A brand looking for a product
Gary has spent all of his career as a graphic designer, creating and building brands for other people. He's always loved doing it, but there's also something slightly strange about spending months immersed in a business, helping shape its personality and how the world sees it, then handing everything over and moving onto the next project. For years there had been an itch to create something of his own and find out what happens after the brand launches rather than walking away at exactly that point.
Make It WHET actually existed long before the drink did. Gary had created the name, the beginnings of the identity and the hidden H that still sits at the heart of the logo today, but there was one fairly significant problem: there was nothing to sell. It was a brand without a product, so it sat on a hard drive for years, occasionally resurfacing before being put away again because there was never quite a reason to do anything with it.
Lou had almost exactly the opposite problem. She didn't need a brand; she wanted a drink.
Whenever we went out, she'd look through the soft drinks and usually end up ordering tap water. Traditional soft drinks were often too sweet for her, while the healthier end of the fridge seemed to go too far the other way. Drinks would promise all sorts of wonderful fruit flavours on the can, only for her to take a sip and wonder where the flavour had gone. She wasn't looking for a health drink or something with absolutely everything stripped out of it. She just wanted something refreshing, with plenty of flavour but less sweetness, that she'd actually be happy to order and pay for instead of another glass of water.
Two problems, one answer
We can't remember the exact conversation when the penny finally dropped, but at some point these two completely separate frustrations collided. Gary had a brand looking for a product and Lou was looking for a product that didn't seem to exist. What if the answer to both problems was the same thing?
That was really the beginning of Make It WHET as it exists today. There was no grand plan to disrupt the drinks industry and we certainly didn't sit down with a market report and decide there was a lucrative gap we could exploit. We simply wondered whether we could create the drink Lou wanted: something sitting between under-flavoured waters and over-flavoured soft drinks, with enough flavour to actually taste of something without the sweetness taking over.
Neither of us knew anything about making drinks, which was a fairly obvious obstacle, but we knew what we wanted and started asking questions. Those questions eventually led us to Lawrence at No Name Drinks and, for the first time, there was someone who could help us work out whether the idea in our heads could become an actual drink.
Over the months that followed, Make It WHET started to become something we were building together rather than just talking about. That's probably been one of the nicest and most unexpected parts of the whole thing. Twenty-five years after first working together, we've rediscovered just how much we enjoy it. We're very different people and approach problems from completely different directions, but somehow that seems to make the end result better. It's also given us something to share and build while we're on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which has brought us closer despite the ridiculous distance between us.
We still didn't know whether anyone else would actually want what we were creating, but eventually there was only one way to find out. We decided to back ourselves, put our own money behind Make It WHET and turn the idea into something real.
That decision ultimately led to Strawberry, Lemon and Pineapple, and an order for just over 16,500 cans.
Which, given we'd started with a brand without a product and a woman who just wanted something other than tap water, felt like quite a leap.
