Jo Fairley’s Strategies for Success

In 1991, Jo Fairley co-founded the pioneering organic chocolate brand Green & Black’s with her husband, Craig Sams. In hindsight, it seems almost reckless. The country was entering a harsh recession, the chocolate market was saturated, and there was little understanding of organic food at the time. As if the gambit wasn’t risky enough, Fairley bootstrapped the business with her own savings.

And yet. Ten years later it had created an all-new category of luxury organic chocolate, of which Green & Black’s was the market leader, and sales were on a steep upwards trajectory. From 2002 to 2005, revenue rose from £4.5 million to £29 million—at which point Fairley sold her brand to Cadbury’s, staying on as an ambassador.

Looking back on her journey at the HSBC Strategies For Success event, Fairley said that she views her achievement less as a feat of commerce than a feat of imagination. “It’s the ultimate in creativity,” said Fairley, “to turn an idea into a business.” She also shared four essential lessons from her path to the top…

Green & Black’s was founded during an economic downswing. While Fairley was determined that her product would be an affordable luxury—“something that you could buy without feeling like you were having a massive splurge”—she knew she would have to ruthlessly protect her margin.

That, she explains, meant she was forced to become a thrifty business owner. “I always joke that you'll never get in trouble with me in the office for anything, except if I see pens on a stationery request, because the world is full of free pens,” she said. “From a business point of view, starting during a recession was a fantastic lesson, because it made me really, really conscious of never wasting money.”

For nine years, Green & Black’s didn’t spend a penny on ads. “I think this is where a lot of companies waste a lot of money in the early days,” said Fairley. Instead, she did what marketers call ‘product seeding’. Fairley sent her chocolate to as many people as possible, from restaurateurs to magazine editors. “Even if you throw it in the bin, it has actually lodged in your brain,” she says.

This created word-of-mouth that led to an extraordinary breakthrough. A bar of chocolate made it to a dinner party attended by Lady Sainsbury, the wife of the owner of Sainsbury’s supermarkets. She suggested that the chain stock it, and Sainsbury’s buyers got in touch. “Back then, Sainsbury’s was the leading supermarket in the UK. That meant that when we came to speak to other supermarkets, we were very much pushing at an open door.”

At trade shows in the 1990s, Fairley would strike agreements with practically every distributor who asked to stock her chocolate abroad. But when Green & Black’s accepted private equity investment, the first thing their new partners did was “take a massive red pen to our exports”—at the time, some 40 different markets.

Fairley was surprised, but her partners pointed out that some geographies offer vastly better economies of scale than others. It cost the same to send half a pallet of chocolate to Estonia, for instance, as it did two whole containers to the USA. “That was a really important lesson for me in strategy generally, because it is incredibly tempting to chase every rainbow,” said Fairley. “Actually, if you choose two or three opportunities, you’re going to have the time and the resources to develop them properly.”

While Green & Black’s was an organic brand, it was wrapped like a luxury brand. This was one of the most unusual aspects of the chocolate, said Fairley. “It wasn’t all ‘earth, shoes and lentils’,” said Fairley, “and that was really crucial for making that leap to the mainstream.”

At the same time, Fairley used the inside of the wrapper to print the story of Maya Gold, its Belizean farmers and the Fairtrade Mark. “As you tasted the chocolate, you would be reading about the difference it had made to the community that grew the chocolate. That was incredibly powerful. And I still get people now coming up to me going, ‘I remember my first taste of Maya Gold, reading the inside of the wrapper at the same time. It was like magic.’”