Here’s to fruitier style and fewer meals waste from ‘Wonky HQ’
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nly 25 people work at six-year-old glowing fruity water enterprise Dash — and so they promote 24 million cans a yr. As ratios go, it’s a powerful one.
“They drink a lot of it too, the office goes through some 8000 cans a year,” laughs co-founder Alex Wright who, alongside Jack Scott, presides over a familiar-sounding tradition for a younger drinks start-up.
Dash’s Tottenham Court Road base is called “Wonky HQ” for the odd-shaped raspberries, lime and different fruit that flavours its drinks.
There’s astroturfed ground (after all) and an indication above a handwashing mirror studying “we judge on taste, not looks”.
With a second workplace in Sydney — 15% of Dash’s gross sales are in Australia — the entrepreneurial duo have come far since first assembly whereas working at a gentle drinks agency after college. They bonded over food waste — as you do.
Scott grew up on a potato farm which — like all fruit and vegetable producers — noticed 17% of fruit and veg binned on the farm gates on account of blemishes.
“We were trying to come up with a product to use for this rejected, wonky fruit, and then we saw soft drinks stuffed with sugar and artificial ingredients. That was our lightbulb moment — infusing wonky fruit into spring water to create a delicious drink without sugar or sweetener.”
So in 2016, the duo give up their jobs in advertising and marketing and gross sales at a gentle drinks enterprise, gained a small mortgage from Virgin Startup, labored with meals waste charity Feedback to search out wonky fruit, and spent each weekend for 3 months with a desk providing samples in Battersea, Regent’s and Green Parks and Wandsworth Common.
“People were walking around carrying water bottles with their own choppedup lemon and cucumber, so we made it in a ready-to-drink format, using spring water infused with wonky fruit, and a SodaStream to add bubbles, and waited to see what people thought.”
At the time, Wright factors out: “We were the only drink of this type in Europe which did not have any sugar or sweetener in it. When they tried Dash, only about 50% of people liked the drinks, because they had sweeter palates, but it’s changed since then with the sugar tax and more awareness.”
Scott and Wright had been solely 24 once they launched Dash: “We had very little experience creating a product, business and team, and the most challenging thing was overcoming the mental hurdle of actually launching the products and getting it out to the world. We learned to follow Eric Reiss’s Lean Startup model — start small, get a product out to the world, test it and iterate to continually improve.”
The first stockist was Selfridges — “it took 20 million emails” is how Wright says they obtained on the cabinets.
Persistence grew to become key: the entrepreneurs had been determined to get into Whole Foods, however its purchaser didn’t reply to their emails. “So I went and sat in their headquarters’ reception at 6am, waiting for the buyer to come,” Wright says. “Only to find out after a few hours she was working from home.”
He obtained observed, although, and launched Dash’s raspberry flavour within the retailer; now, Wright provides, Dash is Whole Foods’ bestselling drink.
Today the model is stocked in 10,000 shops worldwide together with Starbucks, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and British Airways, and in 20 nations.
Sales have greater than doubled yearly since launch, and followers embody Richard Branson, Victoria and David Beckham and Maya Jama.
The founders have raised £21 million so far, from VCs together with Beringea and angels together with former Tyrrell’s boss David Milner and the founders of Beavertown Brewery, Links of London, Charles Tyrwhitt and Sipsmith Gin.
The duo are actually targeted on rising their worldwide enterprise: they launched in Australia throughout Covid, producing the primary batches of Dash cans from Melbourne’s wonky fruit with out the UK staff assembly farmers, producers, or retailers, and even tasting it till they’d been on sale for 3 weeks because of the pandemic restrictions.
“Fortunately the drinks tasted outstanding,” Wright asserts.
Their success hasn’t gone unnoticed: main gentle drinks manufacturers together with Coca-Cola have created their very own fruit-infused seltzers.
Dash’s founders declare they’re unconcerned: “We’re beating them because consumers connect with our brand mission. We use fruit that battles food waste, real fruit and vegetables not flavours made in a lab, and spring water not tap water.
“We have the genuine story and they don’t.”