The juice is loose: Isle Organic beverages signs David Jones deal

A boutique bottler of premium organic beverages with a 50,000-year-old artesian water source has revealed that its range will be included in the lineup for David Jones’ new gourmet food and beverage departments in Sydney.

Sydney-based Isle Organic, which was launched by Richard Skelton and his wife Sonja in May 2020, offers sparkling artesian water infused with hints of certified organic fruit essence, with the drinks produced in both Australia and New Zealand.

As well as David Jones stores in Sydney, the drinks are also available in Woolworths Metro, Coles Local, Harris Farm, Hilton Hotels, WHSmith and Costco Australia and New Zealand, as well as overseas in Singapore.

Isle Organic CEO Richard Skelton said he was thankful to David Jones for including the brand in the line-up and was excited to see the range of Isle Organic drinks on display, while delivering a sustainable, plastic-free option in the water space.

“It was fantastic to be included in the David Jones line-up,” he told SmartCompany. 

“We were pretty surprised when they called. I thought it was spam when I got their email, I wasn’t even 100% sure it was real.

“They are a really easy team to deal with. They wanted something that matched their aesthetic, as well as having a brand that did all the right things in terms of the drink. 

“I think it worked really well for what they were looking for, an organic premium offer that they didn’t really have.”

Isle Organic now has six different flavours in the core range — Tropical Dragonfruit, Wild Blackberry, Watermelon & Cucumber, Paradise Pineapple, Kiwifruit Apple and Summer Lemon — with two more coming over the summer period in a seasonal offer.

Skelton says the idea for the business started when Sonja was pregnant with their first son.

“She said she wanted something that didn’t have sugar in it and it had to be organic,” he explains.

“I just went on this mission to try and build her one. We found a deep well with artesian water that was untampered and untouched.

“From there I just flavoured it with organic fruits. What we were doing prior to that was the traditional way of chopping up fruits and putting them in the water jug.

“Then we commercialised it and scaled it all up to interest. After that, the pandemic kind of hit and there weren’t really many places to sell it. So we got in touch with Harris Farm, who took it in and it just exploded from there.”

Skelton confirmed that while the water source Isle Organic currently uses is 50,000 years old, there are other much older wells they may use down the track.

Isle Organic has three employees, which includes Skelton, Sonja and a colleague.

The business also does a lot of outsourcing.

“The secret sauce really is finding good and really strong partners that we can outsource to,” says Skelton.

“A lot of that is in the logistics. We’ve got a really strong team who we outsource our logistics operation to and they have warehouses in Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland. 

“So they handle a lot of the freight, and that’s a big piece of it. 

“We also rely on our accountant for bookkeeping. So we’re mostly pinned back to a sales and marketing operation, which is as much as we can handle at the moment. 

“We will bring a lot of it in-house over the next 12 months. So we’ll be doing a fair bit of hiring in the next probably 12 to 24 months as it grows.”

SmartCompany contacted David Jones for comment but a response was not available prior to publication.