Launching at Selfridges July 25 2012, 0 Comments

Part 2 of 3

So after sitting for a few hours thinking and trying how we can stick a label on a jar that is both round and concave. We came to the conclusion that it was just not possible, but I've always believed in life that the point of success comes on the edge of failure. Its always that moment when you think, this cant work that a moment of genius happens and it did!! I picked up one of our moon shaped labels

and carefully cut round each side of the label, keeping the back adhesive on it . I then cut about 2cm of the adhesive label off, on opposite ends and slipped it under the clip and hey presto it worked!!!! After a meeting at Selfridges with the Grocery buyer,we had raised the issue of a tamper seal but Selfridges felt this wasn't necessary…in hind sight it would have been a essential part of our packaging ( I'll explain why later, what a nightmare!!)

As you can see the label looked stunning wrapped around our beautiful chocolate brown kilner! There was no lines or creases, we were good to go!! Only thing is we had to manually cut out 400 labels!!….so working back to back, hour by hour we finally completed the task and the entire room was full, bursting with stunning jars - Job done…..

We committed to Selfridges that we would come to the Oxford Street store and run tasters every other week for 4 months. In return for tasters, Selfridges would run a National PR campaign to promote our product and generate interest as we had bought the first Baobab food item to the UK market and they were excited by our story. 

Unfortunately, due to absence in the PR department, along with our dedicated buyer leaving, sadly, this part of the agreement never happened, and if it had, could of elevated our product and story to market it deserved. Yozuna's story and brand to date has had a massive response from countless National Magazines, newspapers and Radio shows(including National Geographic,The Grocer, the ………..Listed on our PR page) just a shame that when the opportunity to shift large volumes of product off shelves at launch, there was no campaign to drive it.

The first taster weekend sticks in our mind, as an employee from the store knocked our product off the shelf, opened it, inspected that the jar was not broken, shut the lid and stuck it back on the shelf. This mortified us, I had worked over a year on the recipe on reducing the sugar level and it was clearly stated on the jar that once opened,must be refrigerated and consumed within 8 weeks! We knew that mould would form within a week or two if the the jam was not placed in the fridge as we had seen this from our pre-shelf life trails we had conducted prior to launching the it on to the market. This really concerned us that after all our hard work, months of planning, of getting the final product ready for the launch could be ruined in less then a couple of weeks. I had countless sleepless nights thinking how many customers would be opening the product having a look and placing it back on the shelf ready for the next customer who buys gets home and finds mould on it !!Two weeks into the launch we pulled the WHOLE lot back! Funnily my fears came true, we got home from London and we had a returned jar from a customer who had bought two and one had mould on it!! My heart sank !!

Lucky for us we had just adverted a major disaster as we had all the stock with us at home. I  re-made all the stock, re-labelled, re-packaged, re-sent…… with our inital idea of tamper proof. 

After 5 months the product had sold out and Selfridges buyer we dealt had left but he contacted us and said the product would be reordered by the next buyer and passed on the contact details. 

Sadly, this wasn't the case, after countless emails phone calls we gave up trying as we had nothing come back to us after six weeks!! Well there you go thank you for helping the small producer……

So what was next for us???