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Brand Growth Heroes ranks in the top 1.5% of ALL podcasts globally. With +25 years' experience working for brand giants and as coach to over 400 challenger brand founders, Fiona Fitz asks the questions you need the answers to from the founders of wildly successful consumer goods brands driving transformational growth.
This is Simona, founder of NoJo London. We make sauce and dressings to jazz up your meals. You can find us in Coop, Ocado, Amazon, and Whole Foods. I'm just calling to tell you about one of our biggest bloopers so far.
I started this business in 2018 and I decided that the best way to start and engage with customers was to attend farm shop and deli show, which is in the NEC, and that's where all the small shops come and you can engage. It's quite a nice way to tap into independence sectors. So back then I used to have a cafe in catering and a very small baby at home. So I literally put all my savings, very naive, very young, and I said, you know what? Let's do like one batch of each source. I had three at the time. Let's print the label, let's do the design and let's test it. Like before, you know, coming out and it, it was my testing ground, so this is how I wanted to see if the product was successful.
So I order bottles, I order labels, you know, I do the design.
Do you do everything? It, it's a big. It's a big piece of work and I sign a contract with manufacturer and I ordered a batch naively, I thought it's gonna go to plan and we are gonna get the batch, go to the show and sell it. Right? That's, that's the dream. This is what the steps that you need to do. And the batch, the batch is ready and they send me some samples to my home address and I opened the sesame sauce and you know, our sesame sauce is magic.
I mean, it's amazing. It. It has a nutty flavor, the balsamic profile. You'd drizzle it on rice. It's amazing. But that one was disgusting. I open it and it's just, it smells like alcohol. It's so vinegar and it's like so acid and, and the texture and it's just shit. It's like you have to bin it. And I had I think 5,000 of each, you know, And, and, and I'm like, what do I do?
The show is in two days and I paid a girl from, from my cafe to come with me because I needed help. And I said, I don't think I, I will be able to pay you because I'm binning all of this. And I obviously cried a, a long time. And then my friend who was pregnant at the time, bless her, she said, you know what?
We gonna go anyway. And I'm going with you and I'm bringing my little sister with me. Because she needs like a line on her CV to get into uni, you know? And, and we are gonna go and we are gonna have a blast anyway. You cannot get your money back, you cannot get the hotel back. You know, the recipe. Make some at home. We are gonna sample it in bowls and we are gonna ask anyway because your clients are there, and we. And we even got some stock list out of it. Without a product, without, you know, anything. And people said, well, when you get a product, call me.
And, it was such a great testing ground and I actually learned so much and, that's the main asset you have as a business owner.
If you want to buy some, nojo, head to our website nojo.co.uk You can use, um, my code for 20% off code Simona20. Uh, it will last, forever. You can also follow my LinkedIn page where I talk about my successes and my failures quite openly.
My LinkedIn page is Simon Deifta and our corporate pages NoJo B Corp.