The day Make It WHET became real

From samples to 16,500 cans

Of course, making a few bottles of something you like is very different from deciding to manufacture thousands of them. There came a point where we had to stop tweaking, trust what we'd created and put our own money behind it. There were no investors funding the experiment and no customers waiting for the first production run. We were paying for it ourselves with the fairly loose plan of getting as much Make It WHET as possible into people's hands and finding out whether anyone beyond us actually liked it.

Somewhere amongst all of this we also had to learn about things we'd never previously given a second thought to: can printing, ingredients, production quantities, shelf life, testing, packaging, pallets, storage and all the other decidedly unglamorous bits involved in turning a nice idea into something you can actually pick up and drink. Every conversation seemed to uncover another thing we didn't know, but gradually the list got shorter and production at Holden's in Dudley was booked.

Then we saw the first finished cans coming off the line.

It's difficult to explain how strange that felt. Gary had spent countless hours designing those cans on a computer, we'd looked at mock-ups and proofs until we could probably have drawn them from memory, but suddenly they weren't designs anymore. Strawberry, Lemon and Pineapple Make It WHET were being filled, sealed and packed into cases. We'd somehow gone from wondering whether we should have a go at this to owning just over 16,500 cans of the stuff.

There was just the small matter of where to put them.

We rented a storage unit in Hampshire and arranged for the first production run to be delivered. In our heads, this part was relatively straightforward. The difficult work had been done. The drink existed, the cans were finished and somebody was going to put them on a lorry, drive them to us and wheel the pallets neatly into their new home.

We really should have known better.

Delivery day

England had been playing the night before our delivery, we'd had about four hours' sleep and we arrived at the storage facility excited, exhausted and probably not operating at full capacity. Jaz, our driver, turned up with a lorry full of Make It WHET and almost immediately we discovered the first flaw in our carefully considered logistics plan: access to the storage facility was through an app neither of us had downloaded.

Once we'd finally managed to get ourselves into the building, we discovered problem number two. The pallets could get through the main entrance, but the pallet jacks couldn't manoeuvre them around the corners to reach our unit. There wasn't much clever problem-solving to be done at that point. Thousands of cans were going to have to make the final part of their journey by hand.

So that's how the glamorous first day of Make It WHET began: the two of us, running on almost no sleep, carrying case after case from pallets into a storage unit while wondering exactly how 16,500 cans could possibly look like so many more when you're moving them yourself. Thankfully Jaz was an absolute star, getting stuck in rather than standing there watching the chaos unfold, and somehow we eventually got everything that had arrived safely inside.

Everything that had arrived being the important part, because at some point we realised we were missing an entire pallet of Strawberry. After months of development, countless decisions and finally getting Make It WHET into production, we'd expected just over 16,500 cans and ended delivery day with closer to 14,000. Somewhere out there, a few thousand cans of Strawberry were apparently having an adventure of their own.

Despite the chaos, what we remember most is standing in that storage unit afterwards looking at all those boxes. Until that moment we'd experienced Make It WHET as an idea, artwork, development samples and a production run happening somewhere else. Now we could reach into a case, pull out a can with our name on it, crack it open and drink something that simply hadn't existed before we decided to have a go at creating it.

And that was probably when Make It WHET finally felt real.

We were knackered, sweaty, slightly overwhelmed and technically missing a sizeable chunk of our first production run, but we were also incredibly proud. We'd taken an old idea from Gary's hard drive, combined it with the drink Lou had been looking for and somehow turned the two into thousands of actual cans sitting in front of us.

The plan from there was pretty simple. We'd give loads of them away, get Make It WHET into as many hands as possible and find out what people really thought.

We certainly weren't expecting anyone to start ordering it.

That part came next.