun and lessons I have learned. I felt that the time has come to share the SuperJam story with you, now that the company is no longer a tiny start-up but an established brand that has had massive success in the major supermarkets. Most new products that launch in the supermarkets don't last as long as SuperJam has and very few become as well loved.

I definitely didn't get everything right first time, and there were even points where I thought about giving up. I have certainly been on a very steep learning curve over the past few years. In this little book I'm not trying to preach to you or to pretend that I am some kind of business guru who knows the answers to everything. I am definitely not that.

Having said that, I have picked up a lot of useful advice along the way and learned all about the ups and downs of starting a company. There are a lot of things that I learned by making my mistakes. Hopefully by my sharing my story with you, these are the mistakes that you won't have to make too. If someone had given me this advice a few years ago, my business would have got to where it is today a lot more quickly and with many fewer sleepless nights.

I don't want to pretend that SuperJam's success has been entirely down to me; in fact, it has been almost entirely down to finding other people who believe in the idea as much as I do. In the early days, I was lucky enough to be supported by organisations like The Prince's Trust. As the business grew, I have learned from other entrepreneurs and even found a few to be my ‘mentors’. They have built multimillion-pound companies and been willing to share the lessons they learned from it with me. I have scattered some of their inspirational stories, ideas and ways of doing things throughout this book, as well as some studies throughout on particular companies that have inspired me along the way.

By telling you about how SuperJam became a success, I want to give you an insight into how to come up with your own idea and get support from people who can help you make it happen. I want to help you prepare for the launch of your idea and understand how to listen to and love your customers. Hopefully I can also give you some advice about selling, generating publicity for your business, building a team and fostering a company culture, and about the importance of giving back to your community.

As well as sharing with you some of the things that I have picked up along the way, I'm also hoping to give you a sense of the excitement and thrill that I get from the whole enterprise. Nothing in my life has compared to the sense of achievement that I felt when I first saw my products on the supermarket shelf, for example.

It obviously takes a huge amount of hard work to get a business, new product or charity off the ground. You have to believe in your idea when everything seems to be going wrong and put everything you have into making it work. But, when it does work out in the end, it feels pretty amazing.