Using Influencers to Help Scale Your Business with Jürgen Degrande

"I think influencers are a key driver in our brand building process. Today, you're talking a lot of start-ups and scale-ups, every euro we invest needs to come along with a certain return on investment and I think working with influencers, obviously targeted influencers, they can help scale your business, Build that awareness level on a very rapid basis, and add a considerable amount of investment. It's not a huge investment from going on the radio or TV campaigns but it does allow you, at an acceptable investment, to reach a larger audience."

Jurgen and his two co-founders Luis and Coen were university classmates, dog-loving entrepreneurs from Belgium. They went into business together after spotting a gap in the market for healthy, nutritious food for their dogs, who happened to be called Edgard and Cooper.

They founded the company in Belgium in 2014 and launched in the UK in 2016. The brand is unique and you'll find out why if you dive into the podcast. It's also the first brand in Europe to have full range in biodegradable packaging, something they're massively passionate about - sustainability. They now retail in ten countries, this is in less than 3 years with over 6,000 distribution points and are on track to double in the next 12 months. They've already achieved £10million in annual retail sales in less than 3 years of trading, which is pretty amazing and they've just launched into catfood in January as well.

So, these guys are scaling pretty rapidly hence it's an interesting story to find out how they're doing that in what's perceived to be a massively saturated market, dominated by a couple of big players.

Welcome to episode 110

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