Now, before my mum sees this and gets overexcited, I’m not talking about small people here. I’m talking about the birth of these cute Arganic mini’s.
This is a tale of teamwork, not knowing how but saying yes anyway.. and the agility of being a small company!
Last month, we had a special request from Persian restaurant Berenjak which is part of JKS. If you haven’t heard of them, they are a greatly respected restaurant group that have brought some of the most iconic restaurants to the London Food scene. The head chef Kian and team fell in love with our culinary argan oil and asked if we could provide a mini form for their swanky new kabab kits. We were excited about the idea of our oil being used to elevate a BBQ + side salad and quickly said yes. Needless to say, we didn’t want to mess them about, so the pressure was on!
The thing is, they needed delivery in a week. To give you some context, standard professional labels usually require a run time of at least 10 working days, add onto this the time required for Dapple Studio, our design agency to fit us in for the visuals.
Though before we could even get onto design, we had to finalise the packaging to know what dimensions we were working with. Environmentally friendly was a must and so the search for the glass bottles commenced. Now that in itself is not a simple task, we needed to find ones we liked that were immediately available, and in the right size.
But it gets even more niche, we were going back and forth between bottle suppliers (who were operating at a reduced pace due to COVID), the team who bottle our oil for us in the Cotswolds, and our designers. We’d find a bottle we liked but then would have to check that the nozzle dimensions worked with the filling machine’s that our bottlers had. We’d find that once we’d solved this, the bottle dimensions wouldn’t allow for good design, so it was back to the drawing board.
On top of all of this, since we didn’t have time to get a cutter made, if we were to find a printer that could do the job at the speed we required, we were limited to use set label dimensions they already had. Oh and 8 years running a business means you firmly know that throughout any process, something ALWAYS goes wrong.
Sounds impossible right? Well it seems that the universe was in our favour and we did it!
What I was reminded of through this is the power of being hands on, thinking on your feet, having flexibility and a Plan B, C, and D. Though the most important realisation was how valuable strong relations with the people you work with are. It could never have happened if it wasn’t for the flexibility, support and cooperation of Cotswold Gold who bottle for us and Dapple Studio, who on top of turning around a beautiful design so quickly introduced us to a printing legend called Kevin with a level of customer service that is so rare to find these days. It was a small job for him yet he pulled out all the stops to get us the labels we needed on time.
Last but definitely not least, our brilliant operations manager Kati led the project and through what I can only describe as telepathy, captured the elements of the process I had missed communicating. It was a mad scramble and we had a good laugh about it in the end!
Despite an early due date and some turbulence during birth, team and babies are doing well and we could not be happier!
