The "Telegraph Business Club" interviewed Harry for the "Secrets of Success" column. You're right - printing stuff in a major broadsheet is an odd way to keep a secret...
Harry Briggs runs Firefly Tonics with school friend Marcus Waley-Cohen. The company started trading in 2003 and shifted an impressive 43,493 bottles in year one. By the end of 2007 it is selling near the four million mark annually. The company’s aim is “to build a reputation as the world’s healthiest, most effective natural drinks” - and it’s not doing too badly.
The pair got into the health drinks sector after researching the market for a friend’s dad. He was looking to import a Japanese water that claimed to cure all ills. Months of looking into the market, the potential and the products on offer eventually led to nothing as far as the water was concerned.
But it had opened the two friends’ eyes to some potential and they decided to do something for themselves. “We looked up the most prominent herbalists in Britain and asked them what herbs would make an effective detox, wake-up and chill-out formula,” says Briggs.
Eventually the pair came across Michael McIntyre, president of the European Herbal Practitioners Association and a trustee of the Prince of Wales's Foundation for Integrated Medicine, and Andrew Chevallier, formerly a senior lecturer in Herbal Medicine at Middlesex University. The experts were keen to get involved in the business and, working as consultants, the drinks formulas started developing.
Next up was deciding on the name for the business. “When you start out in business, developing a product, you are in a bubble. You think it is the best product the world has ever seen and that it will be front page news. Of course it isn’t.”
Briggs says friends were supportive face-to-face but he was after objective opinions, so started surveying people via emails and online. “People were a lot more brutal,” he says, “but it really helped when we were thinking about the name for the drinks. We thought ‘Eye’ was a great name. No one else did. We then thought, ‘How about we call it Marcus and Harry’s’? People said it sounded like a couple of posh blokes. But everyone liked Firefly so it stuck.”
Their big break was the first break: getting into Harvey Nichols. Briggs says: “Harvey Nichol’s wanted an exclusive six-month deal to stock the drinks but we managed to agree on one month as we really needed to shift a lot of bottles, according to our business plan.” From that initial order, the orders started coming in thick and fast.
We got a call from the buyer from Collette, the Parisian department store. She had been in London, looking at what Harvey Nichols was selling, and ordered on the strength of that. A lot of buyers do that, apparently.” Firefly now lists Selfridges, the Hilton Tokyo and the Burj Al Arab as customers, but it has turned a few down.
“Harvey Nichols doesn’t want to go out and see the drink being stocked at half the price in Asda, so we don’t stock there,” Briggs says. It’s exclusivity like this that has made the company what it is.
By Jamie Oliver
