Disrupting the Drinks Industry with EzTenda

Sam Showering comes from a family renowned for creating iconic drinks like Babycham and Brothers Cider, running one of the UK’s largest production facilities with over 2 million bottles produced daily. As the founder of the multi-award-winning drinks brand Pedrino Spritz, Sam experienced firsthand the frustrations of the traditional tendering process for drink listings. This led him to found EzTenda to offer a smarter way to do drinks business.

How did your family first get started in the drinks industry?

My family has worked in the drinks industry and hospitality for hundreds of years since the 1600s. They had three pubs, and the opposite of the road was a brewery called Kilver Street Brewery, which the family didn't own. And one day, there was a fire at the brewery. This would have been in the early 1600s. So there was a big fire at the brewery, and when the fire raged and swallowed up half the factory, one of my ancestors ran out and said, hey, look, I'll help you put out the fire. I've got loads of people in the pub. They can come and help, and we'll put this fire out, but I want to buy the brewery right now. So they made a deal with the brewery and flames in front of them, signed and shook on it. They put the fire out, and that was the very first factory and brewery my family had ever bought. They've been in the game like that since.

They also had orchards where they pressed apples and pears and made ciders. They also made beers, wines, and spirits. In 1960, they started a brand called Babycham, a popular product in the 60s. They sold around 3.5 billion units. It was a massive scale, and they went on a big acquisition or spree of Harvey's Bristol Cream, the world's most popular Sherry. The list of drinks is really big; there are a lot of cool brands in the family history.

What inspired you to start Pedrino Spritz, and how did it lead to the development of EzTenda?

I started Pedrino Spritz because I had a great friend with whom I was living in London and was really interested in drinks, too. We came up with some ideas, and one drunk night, we said, hey, let's do it, let's start a drinks business together. And we did it. After a short trial period, we got some good sales. We got accepted into Waitrose and Diageo, the biggest spirits distributor in the world based here in the UK. They called us up and asked us if we'd be interested in partnering with them so they could invest. They invested in our business, and we took it as far as possible. Then we got to the fun bit, which is COVID. COVID was a tough time for all drinks businesses, and we still, all the drinks businesses and hospitality aren't out of the woods yet in terms of how difficult their conditions are.

There are very difficult conditions, especially in the UK, with inflation, cost of living, and consumer behaviors, especially for startup drink products. I recognized this long before COVID, and it had always frustrated me not to have transparency when selling to venues. They do a deal with somebody, and it locks everyone else out to be able to negotiate and speak to, and often it's like first come, first serve. But the buyer would have just done it with anyone who walked in. So you just have to be first. If we put everyone in a competitive marketplace, we give totally easy, frictionless systems to put their offers forward and their brands forward with their deals. Then, we create a more efficient marketplace for everyone. For the brands, they don't have to send reps around everywhere, and for the venues, they don't have to meet all these people randomly. They can just post their stuff online. They can get all the best deals.

What does it take to create a successful new drink brand?

Things have changed a lot recently; everything is now a lot more expensive than it was. Glass, for instance, is now nearly double. So, the price of glass products doubled. For some of the raw materials, if you're picking them up from Europe, for us with Brexit, it is much more expensive, as well as production because energy costs are so high here in the UK. But I would say from a conservative standpoint, when starting a product, you need to do a lot of testing and make a great liquid. You need to make a great label and bottle mold. You need to make a great business plan. You need to have a great name and a great brand storybook. To get to that stage, I would say a conservative amount is usually 150,000 pounds to start a drink sprint, and that's to start it. That's before you sold a single bottle. That's probably going to be 150,000 in the hole. That would probably last you for your first year to get a product out the door and made and get you into the stage of raising a little bit more money. Then you'd be onto a 400 to 500,000 pounds raise. And you'd be looking for your first hundred customers, first hundred venues, which are perfect to your brand, line up a distributor, get enough stock made, hire a couple of people in the back office for sending samples and making a great website, making a great social media accounts. That would get you to the stage where you could raise again.

Can you share more about EzTenda and how it tackles the challenges you faced with Pedrino Spritz, like the lack of transparency in selling to bars and supermarkets?

Easy tenders idea was, you know, the very first idea when I thought there just needs to be some website to let people know when they're tendering. Tendering is like inviting all drink brands of a specific category to come and say, here's my best deal. Here's my product; it works for your bar, and you should consider it. However, these tenders only went to a few people because they are limited to the buyer's access and people they know. It's a people industry, which I love; it is very people-related. It's a really good, fun industry to be in. Everyone knows each other. But then, ultimately, it's just down to access. And so giving the whole market access, making it a totally free and open marketplace, gives everyone a better chance to get these deals, which otherwise they're locked out of. So, access is number one.

I'd say the number two, venues want to stock, let's say, 300 different products, and they're picking from a wholesale list that may have around 12,000 different products. Which 300 out of the 12,000 should they choose? Each of those products they're choosing value that venue differently from each other. Suppose you're a seaside restaurant with a seaside gin; the seaside gin might pay more to be stopped there than the gin made in the city. So what our software does is find the perfect product for the perfect venue via data, and you can offer them a deal specific to how much they will sell for the year ahead. And this in the industry is unheard of. You just have to take everyone at your word. I just have to go - Hey Jozef, how much rum are you selling at your bar this year? And you go, I don't know, like a thousand bottles. And I'm like, are you sure? That sounds a lot, and I've got to trust you. Whereas if it's online and it's digital and there's proof, you know, we get people uploading their volumes digitally onto our websites. It's a transparent process, which gives everyone a much faster speed to get value from each other.

I'm very proud that we focused on a specific problem - the tendering problem. That's what we made our business about. We call it EzTenda because we're making the tender process easy, streamlined, fair, open, and transparent.

How did you validate your idea in the early stages, and what were your first steps to get started?

Sudolabs taught me a lot of this. It wasn't like I had a plan to validate it. I've never done technology validation before. Of course, we've done things with drinks. We've had focus groups and tasters, but this was a very different thing for me. We had a concept, and we worked on it in Figma. We did user interviews with pub owners, brand owners, myself, and others. I think Jan Koscelansky, Sudolabs' CPO, is the best for product discovery; he's an incredible guy. We built it out into Figma, and then once we agreed on a scope, we built a product in Bubble. We built a product in Bubble in under five days, which was amazing because we had this product and did a trial. We did a gin of the month to a pub just down the road. Then we invited six gin brands to compete to be the gin of the month, and they could offer listing fees, free stock, retrospective discounts, and marketing budgets, and it was seamless. Everyone placed their bids, the venue picked a winner, and it worked. We got loads of feedback because we made things some things very restrictive to start with. The one thing I learned about doing that product discovery phase is to keep things as frictionless as possible. You want the user to be able to enter almost free field at any time, anything that you want, and then as long as 95% of users are all entering similar data, then you can make it fixed, but to keep it, you know, unrestricted first. So, we unrestricted a lot of the data entry fields for EzTenda before we started. And then we built an MVP in only six weeks after that.

So, how long has your business been around, and what stage is it currently in?

Our MVP product has not changed much since then, but it's a very polished product now. We've serviced thousands of pubs. We've done around four million pounds worth of bids so far. In the first quarter of 2023, we grew at 41% per month, month-to-month growth. We've seen a 700% increase in user activity.

“We'll have hundreds of outreach just going on all the time rather than focusing on just these small things.”

We've had new hires, and we're just going to keep pushing the business and getting those growth rates, those great metrics, great integrations, get a huge network effect from these integrations, and keep taking the business to where it will go. The platform is now part of people's everyday schedules. Brands wake up, check EzTenda, place bids on EzTenda, and return to their day. It's like part of everyone's routine, which is really exciting for us.

What drives you to be a founder, and what fascinates you most about the journey?

I never really think of myself as a founder. I think I'm an opportunist. If I see something that interests me that needs to be changed or is an opportunity, I'll go for it. I won't wait around. That's probably one reason why I am where I am. But when I have a team of people around me that I really like and trust and want to work with, I just feel part of a team. I'm not differentiated as a founder. We're all on this journey together, doing this job, doing this. We're on this mission together now, and we're going to complete it no matter what, together. That's the feeling that I get.

“I think if we can develop an environment in which everyone loves repeating positive behaviors in the business, then that's just a really cool place to be.”

I really like the autonomy of rewarding people in the business. To be able to say, actually, do you know what? You guys have done a really good job. We want to reward you guys for doing that. That's been amazing. I love those conversations we've had with people, you know, in recent history, and I want to continue doing that for people. Everyone holds people accountable so much, and they have all these three monthly reviews and performance reviews. It's just so much better to have one-on-one strong relationships with your staff that you can reward as they do well. You're rewarding positive behavior, and you're going to have a very positive workplace. That's my fun bit. That's the bit that I like having. If I lost that power, that would be less fun.

Have these handpicked highlights sparked your curiosity? You won't want to miss the full conversation with Sam Showering on our YouTube channel or your favorite platform. The episode dropped on July 11th, 2023.

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