Welcome back to Work.It – the podcast all about entrepreneurship, inspiring founders and British business, brought to you by Work.Life and Angelica Malin. This podcast aims to inspire you for your own business journey; with hands-on advice, real stories and insider tips from some of the UK’s brightest entrepreneurs.
This week, Angelica is joined in the studio by Ed Foy, co-founder of PRESS London, whose company aims to improve people’s lives through good nutrition.
Ed and his co-founder, Georgie, stumbled upon the trend for cold-pressed juice whilst both living and working for other businesses in the US of A (Georgie in California and Ed in New York) setting about to “bring this back to the UK and start the movement here”.
Both having fingers in other pies at the beginning, they chose to keep things very simple. They decided to “start small, so we just created the brand name and a logo” – Ed said you really don’t need to always worry about a branding agency at the beginning – all you need “is a graphic designer and a name” and you can let them run with it, with your guidance of course.
As with all new businesses it didn’t begin start out as the sophisticated operational process it is today, PRESS began in an old TA military base in South London that they rented by the hour, debuting their retail life out of a bath tub stall in Old Street station. Being out on the streets, face-to-face with customers couldn’t have been more valuable “the selling allowed us some insight into whether people were interested and would buy this product, which is so important”.
Their first big break came from a chance encounter with a Selfridges buyer, who happened upon their store in Old Street, they worked overnight to put together a proposal to run a juice bar in their London store, Ed proclaims “we won the pitch and without it, I don’t think we’d still be going today”. His advice for getting stocked in retailers? “Make sure the cost of goods is right for the retailer. You have to make your product attractive … they want to see that the margins are right”.
Listen here to the whole conversation and hear more about PRESS’s amazing journey, how they’ve shone and stayed successful in a highly competitive industry.
