Cracking open a healthier tomorrow with OLIPOP

Heather Stern: The cracking open of an ice-cold can of soda and the fizzy aftermath are iconic sounds in our cultural zeitgeist. But while traditional soda is a beloved beverage, our awareness of the negative impacts of sugar has risen, leading to increased consumer demand for better options. Enter OLIPOP, the prebiotic soda that’s quickly becoming a household name and is set to hit $500 million in sales this year. Recently named one of Time’s 100 most influential brands, OLIPOP is winning over customers with its healthier take on soda and fun, nostalgic branding.

Today, we’re lucky enough to be joined by the brand’s Cofounder and President David Lester. A strategic thinker with a passion for disruptive innovation and nearly two decades of experience in the beverage industry, he’s built iconic brands like Smirnoff, Gordon’s Gin, and Johnnie Walker. There’s plenty to talk about today from David’s vision for OLIPOP to the importance of imbuing meaning in your brand to the lessons he’s learned throughout his career. And some science along the way as well, I think. But welcome, David.  We’re so excited to have you here today and talk about this awesome brand that every person I’ve spoken to who I said that we’re talking to says, “Oh my God, that’s amazing. What’s your favorite flavor?” So it’s definitely hit the cultural sphere and we’re thrilled to have you today.

David Lester: Thanks so much for having me, yeah.

Heather: So with that, what is your favorite flavor?

David: I still drink one of our original three flavors, which is the Vintage Cola. I remember playing soccer in the summer at school and getting a cold can of Coke from the vending machine, and for years I didn’t really drink soda, so now I enjoy a Vintage Cola each day, and it’s got a little bit of green tea caffeine in there. It gives me a little pick-me-up in the middle of the day as well, so I love that one.

Heather: Awesome. Talk to me about the inspiration behind the brand. We often talk about understanding what is the job that any particular product or service or brand needs to do. What was the problem you were solving for?

David: Yeah, there’s a long backstory to how we arrived at OLIPOP, and it really starts with my Cofounder, Ben. He grew up overweight, eating the standard American diet. I think in his mid-teens, he made the decision to get a job and get better food for himself and change his diet. And so, he lost weight, but he also noticed real cognitive benefits as well, which he wasn’t expecting. So he became very interested in the gut microbiome, the gut-brain connection. He actually dropped out of college to teach himself microbiology. He was growing up in Monterey in California and could see how zealous people were about kombucha. He actually helped set up a kombucha company with a friend of his as well, but he realized that every person that loved it, there were 10 that didn’t. He didn’t like the vinegar taste, and so he was like, “What if you made something more accessible?”

And this is a guy who’s a very talented formulator and also grew up eating a lot of the foods that we eat on a mass basis in America and he was like, “Look, I get it. This stuff is delicious. Can we meet people where they are?” And Ben and I had one attempt at this, a first venture called Obi, which was a healthy soda as well. Same concept, same idea. It was actually water-kefir based. We had three flavors, one of which was root beer, which did particularly well. We made a lot of mistakes and as first-time entrepreneurs, had a lot of personal growth to do and stuff to figure out. And also, it gave us a chance to test out the original concept. And then we took two years before launching OLIPOP and we rethought through the concept. We did our own self-reflection and growth, but really, it’s about taking the benefits of digestive health to a mass audience.

And our thinking was that people really don’t have an issue with soda. In fact, quite the opposite. They love soda. As you talked about in your intro when we were chatting, so many people said to you, “Oh, which is your favorite flavor?” Soda is a category that has immense emotional resonance with people. So when you try and get them to give up their soda and drink a sparkling water or a kale juice, whatever it might be instead, there’s a logic to that decision, but there’s a lot of emotion behind it as well. And so for us, we really wanted to meet consumers where they are and give them a product that they love. And I know as a marketer that consumer behavior change is difficult. And so the less friction you provide, the easier that behavior change is. And so for us, we decided we get it. You love soda. We love soda, too; just try this one instead.

Heather: I want to go back to something you had mentioned about your first attempt and entrepreneurialism is not for the faint of heart. You talked about some personal growth, some mistakes, anything you can share about the lessons or one of the lessons that you took away from a failed attempt, actually?

David: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many lessons, to be honest. It’s one of the gifts of entrepreneurship, I think, that often I found in my corporate career, I didn’t quite have the freedom to make mistakes in the same way. And it makes sense. If you’re working for a blue chip company like Diageo, operating in 180 markets around the world, then mistakes can be quite fatal for the brands or the company in general. The benefit of entrepreneurship when you start out is things are so small, you can pivot very quickly. There were things I had no experience of doing before capital raising, for example. I learned a lot from just multiple clunky attempts at doing that. I always tell our team, “I’ve made more mistakes than you. That’s why I know more than you about a subject.” I think you’re often three to five mistakes away from becoming an expert in something. There was that and lots of personal growth as well. I think when you go through adversity, and I made the somewhat crazy decision with my wife to have two kids at the same time as we were trying to get this entrepreneurial venture…

Heather: Kind of three babies in a way.

David: Exactly, yeah. A really awful idea. But as most entrepreneurs are, I’m quite impulsive and high-risk tolerance and probably over self-confident as well. I was like, “I think this will be fine.” It wasn’t fine. We got through it, but it was very stressful. And for me personally, I think it was really the first time in my life I encountered major failure in that way. And that’s a bit of an identity crisis. When you build an identity around being successful at things, when you’re not, it provokes a lot of self-reflection. And in that self-reflection, I think you can learn a lot. And often what I find is it comes back to ego. And I mean that in the broadest sense, ego, coming to terms with your ego, building self-confidence and humility is a very important balance for entrepreneurs, I think. And on the first venture, I was on a bit of a rollercoaster. For any entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs that are listening, I’m sure you’re probably going through this, which is I would build myself up and be like, “You’re amazing. You’re crushing this.” And then something would go wrong. And then I’d be on the downside of the rollercoaster and be like, “Oh my God, you’ve screwed this all up. This is a disaster.” It’s mentally exhausting and you can’t sustain that. And that’s why people get burned out. And what I learned is that you will make mistakes. It’s okay. You have to find a way through that. And if you do, it doesn’t mean that you are the greatest entrepreneur ever. And if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re the worst either. You just have to find a path forward.

Heather: Yeah. You’ve said something which particularly resonated with me, and I think a lot of what we talk about at Lippincott, you said, “Icons become icons because we imbue them with meaning over time. You can’t fast-track that.” Obviously, as you said, that there’s a real health benefit, there’s the type of emotional connection that people have with sodas to the brand, but what are the ways in which you’re imbuing meaning over time? And as you look ahead, what are your hopes for the brand?

David: Yeah, if I think back to some of the iconic brands I worked on…so for example, take Johnnie Walker, square bottles, slanted label, walking man, the tagline ‘keep walking,’ all of these things are iconic to that brand. You show those to consumers now around the world and they’ll say, “That’s Johnnie Walker.” You can take the brand name off it, but that obviously takes time. You have to be consistent in how you are using those icons. I think for us, we’re still on a journey on that with our own brand. The name itself was not a slam dunk when we first came up. A lot of people thought it sounded silly. OLIPOP, it is a bit of a weird name. I think actually naming is one of the hardest parts of innovation because every name sounds silly when you first come up with that.

Imagine calling a tech company Apple. That sounds ridiculous. Or a company called Google, whatever else it may be. But I think what I’ve learned with naming and, I guess, iconography is in the name, we were looking for something that felt like a soda brand. It was fun to say. It had some connection to soda and then you just have to stick with it, wear it with pride. And then you’re looking for other pieces of distinctivity in your brand. So for us, the arch logo has become a piece of iconography that we’ve been fairly consistent with. And so you have to strip things back around that, to allow the thing to breathe and, say, be consistent in your use of it and think aspirationally what are you trying to deliver with that icon? So now the Nike tick, for example, is such an icon. There’s so much meaning.

Heather: I think I refer to it as a swoosh or a swoop. You say a tick?

David: Swish is probably more accurate.

Heather: Well, I don’t know. Look, everyone can call it what they want. I just wanted to make sure we knew what we were talking about here.

David: Yeah, the Nike swish, see that and there’s a whole emotional meaning behind that in terms of effort and sport and achievement that wasn’t there when they first came up with it. Some of the iconography around Coca-Cola is very interesting to me. The glass bottle that could be broken into many pieces and you pick up one piece and you still know it’s a Coke bottle or the wave that came from the negative space between two Coke bottles lying next to one another. So all these things seem trivial when you first encounter them, but I think it takes a creative mind and certainly one much more design-focus and creative mind, recognize something as being distinctive and interesting and be consistent with it. And that’s difficult in marketing, I think, because temptation is to always change things.

Heather: Yeah. Well, fun fact, Lippincott decades and decades ago helped Coca-Cola with their first global identity. And one time that wave was called the Lippincott ribbon, something we are proud of. And back to your point about things that endure through consistency, but yet have the ability to evolve in the right way. I think your point about the temptation of chasing the new and always feeling fresh and different is a real one. I am hearing a lot of discipline in the decisions that you’re making around the brand and how it goes to market. When do you know that it’s time to push something or what’s an example of when you guys made a decision that might’ve been a little bit outside of the core, whether it’s campaign or an activation or a decision around the product, and how did you know that that was the right thing for the brand?

David: Yeah, I think there’s always been a kind of clear North Star for us in terms of Ben’s vision and mission for the product and what our goal is there. The discipline, some of the discipline that I learned around concept, and from my time at Diageo launching different products and working on different concepts. For me, one of the important things early on was to understand the category that we were in or are in, which is soda. And brands that I really admired were ones like Halo Top, Seedlip and non-alc spirits, Beyond Meat. For me, these were brands that understood the dynamics of the category that they were in. Halo Top understanding that they were in ice cream, and ice cream is about indulgence. And so they did gold packaging, indulgent flavors. They told people to eat to the bottom of the tub. Ben & Jerry’s didn’t do that. They kind of out-indulgenced the ice cream category.

So for me, it dawned on me as we went through. We had one initial attempt at a pack design, which we’ve kept for posterity right at the bottom of our Instagram. If you scroll down, you’ll be able to see the original packaging of OLIPOP. And we got the brief wrong as well. There’s so many amazing ingredients inside OLIPOP and the temptation is people should know about this. We’ve put a lot of thought into this product as we’ve developed it. And so we tried to dramatize those elements on the can and a lot of these ingredients are not very interesting is part of the problem. And we ended up with these blobs on the can. And in the end, we just landed on the fact that we’re in the soda category and it had to be fun and delicious and colorful. And we stuck with that.

And I remember actually one decision we made early on, I think in our second year, we were doing a pop-up at Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, and there’s a number of different businesses there. One of them was an ice cream company. And so we were like, “We’d like to partner with these businesses, what could we do?” And the obvious answer was ice cream floats. But that was actually a very disruptive thing to do at the time because coming out of the natural products’ industry, people were like, “Well, that’s not healthy. You can’t do that. It should be something healthy that you’re paired with.” But the learning from Beyond Meat was that they weren’t trying to change into gluten-free buns and vegan cheese, it was like, “We’re just going to switch out the meat.” And for us, the goal here really is just to address soda and show that actually whatever occasion you would drink a soda in normally, you can substitute that for an OLIPOP and make a healthier choice.

Heather: Yeah, there’s a lot of discussion on one end about being very customer-centric and always in tune with what your customer needs. But at the same time, the Henry Ford quote, “If we asked people what they wanted, they would say a faster horse and buggy,” or something along those lines. So I guess on that front, how would you define your consumer? Is there some way in which you feel either psychographically or in other ways there’s a definition of that consumer? And how are you continuing to learn from them? And when do you know that you should follow them versus have them follow you?

David: Yeah, I think to answer the first part of the question first, who is our consumer? Well, there are people that are looking to make healthier lifestyle changes in some form or other. So they joined a gym, they’re cutting something out their diet, they’ve switched to something different, and actually that’s a very large and growing group of consumers now. That is a mass market as we’ve categorized it. The fact of the matter is if you’re not that concerned about sugar or gut health, then regular soda tastes pretty delicious and there’s some incredible brands and it’s very cheap and accessible, so there’s not a huge incentive to make a change. However, if you are on a path where you’re starting to think more consciously about your health and happiness, then this starts to become interesting because soda has 97% household penetration. So pretty much, everybody drinks soda or has done at some point in their life or has some experience with it. So that’s how we define our consumer.

In terms of knowing when to listen to them, I think what I’ve found, consumers are good at reacting to physical things you can show them. They’re not very good if you ask them to imagine something. So they give us feedback on the product. So one change we made, for example, was we initially launched Vintage Cola as Cinnamon Cola. So at the time, we thought that we had a healthier twist than a regular cola, and there is natural cinnamon in the product. And so we thought that would be an interesting healthy twist to launch with consumers. People told us, they were like, “Is this spicy?” And we were like, “No, no, it just tastes like a regular cola.” And so you learn pretty quickly. You’re like, “Oh, okay.” So we changed the name from Cinnamon to Vintage Cola. We changed the semiotic to red from the brown we had previously, and that was a very successful shift we made.

So, say, consumers are very good at reacting to physical stuff you showed them, not very good if you say, “Can you imagine what you might want instead of a Walkman,” or whatever at the time, they struggle with those type of questions in my experience.

Heather: A smaller Walkman. That could possibly be the answer.

David: Yeah, a song from my pocket would be great.

Heather: Yes, exactly. You mentioned pricing briefly, and we’ve done a lot of studies on the notion back to what consumers want, but then what they actually do, whether it’s around healthier options, more sustainable options, often those come at a higher price. Have you found any resistance to pricing? How do you justify the higher price? Certainly it’s the product and it’s the benefits, but curious about what you’re learning as it relates to the decisions you make around pricing and what’s plausible.

David: Yeah, there’s a reality to using the quality ingredients that we do and that’s that you have to charge a certain price point for it. I think the energy category is proven that for a fizzy functional drink, consumers are willing to pay $3 or more. So I think that proof point is already there. We have launched nationally in Target and Walmart and have been very successful in those retailers as well. And so we’re learning about where the edge of this thing is also. Additionally, it’s worth noting that over 40 million Americans have access to OLIPOP through SNAP benefits now as well. And it’s one of the reasons that soda is so accessible is because it’s heavily subsidized. So we’re now starting to access some of those subsidies as well, say, through SNAP and other benefits.

Heather: I love the thoughtfulness with which you’ve talked about branding decisions, design decisions, naming decisions. Our teams will definitely agree with you on the challenge, things that feel most simple and obvious are sometimes the hardest things to do. But marketing and partnerships and activations and all of these things, I think you’ve said you knew were going to be critical to the success of the brand. Tell me about how you approach the marketing strategy and maybe an example of one or two things that were really successful.

David: Yeah, it changes at every stage, I think. I see for early-stage entrepreneurs, marketing will often really trip them up because they agonize over it. It’s complicated, marketing, as we all know that’ve worked in the profession. Nobody has a straight answer for what’s the one way of doing it. Now, if you ask, how do I set up my supply chain? You can get a pretty clear answer on that and you can measure quite effectively if you’ve done that properly or not.

Marketing is much more complicated and nuanced, and it depends on your category and the timing. And initially, we launched, say, six, seven years ago now, Instagram was a very important platform for us at the time. We didn’t have a lot of money. We were still relying on the organic reach of Instagram. We actually relied a lot on LinkedIn as well. I think LinkedIn has a great organic reach. So as we needed to get in front of buyers and investors and people in our industry, we realized that at the time, the quality of the content on LinkedIn was very poor. You know, it’d be Jeff at the concrete conference in Dubai with a picture that’s on the side. So we figured, look, if you stop…

Heather: Everybody is honored to have spoken and received such and such awards.

David: Humbled by the…

Heather: I better go back and make sure I don’t have that as the start of any of my updates.

David: I’m sure we all have some of those.

Heather: Yeah.

David: There’s no shame in that. But we were like, “Let’s post interesting information and interesting visuals.” Even when we posted for jobs, we would design the thing, so it looked beautiful because I’m quite an aesthetic person as well. I’m like, “Look, if you present me with an aesthetically pleasing job request, I’m much more likely to click on it than something just forwarded or reposted.” So we leveraged those platforms. We also did outrageous things. The pop-up at Grand Central Market is one of those. We did a two-week-long pop-up at Grand Central Market, and it was our Chief of Staff at the time, Liz Trowler, that pretty much ran the whole thing. We didn’t have any agencies helping us. We designed the space in Grand Central Market. We did collaborations and activities on the roof, and it was outrageous. And I think what I tell our team is 90% of marketing just is ignored anyway.

Heather: As a marketer, it’s a true but sad statistic.

David: It’s so hard to cut through. And I found at times as a marketer myself that you’re going through a checklist and it’s like, “Do we have PR? Do we have this? Do we have that?” And I was like, “Don’t worry about it. We don’t have enough money to do any of these.” We’re just going to do one thing, but we’re going to be outrageous about it, to the point that people saying, “What are you guys doing and why are you spending this money?” Which was a lot of money for us at the time on something like this, and it’s like you kind of have to do something outrageous or else it’s just not going to get cut through. So I look at a brand like BrewDog, for example, in the early days or Liquid Death, it has to be true to your brand, but you have to do outsize things initially as we grew.

And the other thing we were doing is building a foundation around the concept, learning about the concept, what resonates, how do we say what this is in the clearest way possible? And we spent two, three years just learning that, and I was very adamant with our team at the time. I was like, “If we’re going to do refreshment, it has to look as good as Coke or Pepsi or better.” If it doesn’t look as fizzy in the glass or you fall into that trap of this feels like a poor version of the thing that I love, I say it took a lot of lessons from Seedlip in non-alc. The first time I’d really seen a brand in non-alc behave at the level that top spirits brand would. They launched in the top 40, 50 bars globally. Their product photography was incredible. They had cocktails developed by some leading bartenders. It was everything I would want from an alcohol brand, which is to feel special, a special occasion.

So when you’re drinking soda, you want it to be refreshing and delicious, so it has to look like that. So we were doing that for three years, and then we brought in a brand strategy partner called Squint and started to develop an emotional brand platform as we had larger budgets. That platform is around real love.

And we did the first iteration of that campaign with Camila Cabello last year where we showed her at home with her family. It was her actual family. We shot it with her grandmother, her mom, her dog. And for us, we really discovered that soda and OLIPOP, in particular, is feeling of comfort for people, it’s a feeling of home. And so often the little things in between the big moments that really is where we find happiness. And so instead of showing Camila as a big star, we showed her making dinner with her grandmother or playing on the couch with a dog or singing karaoke with her father. And it was a beautiful spot and really brought to life the emotional territory that we wanted to communicate to people because, say, that’s part of the soda experience. If you’re going to give people everything about soda, you have to give them the fun packaging, delicious flavors and the emotional aspects that come with it as well.

Heather: You talked a little bit about your journey and certainly referenced Johnnie Walker as an incredible iconic brand. Tell me about some of the experiences that led you to where you are. Are there things that you have taken with you that you go and draw back on from when you were at Diageo or any of the other former places? What are some of those enduring lessons that you’ve taken with you?

David: Yeah, there are a lot, to be honest, and I’m very grateful for the decade I had at Diageo. I learned an incredible amount and had some really amazing bosses and very high quality marketers and people in innovation. I remember, Syl Saller, who was the global head of innovation at one point when I was working in the innovation team, and there’s a number of fascinating lessons from her, but one was about this idea of “just change one thing and keep everything else the same in innovation.”

And I think that’s particularly important in consumer goods because consumers want to place you somewhere. You can build a new category if you want. It’s going to take some time. GT’s built the kombucha category. It took them a decade to do it, incredible feat to build a category like that. And so you can do that. If you want to move faster, you need to tag into a category that consumers already know and occasionally based on what they already know. In order to do that, you need to make it easy for them to navigate because as soon as it gets hard, they will just drop it. So I remember seeing lots of concepts that were defined by what they’re not, so “it’s not a this or a that, it’s a this,” and then it’s just too hard for consumers. You’re making me do so much work here.

Heather: So much work.

David: So for us with OLIPOP, the one thing we changed was the ingredients panel, going from 40 grams of sugar to two to five, and eight different plant-based ingredients to support digestive health, heavily researched with university standard research at Purdue University, but then everything else, it’s a colorful can. It’s root beer. We’re not reaching a health message to you. It’s Camila Cabello with her family. Everything else is the same. So if consumer[s], they know exactly where to place you, they’re like, “This is a soda, I get it. It’s just better for me, which is great because that is the number one issue.” If you look at the data, the number one issue people have with soda is sugar content. So thanks for that and now I can enjoy all the other aspects that I love, and you’re not trying to reinvent everything else on me at the same time because I really love all these other things and that’s why it’s a $40 billion category.

Heather: Yeah. You’ve had a lot of accolades and obviously the brand is on the rise and doing well. Without sharing anything proprietary, what are you either working on or preparing for or launching that you’re really excited about?

David: Yeah, unfortunately there’s stuff that I’m excited about that we can’t share. I think there’s some new innovation rolling out within the next month or so that I think would be really exciting, which moves us into a new space.

I think one of the key things for me is seeing a lot of white space ahead of us. So there’s classes of trade we haven’t gone into yet. There is our household penetration I think is 11%, 12% right now versus soda is 97%. So there’s lots of areas that we feel we can keep exploring and pushing into and being able to work in a category or working on a brand that has that much headroom to it without having to innovate in parallel categories is very exciting to me. It sounds very boring unless you’ve done a lot of innovation, at which point you get very bored of launching new things and watching them fail all the time because it’s hard.

So being able to keep scaling something, often brands will tap out at like, I don’t know, $20 million in revenue, you hit ceiling and then you have to re-innovate again. We found with OLIPOP, we really don’t need to do that. We’ve continued to work on things like our cost of goods, refining our concept, refining our emotional positioning, but those are the things that get me excited, although they may sound boring simply because I got very exhausted with launching new innovation or trying to, it’s a very risky and difficult thing to do.

Heather: The one thing I’m sure you can relate to is that when you’re an entrepreneur at heart, no matter what stage, it’s all encompassing. You’re running this growing business; you have two kids at home. Is there balance? What do you do to unwind? How do you find it? Any tips there?

David: Yes. I did a very bad job. Yeah, I did a very bad job of that first time around, and I didn’t get officially diagnosed, but I’m very confident I went through a period of depression. It was overwhelming. After our second child, my wife had postpartum depression for a period herself, so there’s a lot of financial pressures and things. As I reflected on it, I was like, “The only reason I left my corporate career was to do things where I wanted to get balance back in my life, to be able to make choices.” I really found I’d recreated the walls around me. And so you just have to have non-negotiables. And I think the first time around as well, I had poor tactics for dealing with issues that might crop up. So in my corporate career, I didn’t have any kids. I could just work a bit extra one evening or I’d just work the weekend. When you’ve got kids, you realize I can’t do that now. I need to be there as a parent on the weekend.

And in the entrepreneurial space as well, it’s too much. It’s overwhelming. If your good decisions compound on you, your bad decisions compound on you. So actually, the challenge is emotional regulation and staying in a good head space so that when you are presented with that myriad of paths, you can pick one that’s reasonably optimal that will compound over time. And so learning just to say, “Hey, for me, a non-negotiable is exercise. I can’t maintain my mental health if I don’t exercise.” Now, I take two hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I’ve got a personal trainer, I stretch afterwards. It feels very indulgent actually.

Particularly, I grew up coming out of a working class mindset and sport’s think, if I’m not busy, I’m not valuable. I had to kind of unwind that thinking and actually look at it as underperformance. If you’re overwhelmed, you’re underperforming. I think I used to wear my busyness as badge of honor earlier in my career, and I learned to reframe that in my mind. And I realized if I didn’t reframe that, then I would never change it because I was proud of it. But I started to look at it as underperformance. You’re not doing [a] good job, you’re making poor decisions. If you walk into meetings not properly regulated, then that is heavy underperformance. And you realize, yeah, you could keep working all the hours of the day and still you’d never get on top of things. So you just have to set your boundaries and accept what happens as a result.

Heather: I think it’s great advice. And to your point, this idea that taking time to strengthen your mind and your body is indulgent is very much the thing that pops in your head and it’s the complete opposite. And it’s great that exercise is non-negotiable. Do you have any others?

David: Time with my family. Again, part of the reason I left my corporate career is because I didn’t want to be traveling all the time with my family at home. I cut down my travel a lot. I’m fortunate that my Cofounder, Ben, doesn’t have kids and is willing to travel and go to conferences and stuff, and I am very grateful for that. And then my laptop goes down at 5:00 p.m. every day. I’m in a fortunate position to have an amazing Executive Assistant, Katie, that supports me with that. But I lay out my priorities to her, and I’m like, “Hey, here are the things that are important to me, and if you help me with that, let’s block out that time.” It doesn’t get booked. Whenever the kids are off school, I just take that time off. It’s automatically booked off, so when they’re off, I’m off. And what you find or what I find is that you’ll find ways to get stuff done. You’ll just have to think harder about it. So certainly exercise and time with the kids is particularly important for me.

I remember when I was starting OLIPOP, and there was stressful moments as well, you’re trying to raise funding. And so I found myself going back into that cycle again of the Obi days, and I was like, “Hold on, let’s not go back again.” Sent me to a very bad head space where I wasn’t able to function at a high level, and one of the things I would do at that time was simply just pause, run a bath with some bath salts and read a book for 45 minutes, which was quite an indulgent thing to do during the day. Often in the evening, I wouldn’t be able to do that because I had the kids or you’d quickly shower in the morning just to get on with your day.

And in the most stressful moments, that was the decision I took. As you come out of that, you realize that a lot of things that you were racing around in your head that you couldn’t make sense of, all of a sudden start to make sense, or things that you thought were important actually are now not, and developed a lot of clarity from that. So that was one tactic for me that was helpful in that early stage.

Heather: Yeah, it's also something to be said about being a great role model for your teams. If you are showing that you value and care about that balance and are actually modeling it, I think it has a trickle-down effect. I guess related to that, we are big believers in the notion that your brand is yes, your product and what you're putting out there, but it really is also the people that are creating it, are delivering it, are marketing it. How would you define the culture at OLIPOP?

David: Well first I would say it's an excellent point on modeling, and I think there's times in the past I realized I was telling our team to slow down, take time off, and I realized I wasn't modeling that, and I was like, well, what happens when you come into a company, you look at the people at the top and you're like, "What do you need to do to be successful here?" Well, it seems like you need to...

Heather: Work 24 hours a day.

David: Work 24 hours a day, yeah. So it’s exceptionally important. I still remember the first boss I had, a guy from Diageo called Mark Sandys, who is now the Global Innovation Officer there, and I remember he was probably 27, 28 at the time when I joined. He just had his first kid. His laptop was down at
5:00 p.m., and he was out [of] the office every day. And he was very high performing in his role. And I still remember that, and that’s partly what helped me reframe because I was like, “This guy is high performing. What’s he doing?” And I noticed that was what he was doing.

So I think it’s an excellent point on modeling, and if you don’t, then the culture of your business will not change. I think at OLIPOP, we have a set of values that we actually have the team present on from time to time and give their own interpretation of those values. A brief summary because we go, actually, into quite a lot of detail around those, and then it’s actually gone and broken down psychologically what each of those means in his mind, which I think is quite helpful.

Heather: Very helpful because we’re innovative, break things, but it’s like, “Okay, what does that really mean?” So I think the fact that there’s that detail is great, but yes, the elevator pitch version of your value.

David: Yeah, I think one of the things I like, which I think we have, is humanizing the workplace a bit. And for me, when I went into the corporate workplace, it was an odd experience. I grew up in the northwest of England. My parents worked, my mom was a teacher, my dad worked for the local government, managing parks and open spaces. So a lot of my experience at the workplace and management was going into the school or my friend’s parents who were firemen or nurses, and they were very different environments than what I experienced when I worked in a corporate office in London. There was a code that people seem to be talking to each other in. And one of the things that I like about OLIPOP, and I think Ben has helped to set this tone as well, because Ben’s a very intelligent and competent entrepreneur, but he’s also very wacky and loose and is deliberately that way. People see that unpolished nature and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t need to be perfect. I can be whoever I am.”

And the key thing is it’s a high performance environment. You have to deliver results, but whatever you might need to deliver those results is fine as long as it’s ethical and we can financially meet that. So however you need to work or if you need to take time off or however you want to show up or dress is fine. And it allows people to express things.

There’s people on our team that have quite bad anxiety, for example. And so they can say, “Hey, sorry guys. This week I’m really struggling to stay on top of my anxiety, so just so you guys are aware, this is how I show up in meetings.” Great. Everybody knows. And so they can then instead of internalizing that as something, they’re like, “Oh, this person really doesn’t like me or whatever, have I’ve done something wrong this week,” they can actually turn that around and be supportive and be like, “Oh, person X is going through a difficult week. All right, what grace can I give them? What support can I give?” And it creates a great connection when you can do that, I think. So that’s one of the aspects that I really enjoy.

Heather: That’s great. And it does sound like an amazing culture to be part of where, again, sometimes we say things and look, we’re all in the business of business and there’s things to achieve and goals to hit and endless amounts of things on our to-do list, but to be truly open and responsive for people “bringing their full selves” to work, I think it goes a long way. And kudos to you and your partner on that. This was such an amazing conversation, and I think you can hear in just your anecdotes, like so much of the learning and as you said, the mistakes made that have gotten you to this point. It’s an amazing brand. I do think that there are things that are already iconic about it. I tend to end these talks with a question, which is, who is your icon?

David: For me, honestly, my icon growing up was my mom, an incredible lady. She took time off when my brother and I were younger to bring us up and then went back and studied to become a teacher, and ultimately became a Principal of the school she was at. And she created an amazing environment. There were kids that would go back 10 years after they’d left the school to visit the school. Her office as Principal wasn’t a place you got sent when you were naughty. It was a place of refuge for people. There was a couch there, there were games. It was a place where kids felt supported. There was an inclusivity in that environment. She would go and buy flowers for the staff that worked in the kitchens that they got presented at the end of each school year. She had a phrase that she would say that if she didn’t show up for work as a Principal, the school could probably carry on going, but if the Janitor didn’t show up, the school would shut down because they couldn’t actually function without the other janitors.

She created this atmosphere of inclusivity where everybody felt important, they understood their jobs and created a great sense of community. And that’s something I tried to take through into the business that we’ve now created as well, some areas successfully, some less, but amazing lessons, and I really admired her in her career as well.

Heather: Fantastic. Thank you for spending time with us. I love the lessons that you’ve shared, and it’ll be really exciting to see where OLIPOP goes from here. And I guess here’s wishing everybody some fun, delicious, colorful moments in their lives that actually allow us to take a break and have some happiness and enjoyment. So thank you so much, David. It was great to chat.

David: Thanks so much.