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Sylvia Garvin – Sejuiced and Sublime
Sylvia Garvin and Valerie Maximen did what plenty of successful Brit-based entrepreneurs have done before: they copied the idea for Sejuiced from someone doing it abroad.
But while spotting an idea and bringing it to the UK is common, refining it to improve upon the original is not. It was an obvious stumbling block that caused the pair an immediate rethink to their business plan.
Garvin and Maximen got the idea for a chain of juice bars while quaffing cocktails in Brazil, a country offering obvious climatic advantages over rain-soaked England.
They saw that demand for juice bars was great in the sweltering South American sun, but upon arriving back in England observed that a foolhardy few had already set up shop in the UK and were having a hard time converting the beer and tea drinking locals.
But both had already quit their jobs to go travelling and having come up with a plan to start a business were reluctant to give up. So they took a subtly different approach with temporary mobile juice stalls at Spitalfields and Portobello Road markets.
The half-way house solution, launched in 2004, saved Sejuiced a packet on start-up costs and its founders managed to get off the ground with just £40,000 from a remortgage and family loan.
Having a market stall guaranteed passing trade and the openness of the set-up meant more customers were willing to stop and try Sejuiced drinks. As Garvin explains: “There are already lots of kiosks that make juice drinks and the capital injection would have been much too high – at least £100,000.
“It was summer so we took a roll of the dice and bought the stall and started visiting events around London like markets, small festivals and charity events.
“The drinks were going down really well, but we were reluctant to go down the retail route because of the cost involved 
and slim chances of success; the jump to servicing corporate events was a much easier one.”
Within six months of launch, Sejuiced had evolved into a promotional bar-for-hire business catering for corporate events, charity dos, conferences and product launches. Garvin and Maximen soon developed a USP too: they became a temporary marketing instrument for their clients – and not just a gimmicky place to buy a drink.
The big break came when a friend-of-a-friend asked Sejuiced to provide the drinks for a big event hosted by a major sporting goods chain. From there the business grew through referral and Sejuiced became the drinks company of choice for a handful of marketing agencies and event organisers.
“We take on the client’s branding and become another part of their marketing,” says Garvin. “Clients who want to dabble in experiential marketing come to us, they want their customers to experience the brand in three dimensions – it works really well.
“Once we got a few events under our belt the offers came quite quickly. It’s a fairly easy business to grow through referrals because there are normally other exhibitors and related businesses floating around.
She adds, “Our website has helped enormously too. Now about two-thirds of our business comes through it, our service is very specific so when people search for it they find us.”
With industry trailblazer Innocent Drinks still under 10 years old the health drink market is in its infancy, and in turn the mobile-health-drinks-at-your-corporate-gig-industry has barely opened its eyes.
But the Sejuiced team are taking no chances despite growing quickly in their yet-to-be saturated market. Garvin allows that she has “an inkling” for competitors who are developing market share, but she plans to thwart them with a better service and a comprehensive PR attack.
“The market is becoming more competitive but it has a lot of maturing to do. There’s a lot of work out there and our main limitation is, as a mobile business, we need the resources to serve clients outside our base in London and the South East,” she admits.
“We’ll grow because of our enthusiasm and our approach to the market. We become the client for an afternoon and share in their experiences. We work hard and make sure we get a good reference at the end of the day.”
Sejuiced plans to grow the business geographically by supplying events further afield from its comfort zone in the Southern England. This has thrown up logistical problems and has seen the founders overcoming phobias of driving large vehicles through city centres.
Taking some fruit and cutting it up in Portobello Market is one thing. Fulfilling an order for 3,000 drinks at a corporate function in Newcastle is quite another. Garvin admits getting volumes right was a challenge in the early days, and admits she still dreads long journeys.
“For a recent show in Birmingham we needed ingredients and equipment for 3,500 drinks; that’s 10 square metres of fruit. Basically it’s two long wheel based vans. Unfortunately we might have to upgrade again as orders get bigger,” she laughs.
As well as pushing her business further and further up the M1, Garvin is also diversifying into an alcohol-included evening service called ‘Sublime’. It’s an evening bar with a twist: expensive fruit cocktails, supplemented with beers for the less adventurous.
The plan is to merge the two businesses partially and offer whole-day marketing experience with enlivening health drinks by day, exotic cocktails by night and event branding all the way through.
The combined businesses made £150,000 in sales in the 12 months to May 2008 and Garvin plans to double that figure in the period to the same month next year. To keep overheads under control, Sejuiced employs lots of contract workers, but the plan now is to increase the number of full-time staff.
She explains: “We’re taking on a business development manager to help push the business forward in a way that we can’t do on our own. The first four years have been a juggling act and it took almost that long to figure out the ultimate direction of the business.”
The next 12 months is all about sticking to her knitting, according to Garvin. Growing the two arms of the business and gradually increasing Sublime’s sales volumes and geographical reach.
Having chopped and changed the business model a few times during the start up phase the founders are confident they are finally pointing in the right direction. “When we started a friend’s dad told us it’d take three years to figure out where the business was headed,” Garvin laughs “I think he was just about right.”
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