Three friends stood at a London music festival with a stall and two bins. One said YES. The other said NO. The question on the sign was whether they should quit their jobs to make smoothies.
They had spent six months working out recipes and about £500 on fruit. Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright had met at St John's College, Cambridge. By then they worked in consulting and advertising, steady jobs. The festival was a cheap experiment. Visitors who liked the drinks would drop their empty bottle in the answer they wanted.
It took about fifteen months from idea to market, a slow start for a company that later told its story as a joke.
At the end of the weekend the YES bin was full. Only 3 bottles sat in NO. The next day, the three resigned.
But a bin of bottles is not a bank. What came after is the part that rarely makes the poster. Finding money was hard. They had a product, a jar of encouragement and no revenue. The turn came with Maurice Pinto, a wealthy American businessman, who put in £250,000. It took about fifteen months from idea to market, a slow start for a company that later told its story as a joke.
The business grew. By the mid-2000s Innocent was in a McDonald's Happy Meal trial that would run for five years, and had launched The Big Knit, where people knitted tiny hats for bottles in return for money to charity. But growth had a price. In 2007 the company recalled about 100,000 bottles after reports of smoothie bottles exploding, which it put down to natural fermentation. The Advertising Standards Authority also censured it that year over health claims on its superfoods range.
Then the crash. In 2009 revenue fell and the company lost £8.6m. That year Coca-Cola agreed to buy a stake for £30m, with the founders keeping operational control. The stake rose to 58% in 2010 and past 90% in 2013, leaving the founders with a small minority holding. Ethical Consumer cut the company's rating from 12.5 out of 20 to 6.5 after the sale.
By 2016 revenue was £247.4m, and the company sold more than two million smoothies a week.
What stays with me is the bins. They did not ask a bank, a mentor or a survey panel. They asked strangers who had just tasted the product to do something small and physical. The quit-your-job decision came from evidence rather than courage, and that is easier to repeat than most founders think.