Hope. Courtesy: Eliza Dussault.
One of the things that always strikes me most about young people is their amazing capacity for hope, or as they say in French, ‘espoir.' I think that’s part of what I love most about teaching at a university with undergraduate students where I’m surrounded by this feeling.
Just look at the article photo above. Our daughter was on a walk to raise money for cancer research with her school. For me, this photo embodies what I visualize when I think about hope –in all of its effervescence, joie de vivre, resilience and with a clearly positive belief in the possibilities held by the future.
2008 was a year filled with business challenges, for us, as it was for most of the industrialized world due to the major financial crisis and resultant recession at that time. As a producer of high-end packaged goods, we were definitely in the category of ‘we can delay this purchase until later’ and the result was that much of our industry went into plunge mode, like many other industries and this continued well into 2009.
But with all massive change usually comes, hand-in-hand, the opportunity for renewal. Luckily for me, being married to an always hopeful and optimistic entrepreneur, Charlie went into what I would call full-out re-envisioning mode. What type of lemonade can we make with these lemons? Or, should we make a lemon meringue pie or, possibly, look for other fruit?
I looked back at another period of time which was equally challenging for us (described in a previous post, "Keeping Your Head Above Water When Riding A Wave Of Market Turbulence"), in 2003 and can definitely see some parallels. Many of the same dynamics were at play due to the end of the early 2000’s recession combined with the strike of the employees of our biggest (and, at that time, sole) retailer.
Here are some of the strategies we employed.
Most importantly, we decided to renew and expand our vision. By 2008, we still had the vision to make an international high-quality Ice Cider, but we expanded this to include a new and different category of alcoholic beverages: spirits. Ice Cider is based on a fermentation process, so incorporating spirits into the vision meant developing a new capability set around distillation.
We began some limited distillation in a new facility. Since we already had much of the equipment required for bottling and production, we were well positioned to start experimenting with some new types of alcohol. The first was a premium gin, Ungava, and we went on from there to other categories, ones which would nicely counterbalance both the seasonality in our cider business and buying opportunities with the market. Not only would it offset the seasonality, but would utilize our bottling line to a full capacity.
Since the vision was renewed to incorporate a range of high-end local spirits across a range of categories, we were able to leverage local spices and ingredients to create products that had high appeal to the local market and were also unique and difficult to copy. This strategy offered a variety of positioning opportunities in the market across categories but all based on the idea to focus on local ingredients. Quebeckers are decidedly outgoing in their experimentation in the food and drinks department and have provided a ready market to try our new recipes from the earliest days of startup with our Ice Cider through to the new spirits products.
As a result of this visioning activity to broaden our scope and enter the spirits category, this period of time offered up many challenges for us, but it also presented perhaps our greatest market opportunity yet.
