Innocent Drinks

Recently I visited this talk by Richard Reed, founder of Innocent Smoothies. Richard talked about how to grow a small company into a million pound business with 70% market share.

Richard summarised the advices into a few classic tips and in-between lines said that Innocent is loosing money since 2008. That was quite an interesting information so I raised my hand and asked why this is and where the problem is.

The answer: price of fruits went up, people stopped buying smoothies during recession, Innocent is spending huge amounts on advertising to secure their position before other competitors will enter the market.

Then he said that people won’t pay more than £1.79 for his small bottles of smoothies which does not cover the costs of  making them. The trouble I see is that I personally would think twice about spending £1.79 for a bottle like that but wouldn’t if the price was £1. I asked around in the office and the team agreed they felt the same. Hmmmm….

Anyway, I now feel like buying at least one of those small smoothies to support Richard’s business. It’s only £1.79 and £1.50 of that will most likely go to advertising so that’s OK - I’ll be supporting my own industry

Now, I have to comment on Innocent’s website. For those of you who don’t understand: It’s part of my job to analyse websites every day so why not to share my insights, right?

I think Innocent’s website is cute and suits the brand. The shaking style of the top navigation would be unthinkable for any other website but seems to work for Innocent. I like the fact that there is not too much content on the internal pages; it shows the producers have thought of what they are going to say and why. The almost hand-drawn illustrations are fantastic, creating a lot of the “innocent” atmosphere on the website. The internal navigation between pages is a bit confusing and some pages have totally different layout to one another but overall, a good job!