And the winner is …
Considering I wasn’t due to attend Venturefest 2007, it was pretty good day in the end! I won £1,000 and walked away with the Venturefest Innovation Central Award for the ‘most progressed innovation’ since last year. So my PR machine will be grinding that out, which is brilliant!
I gained good responses from my exhibitor stand, and people have put some really good ideas in my head about the business. Schools and universities have invited me to speak to their students, which I enjoy because it helps me get the product out there. And I like to help people who want to go out and start their own businesses. Most of all, it was interesting that five year-olds were passing on better ideas about my product than people in business sometimes do!
Last week’s London give-away of 50,000 samples of O2GO was very exciting. I was disappointed to see nothing to start with 
until I realised that the people giving them out were positioned between the exit of the trains and the beginning of the Tubes! I arrived on the train myself so I could experience what commuters were experiencing. Once I saw what was going on, people were actually queuing up for the product. So I asked one girl why she took one, and she said it was because she needed to drink more water, and our ads say this will help you to do that. That was great and gave me a real buzz. We got 15,000 hits on our website on that day, unbelievable!
So I may be in the press, am winning awards, and my product may be in Sainsbury’s, but I spent 16 hours last weekend hand-packing my product into boxes for our next sampling exercise. We had to pack 10,000 by Wednesday but five of us could not pack more than 2,000 in 16 hours! So I will be doing the same this weekend and sending them in dribs and drabs to the sampling companies. We’re sending these to media contacts; BBC TV and radio stations, Emap, Conde Nast, other TV companies … the exercise actually puts the product on their desk, so they get an email from their boss (it’s called a ‘perk at work’) telling them to go and get their perk because they’re a valued employee. For O2GO it will be to help them drink more water and will contain a voucher and sample pack. It should also hit many journalists’ desks and probably will get some press out of this as well.
I want to mention Adam and Alex Nowakowski, who helped me no end with the packing, for no payment. I am flabbergasted at how amazing some younger business people are at choosing entrepreneurship as a career. There are a lot of TV programmes (Dragons’ Den, Make Me a Million), which are persuading people that entrepreneurship is the engine that drives the economy. Perhaps I started up for selfish reasons but now it’s more altruistic –they are able to learn from my experience as well as packing for me. But after three years I’m still getting the paper cuts and hand packing while also accepting awards., so it’s not all glamour!
We’re waiting to hear about the MoD deal tomorrow. But this is an amazing but true tale. Our product has doubled in sales every week and we were offered by my previous buyer at Sainsbury’s an additional three months on their shelves - result. HOWEVER she has now left and I have been told by someone else that this isn’t the case and now there is no shelf space left. All of my marketing and budgeting is geared towards this but the new buyer says unless we are selling 1,000 per week we’re not eligible, even though the ranging starts in April/May and by March we are projected to reach that target. Formalities and detail blow my mind: supermarkets want innovation but react in this way! The buyer won’t meet me, I’ve engaged a retail consultant, proved what it’s worth to them (a quarter of a million per year) ….
On the positive side I have found my extra pair of hands! My new colleague will be starting on Monday and he will help me with PR and attention to detail so I can concentrate on targeting Tesco, Asda and Walmart and Co-op. People are asking us to put the product on the site to buy but our hands are contractually tied by our supermarket deals, so I have switched off the web shop in favour of delivering sales to the multiples.
Finally, we’re thinking of sponsoring a sports team (options being sponsoring the underwear of the UK national netball team (not really our bag) or the swimsuits of the British freediving team. The latter is trendy, energetic and water-related and I think will fit the bill nicely …
