Pods, my thoughts.FOD is dovetailing the Juice Lab under their...

Pods, my thoughts.

FOD is dovetailing the Juice Lab under their new acquired brand Original Juice. In marketing terms this is admitting that Juice Lab has failed and that the Original Juice brand will now be the flagship and carry Juice Lab.

We can debate whether the purchase of Original Juice was clever or not. The fact that FOD got it cheaply tells me that it was declining fast. The presentation states that the consumers were 'older' in profile.....this tells us something.
That said, the attempts to re position Original Juice towards a younger more dynamic consumer look positive.....time will tell.

FOD's weakness and the reason Juice Lab and Kombucha have failed...yes, I said failed, is for two reasons primarily.

1) They did not build a business with a core range of SKU's first. They did not build the sales, then launch new products.
2) They did not secure a consistent distribution of the correct SKU's across all retailers. (Layman's terms...their product offering across retailers was a dogs breakfast. There was no consistency. (Compare to Coke or Pepsi....gold standard, I admit)

This is marketing 101. They got it woefully wrong......and are now paying the price.
Points 1) and 2) are not just my musing's. These are facts.

Instead, they had weak distribution across different retailers, different flavours and different sizes. There was no consistency.
Sales never grew, products got deleted and then they threw new flavours and sizes at the problem.
Then the downward spiral began with what us marketer's called 'churn'. SKU's in then out and then more in.
If anyone reading this works in Supply Chain Logistics or Manufacturing you will agree. Increased SKU churn in this process is poison. Costs and complexity of Supply Chain increase significantly.

So now their last hope (for the local business) is to re launch or re invigorate the Original's Juice brand to carry the others. However, this will take serious amounts of advertising $ to achieve this......money they do not have.

FOD are punting that the brand recognition of Original is still strong enough to get them out of this unmitigated disaster with Juice Lab etc.....
A lot of $ spent to get us to this point....

So do I think they have a good strategy..??

No I don't.

IMO this is a last gasp. If they don't rebuild Original Juice with massive advertising then they will lose the farm.

But why worry, we still have China....