Your dad was one of the founders of Mr Whippy. How influential was your dad’s ice-cream business in your decision to enter the food industry?
It definitely played a major part. Growing up there’d be discussions around the table at night about the business. It did seem normal to me. But the fact that my dad really loves what he does was very infectious and inspirational, and that also played a part in me starting a business.
Hotel Chocolat is seen as a luxury brand but it has a range of accessible to high-range price points. How did you decide on the pricing structure?
We started with the idea. Our mission was to make chocolate exciting again. When we started, chocolate in England was at an all-time low; it was extremely boring and there was just no innovation or excitement about it. We knew that the ingredients had to be the best and the price kind of came out of that. We didn’t want it to be too expensive so that we could only sell it in Knightsbridge but then we didn’t want to compromise on the ingredients either. We offer accessibly priced chocolate but also expensive chocolate costing over £100.
How did you decide on your distribution strategy?
Well, we certainly didn’t want to sell through supermarkets. That was one of the factors we felt strongly about; we felt supermarket chocolate had become boring and rubbish quality. So firstly we established an online business, which was selling direct to customers. It was hard to get off the ground – it took six years to get going – as we realised that the idea of selling chocolate and waiting a day before it arrived was counterintuitive to what most people want to do. Many want to buy it and serve it up right now. But we built up our customer database like that and so when it came around to opening our first store we had a strong support base.
What key challenges have you faced along the way?
We launched our first website in the late 1990s and we were too early for the market [so establishing an online business was a struggle]. But then part of the brand has always been about doing things differently. Our recipes are different, distribution is different, we train people in-house at a school of chocolate [in Covent Garden, London] to be specialists. Our aim was to change everything. And from that we came to the logical conclusion that we had to buy our own cocoa plantation and become farmers [Hotel Chocolat acquired the 130-acre Rabot estate in St Lucia in 2004].
We had to get close to the cocoa. But we didn’t realise that through that, our approach would change completely. We looked at everything [in our production process] from a cocoa grower perspective rather than that of a chocolate maker. For example, we realised we could make cocoa drinks, rather than just hot chocolate drinks, with just a bit of powder through in. So we went back to grinding the cocoa beans and adding skimmed milk, took a little stand at Borough Market [in south London] and sold it from there. If you’re a traditional chocolate company, that would never have occurred to you to do.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
My business partner Peter [Harris] will say I’m a natural, glass half full kind of person. If something doesn’t work immediately, it doesn’t mean it’s not working, it means it hasn’t quite finished yet. For example, there’s plenty of ideas we looked at 10 years ago and now are recycling and bringing back to market. Sometimes we were just too early. I have no regrets.
What’s been your proudest moment?
When our cocoa estate was up and running we hosted Prince Charles on a tour around it. Seeing the effect of his visit – on the faces of the cocoa growers on the island, their families, our team and my dad (who escorted him around) as well – was such a great moment. It was great seeing how proud it made everyone feel.
You floated the brand [with a £167m valuation] earlier this year. Why did you decide to go public?
It felt like the right time to float a minority of the business. We knew it would help us tap development capital [to take the money and develop the company further through investing in manufacturing, for example], and it would enable me and Peter to convert some shares into cash. It meant we’d be able to forward plan for the company, and enable the employees to participate [in the company] through the shares. We continue to be the guardian of the brand – we still have majority of the shares. It meant we could continue to develop and grow; we’ve invested some of the money into our manufacturing base in Cambridgeshire.
You’ve worked with your co-founder Peter Harris for more than 20 years. How have you maintained such a successful partnership?
There are two reasons. One is that we have a developed an unusual sense of humour and that has saved us when we’ve had the blackest discussions about things. We’ve been able to use humour to oil the wheels. And secondly, it’s mutual respect for each other’s abilities. We are quite different, but we work well together.
What advice do you have for burgeoning entrepreneurs?
I didn’t finish my degree at Sheffield. I basically moved to France to learn French. A few years into setting up the business and realising we had something good on our hands and not wanting to mess it up, I did a short part-time course called the Business Growth Programme at Cranfield School of Management.
It was just unbelievable, a bit like an MBA, but without the boring bits. Everybody on the course was an entrepreneur, and the conversations you would have and the quality of the learning was transformational. People rave about it. If you can afford £10k, it’s worth it. When I came back after doing it I was more confident in my abilities. I now had instinct plus fact. It just made me more confident to push through with my decisions.
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