INTRODUCTION
Three friends from the Cambridge University, Richard Reed, Jon Wright and Adam Balon founded the innocent drinks in 1998. All the three were in their respective fields of work and working for different companies after they graduated in 1994. Reed worked for an advertising agency, while Balon and Wright worked for different management consultants. The three friends always had an idea about starting a company of their own and in 1998 they founded the innocent drinks after an intense market research and testing their product.
THE EARLY INNOCENT
Reed, Balon and Wright organised events in London like the used to organise in Cambridge such as a music festival called Jazz on the Green in 1997-1998. Though they were in different …show more content…
Dan Germain, an old friend of founders joined the business in summer 1999 and they came up with an idea of changing the packaging and printing off beat messages on the labels which became the hallmark of the product. As the company grew, it used many traditional marketing strategies to grow the company much more bigger.
COMPANY GROWTH
The company adopted a very highly successful formula and sales grew rapidly. Pinto then advised the founders to expand the company in Europe or to extend the brand to other products in the UK. The company decided not to diversify their central idea of business but were interested in expanding the core range of products in the Europe.
Sales were significantly high during 2003 and later as innocent was spread into a wide range of retail outlets, reaching £37 million by 2005 and giving innocent a 60% market share in UK market for smoothies. This placed innocent well ahead of many other brands of smoothies like PJs and Coca cola's Minute Maid. During this time, 11 other brands came and went, and PJ was acquired by PepsiCo.
Despite their easy going management image, the three run the business very firmly and never stopped themselves from firing the employees who do not work effectively for the company. Growth means that they have brought in professional managers from established companies to compliment their skills and on the other hand the resources which they use have the good-will of the company.
The further growth of