Abigail Forsyth

Obviously corporates has been a focus, but is that the main market?

Corporates and also the cafes and the bean roasters, because they often supply the cup with a brand name on it and now they’ve got a reusable alternative. There’s something in it for the cafe. I mean, they save on the cost of the paper cup.

What’s it been like educating those guys about this product? Has it been a difficult sell, given they’ve probably been used to doing things a certain way?

For some it has and for some it hasn’t. Take Campos Coffee, who aren’t really in Victoria but they are pretty cool in Sydney. We went to the Powerhouse Museum and we sold them at a market there and this girl said I could never take this cup to Campos Coffee, they are far too cool for these. And the next minute Campos calls and orders 10,000 of them. And so an order like that floods the market and stimulates interest and that’s the beauty of the cup, it’s just sold itself wherever it goes. Because if you take it into a café and they go “what’s that?” and you go “it’s a KeepCup and it’s made in Australia and it fits under the machine and it comes in lots of colours” then the café calls us. It’s been very viral how it’s worked.

Given that, have you put a lot of time, effort and money into marketing?

No, we’re just letting it grow like that. I think there’s something in the lifecycle of the product. There’s a certain segment of a market that wants to discover it and wants to own it and I think if you come over the top with advertising, hammering it home, it can really disenfranchise the people who are really pushing it for you.

Is it hard to plan given that the thing’s gone viral?

Yes it is, because when we engaged our sales team, I engaged people to go out there and cold call and then the next minute we’re getting enquiries everyday on the phone. So the people I was paying to cold call really just needed to be telemarketers. You’ve got to make sure you get your mix right in terms of how you employ out there in the marketplace.

You have set up an online store. Is that just to give people who see it in someone else’s hand a bit more information?

If you’re an employee of NAB and they give you a KeepCup, the first thing you probably do is go online to check it out. When we made the website, we did question whether we would have a store online and we didn’t know if we’d sell any online. And now we’re just about to redo it. It’ll launch in a couple of months where you can go in and pick your own colour combination for the cup. So instead of having those pre-assembled ones like we’ve got, you can go and pick.

Have web sales been reasonably successful?

Yes, they’ve been really successful and they’ve been all over the world. I mean we launched in June 2009 and by Christmas we were sending them to Germany, we were sending them to Iceland, we were sending them to the US.

In terms of going international, the web seems like a good platform but are there other things you want to do in terms of putting sales forces on the ground?

Well, we’re really in a state of investigation as to how we get people on the ground. Do we use a distributor, do we use sales agents, do we get employees, how do we structure it? My brother is in the UK, he’s set up over there now, he’s setting up a sales team and we’ve got a third party distribution in the UK to try and crack that market and the European market.

But they are quite different. I mean the UK is still quite dominated by tea sales and the main places you get coffee over there are the big chains. We succeeded here and in New Zealand because it was the small cafes that took us into their hearts and minds and that’s harder in the UK. And then in America they still love their dripolator, percolated coffee. I spoke to the guy who’s running Pret over there and he says it’s still 85% of the coffee sales at Pret USA are percolated coffee.

Has KeepCup suggested other potential product lines to get into?

Yes, we’ve got an espresso version of the KeepCup coming toward the end of the year and then we’ve got another few iterations that we’re working quietly away on in the background.

How have you handled the high demand?

We’ve just had to have a golden rule with our manufacturer to keep making them – we don’t know who we’re selling them to, but you just keep churning them out. We had to find warehouse space, we have had some supply problems with the printing on the bands, in that the volumes exceeded what we. So really we’ve just had to go in and get new partners and employ people and do what you have to do. But it has been fast growth.

So from your perspective, very different from the Bluebag area?

It’s been fantastic. It doesn’t go off like food!

KeepCup has taken your business in a whole different direction, but do you look back and think you should have done this earlier?

I guess you have to be philosophical and say if we didn’t do Bluebag, we never would have thought of the KeepCup and it was through our experience in that industry that we came up with this idea. And I think it’s been as well executed as it has because we engaged some good design partners and because we knew our own industry very well.

But I was talking to someone yesterday in a restaurant and saying if we call up and say your cups are not coming in today, they’re coming in tomorrow, the person says no worries. Whereas if you call up and say your sandwiches are going to be half an hour late, they’re ready to kill you.

That doesn’t make you want to get out of the cafe business entirely?

You never know, KeepCup is keeping us pretty busy.

Is that an issue where the new beast takes over the original business?

Yes. I think our Bluebag staff have felt a bit of a lack of love because it does start to consume you, and everyone working in an organisation wants to feel that it’s moving forward and there are plans afoot and you’ve got a strategy. And when you’re pressed for time and one yields more results, it’s hard to juggle your time.

So what have you done to ensure those Bluebag guys are still feeling loved?

What can I say? Not that much. I mean we just keep having meetings with them and ensure them that we are moving forward.

Is it just about explaining how all the different parts of the business work together?

It’s just the basic stuff of taking the time to talk to people and make sure that even though the Bluebag people aren’t part of the KeepCup project, they feel included, they feel informed. That’s when people really feel disenfranchised.

KeepCup features in the Small Business Heroes Exhibition that is part of the Victorian Government’s SME business festival, Energise Enterprise. For more information, click here.