Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Deland Jessop, founder of Counting Sheep Coffee, talks about the challenges of getting a new product on the shelves of major retailers and the steps he took to get there.
“I remember my wife constantly saying stuff like ‘I’d love a cup of coffee, but it’ll keep me awake at night,’ ... and it just kind of hit me: a coffee to help you relax. As soon as I had that idea, I immediately did a search on the Internet, found there was nothing whatsoever ... talked to some friends about it, did a bit of research, found out that the No. 1 reason women in particular drink coffee is to help them relax.
“It took me a long time. We had to figure out what we were going to put in it. So we experimented with a lot of things, and went and got a lot of decaf coffee, turned my house into a lab for a year. Mixing coffee with chamomile, mixing coffee with lavender, and my wife was the guinea pig to try it out on. She spat out a lot of things I brewed up. It didn’t taste very good. Finally nailed it with valerian root ... which is a natural herb that has sedative effects to it.
“This coffee is … Swiss Water Decaf that we source, and it’s mixed so there’s no chemicals involved in the decaffeination. It gets rid of 99.9% of the caffeine.
“I knew we had something when [my wife] started asking me to make it for her again.
“We applied for the Dragons’ Den episode, which was filmed back in April 2013. That was a raging success. We had all five of the dragons making offers even though we didn’t have any sales at that time. On the air we took the deal with Arlene [Dickinson] and Bruce [Croxon], and we were excited about it. Then one minute they were really interested, and the next minute they didn’t think they were going to work with us. Eventually we agreed that we were going to go forward on our own.
“The biggest deal we’ve had and the biggest support we’ve had is in Bed Bath & Beyond, who’s been with us since Day 1.
“They put us in a couple stores in the States, and we were the No. 1 selling coffee in the stores we were actually in.
“We’ve been pouring a lot of money into this so far, and it takes money, time and effort to start up a business, and it’s all kind of on a leap of faith. It’s difficult to have the drive to continue doing that. Being able to take ‘no,’ and pick yourself up, dust yourself off and continue moving on, is a very challenging thing to do sometimes, but you’ve got to do it.
“Fighting for shelf space is not easy, especially if you don’t have the contacts. We partnered up with a broker called Alliance Brokers, which is a very powerful organization down in the States that has all the contacts.
“We’re starting to get some traction now.”
