A Book About Innocent



"A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some
Things We've Learned"
image from http://www.amazon.com/

I bought this book a month ago and have not started reading it since this week. Now that I've started it, I cannot understand why I did not start it earlier. I've you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it.

"A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We've Learned" by Dan Germain, Richard Reed and John Hamilton, has a pretty self-explanatory title. I'm only half-way through but I've been amazed by how such a great business, that has been used many times as a case example, really started. With no resources, strong will and a simple idea they were able to build in 10 years a £100 million company with 250 people. They want to create a business they can be proud of. And they want innocent to become a global, natural, ethical food and drinks company, always remaining commercially successful and socially aware.

The book itself clearly is an example of what Innocent stands for: Be Natural, Be Entrepreneurial, Be Responsible, Be Commercial and Be Generous.
The book is printed on 100% recicled paper with vegetable-based inks. They are simple and direct.

There's a story that really caught my attention, it was how the 3 friends decided to leave their jobs and start the adventure. Let me tell you about it.

To make the story short, the 3 friends had good paying jobs and were working in great companies, but since college they had joked about starting a business together. After they came up with the natural smoothie idea at the age of 26, they started working on the innocent project on their free time. They developed recipes and found a small farmer who would produce and bottle their products. They decided to run a test, they bought £500 of fruit to produce a batch and sell it at a London music festival they were organizing, to actually see if people liked them and if they would be willing to buy them.

How to measure the results? First they wanted to hand out a two page survey to see what people thought about it but realised it was simply to much. The wanted to know a simple thing, if they liked the products. With some help they developed a new simple testing method. They put up a sign with the question "Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?" and put out two bins, one saying "YES" and the other saying "NO", and asked people to put their empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the "YES" bin was full, so they went in the next day and resigned.

This is how the Bins Test was born.

It may not be the most orthodox way to conduct research, but it did meet their purpose. In addition, considering the limited market test budget (which was none) I think the idea was brilliant. This is a clear example that necessity is the mother of invention. (Or as it would be said in Spanish "La necesidad agudiza el ingenio").

Have any of you read the book or have other examples of great ideas pursued with few resources? Would love to hear of them.