Mr. Singh's
A family business from East London producing a range of tasty chilli sauces and cooking pastes.
- Location
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London,
United Kingdom
Categories: Food & Beverage Non-Digital Mixed B2B/B2C
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Investment
sought: - £95,004
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Equity
offered: - 8.41%
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Investment
amount: - £124,111
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £1,035,300
Idea
Introduction
We produce a range of delicious chilli sauces and cooking pastes using secret Kenyan recipes created by our dad Popa Singh (AKA Mr Singh himself).
Our business started in a garden shed picking chilli stems by hand and making sauce bottle by bottle.
Our goal is to be the UK's favourite chilli sauce brand and to have our products sold and enjoyed nationwide.
As well as our Original Chilli Sauce we have a smokey BBQ Chilli Sauce which is perfect for sultry summer get-together's! We strongly believe that our Hottest Chilli Sauce is the hottest commercially available chilli sauce in the UK using 2 of the hottest chilli's in the world.
Our cooking pastes are perfectly balanced to create quick and tasty meals full of nutritional goodness and fantastical flavours. Best of all they are gluten free too!
Intended impact
The impact we want our product to have on people is to make them feel happy and excited simply by having a bottle of Mr. Singh's in their hand. We then want them to go on and share Mr Singh’s with at least 3 more people they know.
Through our branding and storytelling we wish to connect with people and have them become a part of Mr Singh's family.
Whether they connect with us on social media, online or in person when purchasing we wish to make people feel great.
From a business point of view, our intended impact is to win as many new chilli loving customers as possible to grow our brand to become one of the biggest in the country
Substantial accomplishments to date
- Grown from shed start-up to one of the largest independent chilli brands in the UK.
- Supplying to Sainsbury's, Ocado, Booths, Asda, Londis, Tesco, Selfridges and a plethora of independent retailers.
- 12,000+ active social media following.
- Our last social media video has been viewed over 250k times.
- Featured on Buzzfeed, Vogue, Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, BBC Business, BBC Radio and more.
- After 6 months of trading we were featured on BBC 1.
- Doubled sales for 3 years in a row.
- Remained a family business and still in East London.
- Book called “Mr Singh’s Fabulous Fiery Cookbook” being released 27/11/16
Monetisation strategy
Our business model is to sell our range of products through our website and retailers across the country. We supply supermarkets and independent stores already and will focus on winning new customers where we already have distribution.
We will achieve this by raising brand awareness in 2016 and 2017 as well as implementing our bespoke promotion plan for independent stores.
Monetisation of our products through supermarkets will be driven primarily by price promotions.
Use of proceeds
Our intention is to use the money raised from Seedrs to increase rates of sale by raising brand awareness.
In order to achieve this we intend to invest in:
• Marketing activities such as targeted social media adverts
• Filming recipes and other video content
• Purchasing video point of sale displays
• Print media
• Shows, price promotions
• product demonstrations
• Promotional “Popa Singh” Tours
• New product development to expand our product range
• Purchasing stock
• Stock logistics
• Hiring staff
The company currently has a business loan worth £27,000. None of the funds raised will be used to pay this loan.
Market
Target market
Our target customer is on average 37.5 years old, married and a homeowner. Our customer is 52% female and 48% male who earns between £21,000 and £41,000 a year.
They buy our products once every 3 months and use them both as dipping and cooking sauces. They buy Mr. Singh’s because they love our family story, our brand and most of all love the products.
Typically we see that our consumer is an adventurous foodie and is looking to connect with a real brand run by real people. They are tired of faceless corporations with cheaply mass produced products.
They are someone who wants to enjoy tasty, well balanced flavour and someone who loves chilli heat! They also enjoy using their sauces in multiple ways giving greater freedom to explore new tastes.
We know from taste testing so many customers over the years that often, once people taste our products they love them and buy them again and again.
Characteristics of target market
The UK Chilli market is worth almost £19m per year and our goal is to eventually own at least 20% of it - £3.8m. The international market is worth £1.8bn and further revenue will be from here.
There are over 40,000 independent shops in the UK too. Our target is for 10% of them, 4000 stores, to be selling our products. This is in addition to supermarket listings.
The market has been growing steadily for the past 6-7 years and will continue to do so as ethnic flavours become normalised in British food and tolerance for chilli gets higher and higher.
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Marketing strategy
Aggressive targeted advertising to win customers and drive sales in stores.
• Leverage our experience of operating in this industry
• Leverage our fan base in our target demographic to reduce cost of acquiring a critical mass of followers (target of 50,000)
• Target key social groups in 24-44 demographic with live events, using engaging video content and product demonstrations to win new customers
• Tour of London and Midlands in conjunction with well known food locations
• Social media campaigns, powered by analytics from Facebook and Google
• Targeted social media ad buying in key social groups
• Investment into video point of sale for local stores and supermarkets where possible
• Investment into store and range expansion with supermarkets
We have distribution in a plethora of local stores in London and the home counties. In addition we supply Selfridges, Booths, Sainsbury's, Asda, Ocado and more.
We intend to reach our customers using the power of social media to drive them to our stores to enjoy what we have created. Our last social media video has been viewed over 250k times and we intend to release more content to reach more people.
Competition strategy
Our main competitors are multimillion £ organisations.
As a small business we have complete creative freedom to tell our story in our own way. We are aiming at a new generation of consumer who is active on social media and looking for more connection than our competitors are offering.
In the real world we can work more personally with local shops, be innovative and act fast against larger, mature brands.
Our success against these companies will be by building a brand based on a true story of an East London family who came together and built a business they really love with products created from true passion.
We aim for all of our marketing to always be fresh and different to what the competition is doing and brings us closer to our consumers. We expect that this emotional connection will allow us to continue to grow and help people enjoy new and exciting flavours with every meal they enjoy with our products.
As entrepreneurs we are doing our best to out-work the competition to deliver on our dream and for those who have believed in us.
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