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Nix & Kix is a refreshing soft drinks company that makes fruity flavours with a bit of ‘zing’ (just the right amount of cayenne pepper). Its drinks are always free of anything artificial and the whole supply chain is sustainable and vegan. The idea was born in 2014 and today, Nix & Kix have 7500 distribution points across the UK and Europe, from Nando’s to Tesco.
Julia Kessler, Co-Founder and COO, explains how elm is helping Nix & Kix build trust with retailers and driving a massive reduction in zero selling stores.
INEFFICIENT DATA PROCESSES
“Little things made managing our data super complicated. We have five or six different retailers and they all have a different date format and numbers. And that’s so, so challenging.”
LIMITATIONS WITH EXISTING SOLUTIONS
“We had individual dashboards for all of our customers, but we didn’t have a nice, easy overview. Google Data Studio quickly comes to its limitations – when you run out of data storage, you have to go into SQL or different data hosting services. Our retailers’ data platforms all have paid add-ons, but it’s really hard to justify the cost when you’re a small business.”
TIME SPEND
“It was time consuming to update data on a weekly basis. As a minimum, we spent 1.5 hours each week, but the challenge is when you have new data events. If you run a promotion in Tesco, you suddenly have data from 150 stores that aren’t your core stores. And that will all of a sudden make your spreadsheet explode. Managing new data would easily take half a day.”
A TOOL THAT ‘SPEAKS THE BUYER’S LANGUAGE’
“For challenger brands especially, the key is that you can speak the buyer’s language. Whether I’m in confectionery or in drinks, the conversations with buyers are always quite similar – its ROS, understanding zero selling stores, understanding where we have stock but no sales. And you can see that elm was built with those conversations in mind.”
WEEKLY ‘BUSINESS HEALTH’ SNAPSHOTS
“elm’s overview page gives us a quick snapshot of the health of the business. We can easily look at promos, traffic, store performance, ROS and identify where the issues were the previous week. It’s really great to have that on a weekly basis.”
LOCATION-BASED INSIGHTS
“One of the things that was always really important for us was understanding whether we were selling equally nationwide or if we had regional biases. Buyers would ask, “is it a London based proposition? Will you be able to sell in Cornwall or in Scotland?” elm has really helped us understand that where we excel is the South East, South West and the North.”
IMPROVING BUYER RELATIONSHIPS
“We were recently presenting elm data to one of the big retailers. The first thing the buyer said was ‘I’ve validated your data. And it matched 100%.’ Having sound data immediately creates trust, because the conversation isn’t about where the data is from – it’s about how we take that information forward. It’s just a much better conversation to be had.”
MASSIVE REDUCTION IN ZERO SELLING STORES
“We’ve reduced zero selling stores by an estimated 60-80%. That’s because with elm, we can respond to problems really quickly. This obviously helps with our overall Rate of Sale, which is one of the key measures for buyers.”
INSTANT DATA RESPONSES
“A retailer recently suggested our performance wasn’t where it needed to be, but had based this on inaccurate data. With elm, we were able to demonstrate within a couple of hours that their information was incorrect. Whilst big corporates can plan for a meeting far in advance, challenger brands have to respond immediately – elm helps you do just that.”
IMPROVED TEAM PERFORMANCE
“Being able to trust the data means the rest of the team is using it more. They might not be data experts but elm’s self-serve tool means they can all use it, and they are definitely more effective in their roles as a result.”
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To learn more about getting started with elm today, email hello@getelm.co or signup now.
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