innocent's plan B
- Nov 14, 2008
Following on from Richard's post on learning from mistakes I thought I'd share a lesson learned here at innocent. Since we founded innocent in '99 we've made a few mistakes like every one else but there's one mistake that was really hard to deal with and was very early on in the business. We were the first people to put juices into little clear bottles, before that people had always used those milky plastic bottles. It might not seem like a big difference but frankly innocent drinks look a lot nicer in these lovely clear bottles - you see the nice colours and the fruit.
Business was going really well, innocent had been going about a year and a half, but then our bottle supplier called us up and said 'You know you ordered a 100,000 bottles a week? We can only give you 20,000 for the next few weeks.' We don't stockpile because everything is produced fresh. We asked what they meant and they said 'We've got a big customer who wants clear bottles now.' We protested by reminding them that we'd been working with them for ages and we'd given them our forecasts but their reply was: 'Sorry, the machine's full you can't have it.'
It was a big mess. We basically had no bottles. It was the summer, business was booming and we had nothing to put our drinks in! Customers were going nuts. It was a total nightmare - a horrible situation. Every phone call was someone having a go at us and we really couldn't do anything.
Finally we managed to find another sort of bottle - it wasn't the right one but we managed to get the drinks out there. As a result we found a new bottle supplier and learnt that you've always got to have a plan B - you've got to have a back-up.
http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk
