Jamie Laing & Ed Williams - The Sweet Success
Guests: Jamie Laing, Ed Williams
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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Candy Kittens. I wonder what you think I'm talking about when I say those two words. I'm guessing, due to the success of this business, a lot of you will actually already know. It's one of the fastest-growing confectionery brands in the UK, and it was started by reality TV star Jamie Laing with his business partner Ed Williams in 2012.
It kind of begs the question: what adult would start a candy brand at the age of twenty-something? But these guys have absolutely smashed it. They're selling a bag of sweets every couple of seconds. They've sold millions and millions of bags of candy, generating tens of millions in revenue over the last couple of years, and their brand is an absolute juggernaut.
The momentum is absolutely crazy, and these two guys, Jamie Laing and Ed Williams, are the perfect pairing. If you've ever wondered what your perfect business partner would be, or if you've ever thought about what the perfect complementary piece of the jigsaw puzzle that you might be missing is, these guys have found that in each other.
One of them is incredibly overly stimulated and excited, and Ed, on the other hand, is calm. He's pragmatic. He's very, very practical. My conversation with them was funny, it was informative, it was real, and it was everything that this podcast has always been. I can't wait for you to hear it. So, without further ado, this is the Diary of a CEO, and I'm Stephen Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Ed, Jamie. I alluded to the fact that I'd known Candy Kittens some time before we started recording, and here's how. A couple of years ago, I was on Seedrs. I was a broke, young man, entrepreneurial and an investor, and I was scrolling down Seedrs and I saw Candy Kittens. I was so compelled by the story. I saw you on there, I looked into the brand a little bit more.
I'm not talking garbage here, it was probably the closest I've ever come on Seedrs to investing in something. I've seen it grow and grow and grow since then. Every time I get on a Virgin flight now from New York to London, it's the thing that I'm eating. I eat the watermelon ones. At the end of the flight, you come to my chair and it's just all these wrappers from the candy.
I love the fact that when you said, "I was broke but I was looking to invest." I was like, "How is that still working?" Seedrs allows you to do that, right? You've got to click a couple of buttons and pretend you've got a little bit of excess income and Bob's your uncle.
Did you ever invest in anything on Seedrs?
I never did. I've invested off Seedrs, but I was looking for a platform like that. I was obsessed with Dragon's Den. It was one of those platforms that would allow me to invest a little bit and feel like an investor. There were two that I really remember: one was an indoor beach, and the other was Candy Kittens. That felt the most solid at the time.
My first question is, how did you get to that point? What's the context? I know you guys met in a pub one day, but why did you choose Seedrs as a platform to raise investment versus all the other options out there?
It's a good question. I think we'd reached a point where we thought, "Okay, to get to that next level..." and I think at this stage we were probably a couple of years in. We were still young. We'd gone through a family and friends round of investment and pulled together enough money to get the business going.
Can I ask you a question on that? I've always been too scared to raise money from anybody that I know. Maybe that's a sign that I don't back myself, but the thought of raising money from friends and family terrifies me.
Jamie and I have always been very different people, but we bring completely different things. One thing Jamie's always been amazing at is finding money. He's like a Jack Russell for money; he can sniff it out and just go find the people and the right friends.
As long as you're doing it in a way that everybody's happy and everybody's upfront and transparent from the beginning—that actually, look, we're going into a point here where this could go wrong—I think it can work.
There are two things to this as well. Firstly, we were quite young. We didn't really understand how important cash was for a business. We were looking at the easiest place to get it. We didn't realize the concept that you could go pretty much to other people. We thought, "What's the easiest place to get money? Okay, friends and family."
I think it's also important to understand that there's this big misconception that I have money growing on trees everywhere, and that I have this bank balance from McVitie's. I've never seen that. Everyone always writes things saying, "Oh, he's the heir to McVitie's." I'm not. I don't know where that money is.
Have you seen that Lewis Capaldi video where he's talking about how he found his net worth of 10 million on Google and he's still got the New York wallpaper in his bedroom?
He's hilarious. He's a genius. People throw numbers around with all different things and actually, most of it's not true. In terms of business, cash is oxygen. You need it to make you breathe. For us, we needed cash. I think it's like a riddle: everyone has money in their pockets, it's just finding a way of getting the money from them into your pockets.
If you have a great idea and you're passionate, most people buy into the individual. They're not really buying into the business unless it's something like Seedrs. When you're meeting someone, they think, "Do I like this person? Are they passionate? Do they have drive? Are they going to achieve what they want to achieve?" and then they invest in them.
You can create a great business, but if you have the wrong team surrounding it, it's probably going to fail. But if you have a great team and a mediocre business, there's more chance of it succeeding. So it's about going to individuals and persuading them, proves to them that you really believe your brand or business is going to achieve something great.
That's what we were doing with Candy Kittens. Because it was so authentic and real to us, we found it easier to meet people who were potential investors. Seedrs was a platform for us because it was exciting, it was fun, we could make a big show about it, and we were new.
It was publicity. At the time, crowdfunding itself was new. There was a real buzz around it. Everybody that you spoke to who was talking about raising money was doing it through crowdfunding. So we also had a slight human sheep mentality: "Okay, we want a bit of that, we want to go in and get involved in that as well."
I think it's important to say that it didn't work for us. Why? Because we approached it in the wrong way. We believed that because I had a profile, because the brand had a profile, because we had 80,000 people following us on social media, that people were going to invest.
We thought that amount of people was going to turn into cash. It just doesn't work that way. We were mistaken. Crowdfunding is a great place for a lot of different people, but for some people, it isn't because you've got to get investors before, you've got to get people interested before. We did none of that work. We just thought we'd put Candy Kittens on the website and everyone would invest, and it didn't work out that way.
You hear about all these big success stories where people fund in 30 minutes, like Monzo. But actually, the reality is that a lot of them are doing a huge amount of groundwork beforehand. We were too naive to that and didn't really line up any investment beforehand. We did a bit because Seedrs explained that's a good tip, but not enough.
So how did that play out? How much did you raise? How did the Seedrs story conclude?
What actually happened, which was another example of one of the hundred times in our lives where we've been incredibly lucky, was that we hit a point where we were about a week out and looked like we were about 80% funded. We didn't think we were going to just tip over and get that extra 20-25%.
So we spoke to our existing shareholders, our first investors, and one of them said, "Well, if these 150 people have backed you and are really interested, maybe I've missed something. Why don't I just put all the money in myself?" We were like, "Okay, we wish you'd said that six months ago, but let's go for it."
He essentially put the whole amount of money in himself. Then we had a group of about 20-25 people that had invested or pledged on Seedrs over five grand, I think it was. In order to honor their commitment and the faith they showed in the brand, we said they could still come in at that valuation. Everybody that had invested less, we politely declined and sent them a bag of sweets and said thank you very much.
I'm super intrigued, Jamie, about the misconceptions thing. It's got to be the case that that misconception follows you around. I noticed you were very quick to address that particular point. Give me context as to what that's like as an entrepreneur. The more success you get, the more people, because of the way humans are, like to discredit or discount your success.
It makes them feel better about themselves. If they can take the credit off you and mitigate the hard work that you've done, then it shines a better light on themselves. The thought that you might have worked really, really hard is something that makes others feel inadequate to some degree.
Yeah, that's totally it. I suppose if I'm totally honest, it's probably a defensive thing now. That is the main question. When Ed and I go and do different talks and chats, the question that comes up every single time is, "Well, you had a lot of money, so surely your family helped you with that." I say no, that's not the case.
It's probably a defensive thing for myself, but also it's important to know that we didn't come from a place of that situation. People listening to this podcast or a talk know that it is possible to achieve those things even coming from a completely normal place, in a sense.
But yeah, it is tough because in life you want to be proud of what you've achieved and what you're doing. When people try and give excuses or say, "Well, this is why you've achieved what you achieved," you kind of want to hit them back with something else a lot of the time.
I mean, I joined a reality TV show. The amount of garbage that I got given... I'm used to it. I'm totally used to it. But I think it's more for some reason there's a lot of pride we have with our business and a lot of passion towards it. Ed and I were 21, 22 years old. You know how hard it is at the beginning for people to take you seriously? Even our parents didn't believe we were going to set up a sweet company.
Ed and I have built this company up from the ground up, nearly losing it a million times and going through lots of different struggles like every single person does. So you want to be proud of that. You want to say, "Well, this is what we've done and this is what we've achieved." We started with 3,000 pounds in the bank. We didn't start with a million.
I probably counter it every single time for two reasons: firstly, because I want people to realize that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. You don't have to be in a certain situation to raise capital or to build a business. Anyone can do it if you really put the hard work in. Secondly, we're proud of Candy Kittens. We built it ourselves, and I don't want other people to believe differently.
Then they won't see that path as being achievable for themselves.
That's it. Growing up, I always thought that if you made a lot of money and you had this and you had that, that was going to equal success. What I've realized now is that is totally not success. That is actually having a purpose. If you have a purpose in life, you feel very successful because you wake up every day and you want to achieve and do something.
For us, we feel incredibly successful every single day because we get to do something that we want to do all the time. We really encourage the younger generation to go out there and do the same thing. People now are told you have to go into this job or this industry to achieve this. You're told you have to pass this exam to get to this university, and if you get to this degree, it means you're going to reach here. It's totally false.
Going out there and doing something that you really want to do and want to achieve, that is way more fulfilling and way better than anything else. You dropped out of university and look where you are now. It was because you just went, "Screw this, I want to go and do what I want to do." We really want other people in this world to go, it doesn't matter what background you're from, what gender you are, whoever you are, you can go and do it if you put your mind to it.
Here's me playing devil's advocate. As much as entrepreneurs say "we did it ourselves," I know that even if you did come from a wealthy background, it's not a precursor for success in your own life. I've got so many, in fact, my most successful friends typically aren't the ones that went on to do great things because they had it handed to them.
It's often my friends that were deprived of their parents' resources that end up going and building a life for themselves. Umar Kamani is a great example with PrettyLittleThing. He's had the credit robbed from him because his dad's the billionaire founder of Boohoo. But I've been there with him, and I know his journey.
It's a shame that, isn't it? Jamie and I have our own podcast, and we had somebody on a few weeks ago. I had a call the day before from her PR manager and she said, "Can we just make sure that whatever we do, do not talk about school life or early life, because she had quite a privileged upbringing and went to a really nice boarding school, and she doesn't want to talk about that because it always discredits what she's gone on to achieve."
It is sad, isn't it? Because with Umar, he is the most obsessive, hard-working... he's obsessive to the point where you might diagnose it as a bit of an illness. To have watched him for five years, to hear everybody in this city and globally just say, "Oh well, his dad's a billionaire," it feels like a massive injustice. He'll never be given that credit.
How does he feel about that? Does that bother him?
He realized that was the case, and I think it did impact him early on, but now he's so comfortable because he's gone so far and so many people have been around him to see that he is the one that's taken the brand there. He's getting more and more relaxed with it. But that's why the first question to you was because I didn't think that that was the case.
I think also it's just a cross you bear. I really think it's important not to forget about where you came from, your roots. I went to a private school, I went to a boarding school from the age of eight years old.
This was my question about self-awareness: what are the privileges that you think you've had in your lives that have put you here? They might not be financial privileges, but they could be education, it could be good parents.
We talk about this a bit, but I think actually for both of us is that our parents have always given us the confidence to go and do what we want to do and have never, ever held us back. Yes, when we started the business, they said, "Sweet company? You're mad, what are you thinking about?" But ultimately, they believed in us and said, "Actually, go on then, if you think you can do it, go and show us."
I think that's probably the greatest gift that I was given: the fact that our parents believed in us and encouraged us to go and achieve anything. I was never told that I wasn't good enough or I couldn't go and speak to that person or go and do that thing. I would go and be confident to have a conversation with anybody from any background, any walk of life. I think my parents gave me that, and that is probably for me the biggest asset to do what I've done.
I think that's exactly it. The biggest asset... Growing up, I went to a private school and I don't think you're educated better. I don't think that there are lots of things that are positive about going to a boarding school or private school, but there are lots of negative things as well.
But the biggest positive for me was you're given confidence. You're told to stand up in front of the whole school and give a talk, or you're told to read a poem out. That inner confidence that it puts within you is so vital in life. The reason why a lot of people don't go out there and achieve what they want to achieve is because they lack confidence. They're scared about failing, they're scared about not achieving something, they're worried about what people will think of them.
I think it's really important from an early age to have confidence, because then you can believe in yourself that you can go and achieve stuff. For Ed and I at the very beginning, we wanted to go and set up a sweet company. We had no idea how to make sweets, we had no idea where to get them from, we had no idea what we were doing, but we thought, "No, we're going to do it because why not?"
Why a sweet company?
Well, it's interesting because I believe a lot in fate. When I was a kid, I was scared of the dark. I used to go and sleep in my brother's room because I was scared of the dark and wanted to share a room with him. He used to tell me a story of "Jamie and Sweetworld" to make me fall asleep. So I had this obsession with sweets.
Coupled with the fact that my parents didn't allow me to eat any sweets because I was so hyper, they fed me white chocolate, which was more sugar in it than anything else. So I had this obsession with sweets. I love sweets. And growing up, my one wish would be to have a world made of sweets that sweets didn't damage your teeth.
I think this manifesting in my head kind of grew and grew. I went to New York when I was about 17 years old and I went to Dylan's Candy Bar, which is Ralph Lauren's daughter's sweet shop. It's kind of like the Hamleys or the Harrods of sweet stores. You imagine Willy Wonka, but in real life. It's amazing.
I went in there and it was incredible, and people were spending 300 dollars on sweets. I thought, "This is crazy, I want to create a sweet shop." The idea behind it was to create a sweet shop that was a mixture between Willy Wonka and Hugh Hefner. That was the idea because I wanted the kittens to be beautiful girls, because I thought that would be fun for me, and the candy was a generalized term for sweets.
I had to drop the Hugh Hefner thing pretty quick. It wasn't a good look, not in this climate.
Ed very quickly swooped in and said, "Let's not set up a sweet shop. Let's not do that, because that means we only have one situation where people can go to, you only have one location. Why do you just want to have one location? You want everyone to have these sweets."
I think it was the fact that Jamie had stumbled across this massive opportunity in the market for a modern confectionery company. Somebody that was delivering something that was relevant and resonated with a young audience. If you look at chocolate, there's a chocolate bag, a box, a bar for literally every single person out there, from a real cheap chocolate bar through to a champagne truffle 75% cacao thing.
And then with sweets, there are just sweets for kids and maybe a tin of sweets in that weird white powder hard-boiled sweets that your grandma's got in her front of her car and nothing in between. As Jamie started telling me this idea, it was sort of like a lightbulb moment and it kind of came off together and we've been going at it ever since.
Which I think is so important: when you're selling a product, I really feel like it needs to have a story and it needs to feel real towards the consumer. For us, it was very real. It felt real towards everyone. They actually believed it. So it was okay for us to go down this road of making sweets, because they went, "Oh no, this is believable. I understand where this is coming from."
We had this story and this background thing, so we knew what we wanted to create and where we wanted to go with it. I think the trouble happens is when someone says, "Okay, what do we create?" They sit in a room and brainstorm about what they want to create. I'm sure it has happened a lot of times, but I find it very rare that someone goes, "Okay, there's a gap in the market for a new water, let's go and create a new water," because you don't actually—it's not within you.
Business and building a brand is hard. Back to your point about whether you're a billionaire or you have so many social media followers: business is still hard. Going back to the PrettyLittleThing guy, it's amazing what he's done with that business. Doesn't matter if his dad's a billionaire and all these different things; it's incredible what he's done and he should get the full credit for that.
And it's because he actually really believed in it. He knew what he wanted to do. If you get lost in life, doesn't matter whatever you're doing, you then become muddled and you don't know what you're doing. You need to have a destination without a doubt. For us, we always knew our destination. We knew what we were trying to create: the best sweet possible, which we were doing and still doing today.
Consumers also can just see through that so easily now, right? There's so many touchpoints. If you were Haribo and you launched a bag of sweets, you just put a bag of sweets on the shelf and you can make up the story and say what you want, and there's nowhere else to find out. You see one TV advert and one bag. Whereas now, there are so many places for people to go and find out about your brand, whether that's the content you're putting out or the stuff that other consumers are saying.
And there's so many brands as well. So much choice. You can see 30,000 bags of different variations of Haribo; it's very easy for there to be a standout and then gray, everything else is gray.
Exactly. And that's where we started this unique segment for premium confectionery. So we're the first people to come along and make a gummy sweet and sell it for 3 pounds a bag.
We did that by mistake. We did it by accident. Like a lot of things that we've done, they were happy accidents.
Which part was a mistake?
The 3 pounds. So we just made a sweet, we said "Okay, we want it to taste like this, we want to use real fruit juice, we want to use natural ingredients, we want to put it in this nice bag." "Sweet, okay, that's going to cost three quid." And then we just put it on the shelf.
It's interesting you refer to that as a mistake, because it's like unintentional intention. You created something that you wanted and that you thought was great, and you are also probably the customer to some degree as well. It's funny that the most unintentional thing comes from a place of...
I suppose yeah, it's unconscious more than unintentional. We were just going, "Okay, this is the thing." We talk about this a bit: I studied design at university, and a big part of design is all about doing your research and understanding the market and really going out there. You just think, why? Because actually, if we had gone out and asked the market what they wanted, nobody would have—we would never have come back with this. We would've come back with another Haribo.
So for us, that 3 pound thing was just so jarring and so unbelievable for people in the industry, but actually for us, we were like, "Well, we believe it, we can do it." And we've proven that. You're right: just don't go and ask the market for research, definitely not.
The best business plan is no business plan, supposedly.
It's a really interesting thing I say about my own business. We were a bunch of young kids, we walked into this office, and the first thing we did, we spent 13 grand of our startup budget on a slide. Everyone could go on a holiday whenever they liked, you didn't have to book holidays.
The next thing we bought was a basketball hoop. So we've got this office with no desks, a 13 grand slide and ball pit thing installed. We're all sat on these one pound beanbag desks. There's this photo of this massive office and they're just installing a slide before the desks have arrived. "We're going to be Google!"
But it was totally like: this will be a fun place to work every day. And it's funny that in reflection, naivety is the motivator behind all of our greatest decisions. Because if we had read a book on how to run a business, how to make an office, and how to do marketing, we would have been doing newspapers in a four white wall office.
But the naivety made these kids... we started doing Thunderclaps on Twitter with people like you back in the day. We created this term Thunderclap, and in this crazy warehouse, we have a 100-meter jungle in there where the birds sing. That naivety, which you probably see in Disney and PLT and your brand, is in fact the best ingredient.
It's funny that when we talked about Seedrs at the start, when we put together our Seedrs campaign, we went out and got a few testimonials for our campaign video. We thought we'd smashed it; we were selling in Selfridges at the time.
So we spoke to the head of food at Selfridges, and she said, "We said, can you say something nice about it?" and put the camera on her. We thought she was going to say, "These guys are geniuses, they've nailed it, they're experts at what they do." And she actually just said, "You know what? I think these guys are going to go really, really far because they haven't got a clue what they're doing. They don't know anything about the industry, they're totally naive."
And that was exactly what you've just said: the fact that we came at it from a completely fresh place.
I honestly say this, and it's so funny that you used the word "naivety." I say all the time: naivety is your biggest weapon. It is so important to realize that. People go out into the market and try and study everything and understand how they do this and that. I put it down to the same thing: if someone said you should go and we're doing "The Mask 2"—have you seen "The Mask" with Jim Carrey? Or let's call it "Ace Ventura 5."
But it's not going to be Jim Carrey, you're going to play it. If you've seen "Ace Ventura," it is impossible to play anything else but how Jim Carrey played it. It's impossible. So it's actually the naivety of going into it, just seeing it completely raw for yourself. That's when you'll gain success because you go about it just how you think. If you start following others...
It is so important to have a mentor, I think. It's important to have someone that you can turn to and look up to. But in terms of what you're creating, do it yourself. Like I said, we were 21, 20 years old, creating sweets, putting them in bags that no one else had seen before, making them gluten-free, making them cost 3 quid and just putting them out there. We said, "Well, we like it, so we're going to do it."
I think that's so important. People try and follow these trends, and if you start following these trends, it drifts into different things. Like, I always talk to people who go into reality TV or who are creating a podcast or who are creating a YouTube channel: you have to know the reason why you're doing it.
If you're going into reality TV or doing a podcast or doing a YouTube channel just to become famous, you will get lost. Because when you get that fame, you won't know what to do with it. You'll go, "What's happening now?" And this is why we have a huge problem at the moment with these different things, because people gain fame and they don't know what to do with it.
So you have to know where you want to go. And they didn't know why they wanted it in the first place. And then actually what you find out is that you realize that actually it's very unfulfilling. It doesn't bring you happiness and success as much as you thought it would do, and you go, "Oh shit, everything that I was driving towards doesn't really mean anything."
An anti-climax must be crippling.
Crippling. And so you've got to know from the beginning what you want to do and where you want to go, otherwise you'll get lost.
I think the same applies to success and wealth generally as well. I think if you don't understand the motivations from day one as to why you were striving to get rich or build something great, the day... I remember some of the most confusing days of my life were the days when someone came across and said, "We'll buy your company for X tens of millions."
And going home, an 18-year-old Steve showing up in my mind, and it being about "Let's get that Lambo." And then going on Rightmove that night—I remember being sat in the bottom floor of my house and going on Rightmove that night and being like, "Okay, we'll look at mansions."
But then looking at a photo of a mansion and thinking, "Okay, well if I live there, that's going to be 45 minutes away from my friends. There's seven bedrooms, a tennis court. I don't think that's going to make me happy. Okay, we'll look at Lamborghinis." Looks at Lamborghinis, black Aventador Lamborghini. "That's really looks really uncomfortable versus the big 4x4 I have now."
And thinking, "So why did I do this again?" I know there's a reason, but I don't think I was fully in touch with it. Because I love getting up every day and I'm enjoying this, but 18-year-old Steve who was broke and come from a family that were bankrupt, that never had Christmas and birthdays, had somehow told himself that if you get rich then your parents might stop arguing.
That kind of thing. But that wasn't the reason why I was doing it. And so it was success and getting success that made me super self-aware: why are we doing this every day? And if you're just going to keep getting more and more successful, what is the purpose of that pursuit?
Where's the finish line?
Exactly. Because you're going to keep climbing and you're going to get more power and more freedom, and you can't believe that every step up this ladder is going to make you more happy, because if you believe that, it will make you more miserable. And that's the anti-climax point.
Yeah, and I think it's... and listen, all three of us can agree: we're not sitting here and saying you need to know exactly what you're doing right now. You can start on your journey and understand that you want to create the best sweet possible, but you've got to learn on your journey that actually you've got to really understand why you're doing this.
There's a great story that Ed and I heard about a guy who worked for JP Morgan, I think it was. He worked for some big bank and huge amounts of money. He went on holiday to Thailand, he was in Thailand and he was sitting on a bus, and this guy got on and he didn't really want anyone to sit next to him so he kind of covered up a seat.
But the guy came and sat next to him anyway. He was an American guy and he turned to him and said, "How are you doing?" started speaking to him and said, "Yeah, I'm good, I'm great." He says, "What do you do?" and he said, "I work for JP Morgan." And he said, "Oh, you must be earning a lot of money." He said, "Yeah, I do, I earn a lot of money, actually." He said, "Are you happy?" and he went, "I don't really know if I am."
And he said, "Okay, well do the test: if you're sitting in your rocking chair when you're 90 years old, are you going to be happy with your life?" He said, "I don't think I will." He said, "Okay, well change it." And he came back from Thailand, he quit his job there and then, and he set up a company called Change Please, which is a coffee company that is around London in different places that hires homeless people and houses them for a year and serves coffee. It's an amazing business, and he's happier than ever.
And actually he realized that his life wasn't about earning cash and those kind of things. Actually, it was about success, but success in a different form. And his success was helping others and doing something to make a difference. And it's so important to realize that from the beginning, I think.
I think it's true for going into any situation really, whether that's a business or a relationship or even on a lower level going into having a coffee with someone. "What am I doing? What is this for? Why?" Something that we've been talking about recently with our team is every meeting we go into: what's the reason for this meeting?
Because you can just go through life just turning up to stuff, but not really knowing what the purpose was or what you were hoping to get out of it. And I think thinking sometimes selfishly: "What's in it for me? What am I getting out of this?" is actually something that we are taught all our lives not to be selfish. Growing up, it's a bad thing to be selfish, which on a macro level is true. But actually day-to-day on those little things: why? Why do we want to go and do this thing? What's the point?
If you're not careful, you can slip into probably a career of 30 years where you actually think, "Wait a minute, what happened there? None of that was for me." So I think yeah, knowing what you're doing, and this comes back to that self-awareness point, I suppose. So key.
And also, I want to mention these guys... we were in Germany in something called the ISM the other day, which is a... we've been there for the last eight years. Ed went there by himself to begin with. It's an amazing story how you basically go there, you can think of every single sweet and snack in the world. It's a big conference trade show thing for confectionery.
It's amazing and Ed went there because we've had a sort of funny journey with our sweets. Ed went there to look at different sweets and find a manufacturer, and came across these guys called Katjes who are a German company. I know Katjes. They're great, right? For listeners who don't know Candy Kittens, our brand, they make Percy Pigs, which are M&S sweets.
Ed said to them, "Oh look, we want you to make our sweets for us." They said, "Okay, well your minimum order is 400,000 tons a year and we just dropped Morrisons." We went, "Okay, well we're a startup, this is probably not going to work."
Anyway, what happened then, so skip to eight years later, they've just bought some of our business and they're making our sweets for us. It was an amazing journey from the beginning. But I met these guys there who this year have a chocolate bar called Tony's. They were four Dutch guys who were journalists and they went and checked out the cocoa trade in Africa and saw how horrific it was, saw the child labor that was going on, and said, "Okay, fine, we want to do something about this."
So they wrote an article about it, no one paid any interest to them. They went, "Okay, fine, well why don't we set up our own chocolate brand and use the cocoa trade to try and get arrested?" And they didn't get arrested. So what they did is they then set up a chocolate that was completely ethical. Their story and how they do it and the uneven road of all these different things... again for them, the reason why they did that was they went, "Okay, well this is something that we want to do and we want to strive towards."
It's like with Candy Kittens: we want to do it because we like sweets. We're like, "Well, this is going to be fun, this is going to be great, this is going to be exciting, and also at the same time we're giving other people pleasure because we're feeding sweets to everyone." So for us, it was always about doing something that we always wanted to do. I think that's really important.
Even as an entrepreneur, I know that there's the outside perception is you start a business, up you go, fame, success, money, it's all wonderful. But there's a very rocky road to travel to get there. I wanted to know a little bit about your really tough times, the times when you were in your darkest days.
In fairness, I mean we've had tough times, really, really tough times. And most of them probably are started off and finished with cash. And I think having that cash in the bank is literally your oxygen that keeps the business going.
But I wouldn't necessarily say they were dark days in that sense, because I think that we've always been quite good at kind of managing the emotional part and the way that we're involved in the business emotionally. So yeah, that's probably been a good thing. We don't take life too seriously, which definitely helps being an entrepreneur because it's pretty tough.
But yeah, I mean the toughest times I think probably have been days where you look at the bank and you've got no money in there and you've got to pay the wages tomorrow. That's pretty horrible. We've had days where we've had to go out and get kind of 20 or 30 grand in an hour to kind of keep ourselves going and you're just calling every single person you know and...
How does that feel though, on those days? Say days when you look at the bank account and there's not...
It's weird, I don't actually remember that feeling particularly. It was scary and horrible, but I don't remember ever really thinking we're done. I never, ever thought this is the end.
This is why it's very important to have someone. I think there's something like 73% of businesses have a co-founder or you have a business partner. It's really important to have... I personally think it's important to have a co-founder because firstly, it's a lot of stress, and to have someone else to do it with is a bit better for relieving stress.
It's more exciting to be on a journey with somebody else. It's a bit of a lonely place. I heard you talk about an interview once where you said that you spoke to Gary V who said if you want to be super successful it's going to be very lonely. I can definitely see that.
So if you have a buddy along the way to do it with, that's quite a fun thing to do. And again, I think if you're greedy then you want to take the whole business yourself 100%, but if you're not, I think it's a great thing. But Ed has always been this guy who has never worried too much. I catastrophize. "Oh my god, what!" But Ed has always had this level head.
I think that's really important to have, especially when you're running a business, because you need to have in situations of emergencies or in situations of chaos, you need someone to break through the clouds who can look above like a telescope and say, "Okay, no, we're going to be all right."
You can't worry yourself out of a problem, right? So it's like, okay, crap, we're in the shit. What are we going to do about it? And in this case, okay, we've run out, we need 30 grand by 10 o'clock. Okay, who do we know that might have four grand, five grand? Okay, we're going to call this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy. And you make it work. I think those are the kind of tough, tough times really, because it's kind of...
Does your team ever realize?
Probably not. No.
I'm quite fascinated by this world that employees never really get to see, which is the same for my business, which is total chaos upstairs. Like in the with the CEOs and the founders, total chaos, but almost like a blissful ignorance below.
I find it really hard. Even just about 12 months ago, we were going through a really, really big kind of negotiation and kind of top-level conversation about the future of the business and what we were going to do and the strategy. I came out of a meeting feeling pretty shit and thinking, lots of thoughts going through my mind and just needed to kind of digest it all.
I got back and I sit at my desk and everybody's gets up and they're having beers in the office and they're doing all the fun stuff that we have built and encouraged and want people to do. And they're all like, "Oh, we're going to order some pizzas, Ed, do you want anything? Do you want a beer?" And I was just like, "No thanks," just put my head down and kind of just carry on with the work.
And that's the loneliness. That's an emotional loneliness.
You're just sat there on your own while the whole team are just having fun. I was thinking if only they knew what we've been talking about.
Are you sometimes envious of the ignorance to those problems? In a respect you wouldn't trade it.
I wouldn't trade it, but I think sometimes I think "shit," and I'd love almost to the point where I'm like, I could almost just tell them that I don't want them to have to... yeah.
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Is there a part of you that somewhat wishes you hadn't... because I think of entrepreneurship as like something that you can't unsee. When you're building a business, you can't like unsee it. Your dreams, your ambitions, where you want this to go, you can't turn that off. I wonder—I don't think this is true—but I wonder if I would have been more happy if I didn't have the disease that I have of entrepreneurship. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think the answer's probably just no, isn't it? Because you are who you are, right? I'm happy.
Exactly, yeah. But it is interesting. I've actually on the flip side of that, I've got lots of friends who are trying to run their own business. They're pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. And actually I look at it and go, "Do you know what? You'd probably be better just having a job."
There's loads of people like that we meet and you think, "Why are they doing it? Why are they putting themselves through the pain that we—we go through that pain because we believe it's right and that's just what's called us there."
But surely they do too, right?
But I think no, but I think actually sometimes people listen to your podcast, they look at your Instagram, they look at people like Gary V, and they go, "Yeah, that's me, I want a bit of that." And that's like being the footballer now. When I grew up, I couldn't think of anything more than wanting to go and play football and be a pro footballer. Kids are now growing up going, "I want to be Gary V."
It's a weird flip. Nobody when we were growing up wanted to be a businessman or an entrepreneur. That word didn't even exist.
Because I think it goes back down to that situation now where we turn on Instagram or go onto YouTube and we see everyone driving Lamborghinis or fast cars, and we think that generates happiness. And so we go, "Well, how are we going to reach that happiness? We have to become an entrepreneur, set up a business, and then we get success."
But actually, it's a tough road. As you said, there is a huge happiness in having security and working in a community where you have a job and you can go to your work every single day and you can switch off at night. Being an entrepreneur and running your own business, you can never do that. You can never... I said this to Ed the other day, I said, "Ed, when was the last time you think you switched off?" and he went, "I don't."
And I went, "Exactly, you can never switch off." And yes, and what I honestly believe that the majority of entrepreneurs are filling a void within themselves. They have something missing within them. I don't think Ed actually has that; I actually just think Ed just quite likes running people and just being a leader.
I think he actually does, but for me, or I think maybe for you too, there's something that you want to fill. The reason why a lot of these successful people who people think, or entrepreneurs, put stuff on social media and things like that is because they're trying to constantly create and constantly do and constantly do different things and show this and that.
But actually, I think honestly, probably for myself, you're filling something or you're trying to be validated for something, and so that's why we're doing it. There is a huge bliss in being part of a huge corporate business and turning up and doing that and leaving work every single day and having your life. Being an entrepreneur is not all roses and sunshine at all, and it's stressful. It's very stressful.
It's actually something that kind of bothers me a little bit in the fact that when we have our podcast or we get involved with stuff like this, there's lots of people listening that then perhaps get encouraged to take that path that perhaps didn't—didn't need to go down that route. And I sort of feel partly a little bit guilty sometimes to think it's actually okay, you can have a great job and be really happy and enjoy that, and there's nothing wrong with that. You're going to have probably a much easier life, it's going to be okay. I think there's a balance between sort of giving advice and then kind of converting people.
And also there's a real total difference between being an entrepreneur and being a businessman. There is such a difference. You can be a great entrepreneur but you can be a bad businessman. I think I personally am a good entrepreneur, I don't think I'm a very good businessman. I wouldn't be able to... without Ed, there is no way that Candy Kittens would be a success. Not in my wildest dreams.
But I also think on the flip side, Ed sort of is both; he's an entrepreneur and a businessman. But without Ed, without me, there was probably no way that Candy Kittens could have...
But you will have seen this as well. I mean you guys have now gone public, right? So presumably you're dealing with people in that world that are very high profile, very well-respected businessmen.
Of course, every investment bank I've just flown... but these are not entrepreneurs, they can't think like we think.
Of course not. I mean the finance team typically, you'd do well to find someone in a finance department that is entrepreneurial in their nature. They are more... it's more like a risk.
Do you find it hard to communicate with individuals who are in the big corporate bank?
It's a lesson I've had to learn over the last couple of years, which is just if you want to succeed with those types of people, you have to know their motivations and what they care about. You have to take your like dreamy ambition, "we can do everything, we're going to take over the world" stuff, and you have to try and filter it through their the way they see the world.
So I try and speak their language, even though naturally I'm like you where, you know, I'm big dreamy like the business would have gone bust if it was just me. Same with Umar, he's told me a million times. And you learn over time how to start to speak in a different language to those people where to... exactly, spreadsheets. And if I'm talking about culture and buying a slide, now I know to talk about it through the the impact of the P&L.
The positive impact of the P&L. So we bought a slide in our office five, six years ago, whatever it was, and every major newspaper—Buzzfeed, Vice, Channel 4 Gadget Showcase—came down. Vice did a documentary on us; that's all about the fucking slide. And so you think about the marketing ROI on that slide, it's like disproportionate. The BBC had me like laying in there the other day. Everyone comes to the slide. You could not have bought that, but how do you communicate a bit of brand work that is going to have no direct ROI to a finance person? So that's the skill that I'm learning.
But that's interesting because that goes back to your naivety as well, the fact that you got that slide in because you thought it would be fun and then you get all this press because of it. But also I think that analogy of the slide is a great story because it actually just shows what—the culture within a business is so important, what you're creating.
It's brand now. This is the big distinction. In a world where companies are now glass boxes, where employees can take a Snapchat or an Instagram and show you inside, social media... there's no such thing anymore as internal company culture. It's just brand.
And so you can tell me the stories of you hearing about Amazon staff pissing in bottles in the warehouse because we're all glass boxes now. You can tell me you know about Google's office. People will know about your office through all of your employees doing beers and pizza, and that is part of your brand. I think the biggest contradiction in the world would be if I came to Candy Kittens' office and it was a bunch of like miserable... you know?
Totally. But I see—but I think Steve what you—your slide analogy is great because even though you spent 13,000 pounds on building a slide that you probably couldn't afford and don't use, you still created something within your business that was exciting, fun, energetic, something that you... that was you. And I think that's really important because even though it cost you a huge amount of money, it represented something much more important. And I think that's key that you never lost what you were trying to do and what you were trying to show, you kind of just went "This is what we represent."
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I was really interested in what you said a second ago about you've got a couple of friends who are trying to be entrepreneurs and you know from your perspective that they shouldn't be. Now to even have that understanding takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness, almost an impossible amount of self-awareness because the narrative is just keep going, never quit, you can do anything you set your... but what you're saying is quit. You're saying you shouldn't do that. And that's the counter-narrative to all of the messaging out there. So my question is: how is someone supposed to know when entrepreneurship is not for them?
Not sure I'm intelligent enough to answer. I think it's so, so difficult, but it does come down to that kind of self-awareness piece. And I think Jamie mentioned earlier about people that are sat in a room trying to come up with an idea. So people that say "I want to be an entrepreneur, I just don't know what business it's going to be yet." That's like... that doesn't work. It's like saying I want to be a professional sportsman but I just don't know what sport.
Like how? How's that going to happen? I think you have to... it comes from those real kind of innate ideas, the ideas that are within you, something you genuinely, as you just said, really believe in, genuinely believe in. And also probably the way you're enjoying it and going through the process.
I think some people talk—I talk to people about—you know so we meet people at different events or whatever and they say "Okay, I've got this thing and I want to do... I'm struggling to get hold of the right people to make the business work." And you say "Okay, what have you tried?" and it's like "Well, we've sent some emails out but nobody ever gets back." You go "Okay, well that's the point where you should—you should stop now. That you should now quit." Because if you've just sent an email and somebody hasn't replied and you can't possibly think of any other way to get hold of them, then it's not going to work for you.
But also Ed made such a good point the other day: we were talking to a friend of mine who is working for a gin company, and he said "Oh I'm trying to get hold of Waitrose and things at the moment, I can't get hold of them. How do I get hold of them?" And Ed sent him an email saying "Honestly, just go in there. Go to the headquarters and walk in." That's what you need to have.
I think you know when you shouldn't be an entrepreneur if you're not willing to take risks. And risk is everything. You've got to put yourself out there and just be willing to do anything and everything to achieve what you want to achieve.
Question to you then: how does one go from being a non-risk taker? Because you guys... one of the things that you said you shared, one of your privileges per se, was confidence. So if someone's listening to this right now and they are maybe not the most confident person, is there anything they can do to build said confidence?
Different types of confidence though, right? As well. Because it's not always about saying "I'm confident enough to stand up on a stage and deliver a keynote." It's also the confidence to say "I really believe this idea can work, and I don't care what anybody tells me, I've got confidence in my idea." Or there's confidence in knowing that you're very good at maths and you're going to absolutely kill it and your numbers are always right.
There's different levels, but I and I don't know which one you necessarily need, or if you need all of them or maybe one of them to be right. But confidence is quite a hard thing to teach, I think, particularly as you get older.
So where did it come from in you though? What... can you... are you... because one of the things that when I look back, you know, there's obviously nature and nurture and I'd be somewhat naive to not pay homage to the presence of those things in my life. But when I look back at my life, it's doing something and then being like "Oh that was cool, I didn't know I could do that," and then taking these small steps that you know today... it's almost like a staircase. You take one step up the staircase and you think "Oh yeah, fuck me, look at look at me go."
You take another small step. For me, it's like public speaking. I spoke in front of 50 people, I was shitting myself, shaking, couldn't read what was on the thing. And then the next, you know, 100 people and I'm like "Oh my god, fuck." And then I do fucking 15,000 people in Brazil with Obama, and I feel the same. And I think it's that—it's almost like this little staircase.
And the problem with motivational speakers and shit like that is they tell you to just throw yourself into this like fiery abyss of uncertainty, whereas for me the way to get there is just these tiny fucking steps over a long period of time. And that could be: make the Instagram account today. Like come up with a name.
I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head there where... okay, for example if you sort of say to someone... so you know Ed and I and yourself we were lucky to probably have confidence from the beginning. We did something, whether it was score a goal in football when we were younger, or pick up an instrument or sing once, and "Oh my god that's great, go and do here." And slowly by slowly you build it up like that and that's how you build stuff.
But it's the same way if someone says "Right, I'm going to go and start the gym." You know, don't make these huge dreams that you go "Okay, I'm going to have a six-pack or whatever by one month's time." You've got to slowly do it bit by bit. If you go on a five-minute run one day and then do a 12-minute run the next day and then a 30-minute and you build it up like that, that's the way to success and that's the way to building these different things.
And repeating that.
Repeating that, yeah. You just have to, I think in terms of confidence, you have to be willing to work at it like everything, and you have to be willing to take it step by step and try different things, whether that is giving a talk in front of five people, then doing a talk in front of 10 people.
I went and did stand-up comedy for the first time... really, yeah, in my life the other day, and holy shit, it was one of the worst things I've ever had to do. But I went and did it and I thought "Okay, I'll just go and do this" and I went on stage and it went really well. And it was funny, everyone laughed. I was like "This is amazing."
So I then went "Okay, well I'm going to go and do this again." And I went on stage again and it was one of the worst things I have ever done. Really? Yeah. Don't make a joke at the beginning about... I made a joke my first... I came on pretty confident for the second time and my first joke was says "Oh I've done stand-up comedy before and this is the second time I'm doing it and I got in a taxi coming here and I spoke to the taxi driver and I said can I practice my routine on you?" And he went "Yeah, go on lad." And I said and obviously he spoke like that because he's working class. And no one laughed.
And I went "Oh my god, don't make a joke if you're white, privileged and posh on stage." But it was this learning and it's the same thing: you learn these different things and you learn—you learn how to get confidence. So going back to your question: how do you teach? It's about within you. If you want to start becoming fit, you have to do it yourself. If you want to give up alcohol, you have to do it yourself. If you want to learn to get confidence, you have to do it yourself, but it's bit by bit, and you have to go on that journey yourself. No one else can teach you it.
But that's the big thing, right? No... there's only a small amount of people that are willing to put the work in. And I suppose then that goes back to the question of how do you know when to quit? Is are you genuinely, really, really willing to sacrifice and and give up? But I think if you if you start seeing it as a sacrifice, that's also part—part of the problem.
Because I never considered... I don't mean—you have obviously made lots of sacrifices to choose to kind of live the life you're living. But I don't know, do you kind of ignore?
Of course not. Of course not. Because you never look back and go "Okay, well I'm going to make a decision today, I'm going to sacrifice this thing instead and do this." Because it always—the nature of sacrifice almost makes you believe that you're giving up something you wanted to do more for this. But I never wanted to go out and go to Tiger Tiger in Manchester more than I wanted to sit and build my website.
So although it's almost... yeah... like it's some people will look at your life and say "Oh you sacrifice so much." I'm like "Well no, I didn't want to do those other things." And you can tell what I wanted to do by my actions. Like so...
But you're a rarity for sure, because you—you were 17 when you started, was that right? 18, I suppose. And that's pretty rare to understand what you want to do at that age. I said it once, I said it again: I think the educational system is completely flawed in lots of different ways because firstly it drives creativity out of you in lots of different ways.
Secondly, it's a place where you can't copy, cheat, you can't collaborate, you can't do anything. And life is all about collaborating and copying and helping each other. And at school it doesn't... and said you're meant to know exactly what you want to do at the age of 18 years old. You meant to know you want to go and study this at university and do that. And no one fucking knows.
I didn't know.
Yeah, but I think you... it's a weird... because I didn't know what the word "entrepreneur" was until maybe two years after I'd become one. I didn't when I when I started out there wasn't this like the social network movie and all this Gary V stuff and all this entrepreneur... I was I was a kid that my favorite game with my brothers was turning my bunk bed into a business and making fake money and passing it to each other.
My mom was always really entrepreneurial although she never had any money and she failed and she slept on the shop floor of her business every night, never came home in her in her corner shop. But I just thought that by at 16 years old I realized that my grades were going to be really, really, really bad. And that that meant that this narrative of getting good grades and being rich was never going to happen for me.
And I also think I overvalued money because we never had it. I think I was like insecure and inadequate. I'll give you one more layer: I was the only black kid in a school of 1,500 white kids in an area where everyone was middle class but our house had like six-foot grass at the front and smashed windows on the front for a decade and a half. I felt inadequate. I was dealing with this complex about me being black and having fluffy hair and all the kids having straight hair. And it was just like this constant: I need to like if I'm going to get it, I need to get it on my own and I definitely want to get it.
You had that hunger driven within you because your mom was sleeping on the the shop floor. Which is crazy. And you saw, I think, what a lot of what a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of successful people experience when they're younger is that they experience sort of pretty hard times. And they can see that what hard—not hard work, but where life can lead.
And I suppose what you're saying is that you didn't—you didn't want to leave that, you wanted to change your family's life and and build it like that. And that comes from a place... so even though you didn't know what you want to do, you knew where you didn't want to be. And so that... but that's even better, right? That's actually...
So for I suppose for Ed and I at and a lot of people listening, they're 18 years old, they probably didn't experience the same things that you experienced, and probably have you know they probably go on nice holidays and they probably do different things. And so...
My friend that I mentioned earlier, his dad's a billionaire, but he experienced the exact same thing but in a different because it all it is is an emotional feeling. And that emotional feeling can arise from say your dad being a billionaire and you feeling like you're always in his shadow.
And you can get the same thing, the same motivation, the same drive. There's this huge misconception amongst like entrepreneurs that we're all on the fucking playground selling fags at 12 years old and we're all like wheeler-dealing. But the emotional feeling can come from any circumstance. It can come from like female rejection. It can come from... you know? It's just that feeling of inadequacy or independence.
I totally—I totally hear what you're saying. I think that's so funny. There is that kind of misconception again where "When did you start your first business?" What? And I always say "I made I didn't make it up, but I said 'Oh I picked heads off my daffodils, off my mom's daffodils.'"
I don't think it happens there. It gets to a place like you said where you wanted to build something for yourself. The reason, you know, Ed and I when did it is because we were more excited about the prospect of building Candy Kittens than actually going and working for a corporate business.
§02Transcript — part 2
I think that's an example of life doesn't really play out like a like a movie. But we think it does. So you get this classic question so you go "Oh shit what was my first business? Like oh shit how did I..." because everybody expects that kind of Disney fairy tale entrepreneur story, but it's not always there.
So like yeah I was washing my dad's car and getting a couple of quid for it, but that wasn't a business. But it was probably something that led to: work hard, get money, work harder, get more money. And it did eventually turn into a business. But yeah it's just I guess it doesn't always play out, it plays out differently for everybody.
I think so important because again that's empowering to a lot of people who can't think of, you know, them selling fags on the playground at 12 years old. And the narrative is that if you weren't doing that, then maybe you're not cut out for it in some respect.
But the entrepreneurs that I've met on this podcast alone are so diverse in their upbringings. They are introverts, and again that breaks the narrative because apparently all entrepreneurs are these fucking wacky wacky, you know super confident people. There are introverts that have remote teams and have built businesses that are making hundreds of millions. They are—they are sometimes extroverts, they are sometimes the you know the people like me and probably a little bit like yourself Jamie and Gary who are you know much more sort of externally confident. And they come in different shapes and sizes.
I think the question that I wanted to pose to you guys is we've done a lot of I guess looking backwards and looking at now, but what is—what is it—what is it that you guys are playing for? Like why do you get up every day now and what's the—where is this going over the next couple of years of your life?
Tough one, you want to take this one buddy? I think that for me I want to continue to build the best possible business we can build. And when we started we really had ambitions of going out there and kind of knocking Haribo off their perch and going "Okay let's really properly challenge a market." We're now the fastest-growing confectionery company in the UK, but beyond that we're we still got a long, long way to go.
Isn't that nuts though? It's crazy. When you look at these brands... a packet of Candy Kittens sweets is bought every 12 seconds?
Yeah I mean maybe... is that wrong? Have I just lied? That sounds interesting.
Have I just totally lied about that? We saw some kind of stats in the office the other day and like we're selling more in the we were selling more things than like major brands like Skittles. We're growing quicker than Skittles, we're growing quicker than a whole heap of brands.
And these are kind of household names that we grew up with that we're then going toe-to-toe with and challenging, which is fun. So that I think is great, but we want to do that properly on a kind of global stage. Personally, I think it's about that kind of sense of achievement inside yourself to say "Yeah, okay, I'm really proud of that, really happy with what we've done."
Nothing makes me more happy than building the team, and I think seeing the team grow and go on to do amazing things. We employ some great people, some really talented people, people that have come through our internship program and end up being then kind of senior managers in the team. It's really fun for me.
How does it feel when they quit?
I've probably only had one person quit that I was that I was upset about.
And how—talk me through that feeling? You find out, you get that email or whatever, you have a chat and they say "I'm going elsewhere." How does that feel?
I think it's quite upsetting, but actually in this case she left to go and start her own business and do something else. And I think that was that was kind of cool as well because you think "Okay, well she's kind of been a part of what we're doing, in some way perhaps has learned from us and been inspired by what's happening within these walls, so actually that's kind of cool she can go and do her own thing." If she leaves to go to a competitor or leaves to go somewhere else, then I don't really get upset about it. I say "Okay, cool, go and do what you do."
Interesting question, and I'm going to ask you both in isolation so you have to answer separately. Jamie, how would you feel if Ed turned around tomorrow and said "I'm quitting. I don't want to do this anymore, I'm going to sell my stake whatever to this guy and I'm going to leave and I'm going elsewhere."
In all honesty I'd probably feel quite let down. I would because I think that I think persistency in is a really big thing and you kind of if you go into something you kind of got to stick at it and go for it. So yeah I would probably feel—I probably feel let down. Because for Ed I have not been an easy journey for him. You know, I started a TV show, I was doing lots of different things and he had to build run the business while I was going "aaaaaa" and I'm like that on bad days.
So I—but I think at the same time when you go into something together you kind of have to stick at it and you kind of got to do it together and you go on this journey together. And I get that people change their opinions and change their minds and different things, but you kind of want to stick things out.
And how would work feel the next day? Ed's gone, you get into the office.
Shit. It would be like getting into a cockpit and trying to land a plane. I'd have no freaking clue what was going on. So it'd be pretty damn scary for me. You know Ed and I as Ed said at the beginning, we are two very different people but we're similar in lots of different ways and we have the same aim and we complement each other in loads of different ways.
Would you feel like a bit of your sense of purpose as to why you were doing this was gone?
I would—I would probably—I would feel inadequate to do it. I don't think I—I would not be the right person to to run it. It's, you know when you're building a business it's very important to hire people who are better than you in so many different ways and it's very important to hire people who do the job better than you. And Ed does the job far better than me in every single way. So it would be a tricky scenario because I then have to find another Ed, and that would be a very hard task to do. So I would probably... is he about to tell me? Is that the whole point of this? I would feel scared, I would feel worried, but I would with everything you just got to push on and you've got to achieve what you got to achieve and you just got to go through it, you know? And that's what I think. What about you, Ed? Tell him.
Tell me the truth, go on. Okay, so we set this up today... no. I think it's tough. I think that there's this kind of old adage that everybody in a business is replaceable. But I think actually in in our case, the relationship that Jamie has to the business and the relationship that Jamie and I have, Jamie has made himself very, very difficult to replace.
It's so synonymous with the brand and kind of such a sort of bedrock to what we're what we're about. I think it's probably safe to say that Candy Kittens wouldn't be Candy Kittens without Jamie's energy and personality and everything that he gives to it. So yeah it would be very tough. I think that we would have to seriously consider kind of how the business would move forward from that point.
We've got to an amazing stage, put that to one side, we got to an amazing stage and from day one we were kind of keen to make sure that Candy Kittens stood on its own two feet as a brand. And there's lots of places now, you know we sell in the states where people don't know who Jamie is and and we've got we're building the brand based on the fact that it's a really good product. But it would be tough. And I think as Jamie said it would be that kind of sense of being let down and thinking shit okay if he quits then then what am I still doing here? Why—why is what is he seeing that I can't see? Or or what am I do I think am I looking at a goal and the potential that just isn't there anymore? So yeah I would feel a little bit disappointed I think.
Let's go back to that question about the future then. So the future of Candy Kittens and where you want to go with this and where...
Well I think probably for for both of us I think that you know at the beginning we wanted to establish ourselves as the leading confectionery brand in the UK. That's what we want to do and we still have that aim. We're a British brand, we want to continue to do that.
But I think that you kind of in terms of the future you don't really want to give yourself boundaries, you kind of want to just go you want to aim for the stars and try and reach it. Is the answer you don't know? I think for us we just I think you know Ed and I if we are totally honest with ourselves, will we be selling sweets for the rest of our lives? Who knows?
Ed and we always say the same thing: you know if we had gone and sold socks we would probably be doing the same thing. You know we actually don't make the sweets; a German company Katjes makes the sweets for us. But what Ed is and the team is and I am we're good at is we're good at building brands. And I think for us we will constantly, whether it's Candy Kittens or something else, we'll constantly build brands and we'll constantly start things and build things and create things.
I think creativity is the most important thing in life, and I think that's what we will constantly be doing, whether that's Candy Kittens or something else. And you don't know how long that you know that could be three years, five years, 10 years, could be you know just depends how things play out.
Yeah I mean I think the goalposts keep moving further away for us. We thought "Okay when we get our first supermarket we will have smashed it," and then you get that one and then you want the next five supermarkets. And then you get those and then you want the supermarkets in different country and then you and you keep going and it just those goalposts keep moving further and further away. But I think I'm okay with that as long as I keep enjoying it, as long as we keep having fun and we feel that sense of achievement and pride, then then we'll still be still be chipping away.
And this is my last question before the last one: money. You talked about Katjes coming in and buying some of your company out. I'm guessing that was they bought your equity?
Yeah we're rich, we're really rich now. See you later!
This was in fact this podcast was to announce to your employees. Yeah yeah yeah we're off. We're billionaires, we're really excited about it. No, Katjes came in, they bought they bought out I can say this kind of yeah yeah they they bought out the minority shareholders.
So Ed and I are still in, very much so, we're still there. We just wanted to team up with someone that, again, we've built the business a very long way, but I think we we know exactly what we want to do and we'll continue doing what we want to do. But to have someone on board who are a manufacturer is really important and that's what the German company Katjes do for us: they make amazing sweets.
But you haven't got a payout per se yourselves yet because they bought out the minority shareholders. Same with in my company; they bought out the minority shareholders, my investors.
Yeah so we're still kind of working away and I think that what's amazing for us is that we suddenly got this startup world that we're in and we've got a young team, lots of naivety, energy, creativity and everything that comes with it. And then on the other side of the coin is this huge German company that's over a hundred years old and they're generating hundreds of millions in revenue, owning companies across the globe, real kind of corporate mentality.
And those two worlds kind of collide in a really nice way for us. We're able to work with them, learn everything that they have to offer. And ultimately the reason we kind of went and made the partnership happen was because we really believed in them and they were just a great bunch of people. Still family-owned organization, and although it's this huge, huge thing, they they share a lot of our kind of mentality and ethos. So yeah, really nice way to work.
You know 53% of German business is still family-run? It's amazing. And in the UK what we do is we we think "Okay, we'll build this and sell it, build it and sell it," and actually it's a really... the Germans are amazing because it's not about being cash rich. What it's about is having a you know generational wealth in terms of building for your family and for your your family's family and for your family, and it's about building family, passing it on. They never sell. And in the UK we think we are incredibly selfish and we go "Okay, well we're going to make the money," and that's why we have something called the third-generation curse, which is grandfather makes it, father sustains it and then son loses it, because they don't do anything and it happens over and over again. And in Germany it doesn't happen because it's all about keeping it within the family. Very mafia of them, but it's a but it's a good way to to be and it's an important way to be.
As founders that are yet to take cash off the table, does that play on your mind as you're getting older? You're starting families and those kinds of things. Do you think "I would like to take some cash off the table at some point"?
Well I think, I think listen there's a there was an interesting statistic came out the other day: the happiest people earn 72,000 euros a year. Those are the that's the peak of happiness because anything anything that you earn less you want more, and anything after that you just it's more problematic. You don't really have to earn that much money in order to be super happy. What what cash brings you is a bigger house and a faster car and nicer holidays, pretty much that's what it brings you.
But it's interesting because the we were actually talking about this with the German guys, and they were explaining that if you every increment you get a salary increase up until about say 50, 60 thousand—there's a level, call it 50,000. Every time you get a salary increase it has a real benefit to your life, so you can suddenly rent a nicer flat, you can do this, you can do this. And then when you get to like 50,000 pounds say, there's nothing that you can do differently to the guy earning a million pounds a year.
Because okay he... and he gave an example, this was the owner of the business in Germany, he said "Okay well I'm going on holiday this year to Cuba with my family. Okay cool I'm going to fly probably first class and I'm going to do some nice things when we're there in a nice hotel, but you could still go to holiday in Cuba, you just get a different plane to me and maybe stay in... but the core experience is still the same." You can still live in London, you can still do this, you can do... so the what you do with your life is the same. So there's a a massive void as Jamie's then saying: the more money you earn, more money more problems, you get to a point where actually that doesn't benefit you.
So I don't know, for us I think we want to get to a point where life is sustainable. And I think as an entrepreneur if you are not able to kind of do the things you want to do in terms of having a family or I got married last year, these kind of things, you you are then sacrificing a little bit maybe too much that's going to make your business really difficult to run. So if that's causing you financial stress and anxiety and and trouble outside of your day-to-day life, then you're going to probably be a worse person in the business. And you can see the value you've created.
There needs to be a balance. And we were taught from a very early stage at Candy Kittens to pay ourselves a a reasonable salary. I remember going into a meeting and and kind of putting out on the table with our our board of directors kind of what we thought we wanted to earn and being quite punchy and saying "Okay well we want to earn that" and it was like it was silly, it was like 18 grand a year because we thought "Okay well we can that's enough to pay our we pay our bills and we can survive on that it'll make the business work." And they were like "No, no, you guys need to pay yourself a proper salary because otherwise you're going to be resentful and you're not going to be working properly and you're going to be scraping around for cash." So so yeah there's a balance, but I don't feel desperate to take cash off the table, I think there's a lot we still want to do and we're in it for the long run.
My last question then. You mentioned marriage. I'm always intrigued by the impact that the entrepreneurial pursuit has on romantic relationships for entrepreneurs. And I know you're in a relationship Jamie, you're married now. What impact has being an entrepreneur running a business and being obsessed with your own with with Candy Kittens had on your relationships?
I think actually probably in the early days of our my relationship with Charlotte it was probably the thing that drew us closer together because it gave me an escape, gave me something else to think about. She gave me something else to think about and focus on. So instead of...
I thought you meant Candy Kittens gave you an escape from Charlotte! I was like you're in trouble!
No, no, totally different in my head. No but actually you know leaving not sitting in the office till 11 o'clock at night and just getting a takeaway, I actually had somebody to go and see or go and go out for dinner with or whatever. So that was quite a positive thing. She also runs her own business, so in my case I'm very lucky we spend a lot of time talking about each other's work. So that kind of works well. I think it's I think it's finding the balance though and also knowing when to switch off and and we've sort of seemed so far to be able to do that.
Yeah and I think I think sort of the same I think it's about I think it's really healthy and a good appetite to have is when you lead two different lives and you you lead two different lives and you kind of come together as one. I think for my I've had a sort of checkered past in terms of relationships, and that's for lots of different reasons. But I think now in a relationship where we kind of value each other immensely and understand and appreciate each other. And I think it's just about balance. I think balance in life is really important.
Are you easy to date?
God, I was thinking about this the other day. I think I think I am and I'm not.
Why aren't you?
Because I'm hectic. I think I'm hectic. I'm a really I'm a really good in relationship so I'm I would consider myself a fun and and loving and all those different things, but I have had to learn to not be so selfish. And actually there are other people who you you need to appreciate and love and different things. And I think for a lot of my 20s, most of my 20s, it was all about what pleased me. And then you realize actually that it's not about what pleases you, it's about how how to please others. And I think that's what I probably had to learn a lot, but I think it's about having a healthy balance between work life and and relationship life. Because at the end of the day if you if you don't have family and love—I said this before—the meaning of life is really to love I think, and it sounds super cheesy, but I think it is and you know when you're older you're just going to want your homie next to you and that's pretty much it. You don't really care about anything else.
The last the last point I always say on this podcast is just about my my little dinner party song and dance. I don't know if you've had this before, but I tell the guests that they can pick if they were to have a dinner party today at this very table and you could invite four guests dead or alive who would you invite? So I'm going to let you invite two guests each and just explain why you'd invite those two people dead or alive anybody you want.
And also what we're going to eat.
Okay I would probably go for I'd have to go for an adventurer. So I'd probably go for Shackleton. Shackleton would be great just because a leader! Oh my, what a leader and the things that he did and the things that he saw. So I'd go for someone like him in terms of a leader. And in terms of someone entertaining I would probably go for someone like... I think Elvis would be quite cool just because of what he stood for, what he did, but also why—why it tumbled so badly towards the end when you have that much success and that much fame and all these different things and everyone what they want to achieve and why they want to achieve it—why does it go wrong? What happened? Was it unfulfilling? And I'd want to find out. It'd be quite depressing but I'd kind of find out. And we would have a starter, we'd have a burrata. Delightful.
You can pick the main then Ed.
The main... okay cool. I'm going to stick Italian theme as well actually, it's already sorted in my mind. So I would go for Muhammad Ali because I just think he's super cool. I watched the Will Smith Ali film the other day again, one of my favorites, I just think that...
Never seen it!
It's so cool. It's so great. Just insane. You need to do that homework for you Jamie. I was watching Bruno last night so that's a bit of a low... a bit more highbrow, good stuff.
So yeah we I think he just the experiences he's gone through and the the challenges he faced but also super entertaining and fun I'd imagine. And just the guts to say "You know what, I'm going to give up my whole career because I don't want to go to war," being you know willing to go to jail and all those things for it. Just crazy. Crazy, but just so quick-witted and the way with words and being a real kind of capture the whole nation, amazing. And similar sort of vein actually, Obama I think would be pretty cool. I mean you look at the current state of politics kind of globally at the moment and somebody like Trump in power, I just think that's it's just you can't get your head around how they've gone from like one of the greatest spokesman, spokespeople of all time... character... to then go to and you know whether or not you agree with like the the details of Obama's policies and politics, but actually just to be that great spokesman and such a great ambassador for a country. And then you just go to Donald Trump? It's just like I don't know how that happens. But those two I think would be pretty cool. And what are we eating? We're going to eat gnocchi. Which I just love, so simple.
What? That heavy, heavy, heavy pasta?
You sound like my wife now! Why? Because I'm never allowed—because I'm never allowed it at home, so that's why. Gnocchi. I'm never allowed. Out of everything we could have had, we've had we're having burrata then gnocchi.
I'll let you guys settle that one later. Thank you so much for giving me your time today, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm super excited to watch the future of Candy Kittens unfold, it's an incredible brand and yeah every time I get on the flight every single time I see it and I and I am... it's my sort of innocent or guilty pleasure however you want to look at it, but I want to say thank you as well because you've created something that makes my flights a lot more pleasant to New York so thanks.
Thanks buddy, appreciate it.
Thank you. Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Thank you so much everyone.
When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for Pets. This is Kate. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.
When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted. Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for Pets. This is Kate. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.