ONE TO WATCH
Company CV Name: Jimmy’s Iced Coffee Founded by: Jim Cregan & Suzie Cregan Founded in: 2010 Team: 4
“The iced coffee idea dragged me out of bed”
Playing it cool: Jim and Suzie on a promo drive
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and dealing experience between them. Growing up in the UAE, the pair partook in a couple of cheeky money-making endeavours. “We used to live in Sharjah, which is the emirate next door to Dubai and is a lot cheaper,” explains Cregan. “We went to all the Indian hang-outs. There was a place called Rolla where they sold fake Quicksilver and Billabong bags. I just bought them all up, went into school and made up some story that my uncle had flown over from the States and had bought over a whole load of backpacks. I said they were for sale for 100 Dirhams even though I had bought them for 20 Dirhams.” Another scheme saw them buying alcohol on the black market and selling it into schools; a risky move if ever there was one. “It was pretty naughty but we made good money out of that,” Cregan quips. This foray into the booze trade continued when Cregan and a friend established a venture called Spit Delivery in the UK a few summers back. It entailed rowing supplies of alcohol across to Mudeford Spit, a stretch of land near Christchurch comprising 345 luxurious beach huts. “That was quite a fun little business too,” he laughs. “We went round to every hut and gave them a menu of our drinks and a fridge magnet with our phone number on so that they could call up and say ‘I want a case of Budweiser’, ‘I want a bottle of wine’, ‘I want this that or the other’.”
(H)One to watch.indd 2
Cregan clearly had all the makings of a successful entrepreneur, but until that fateful day down under, he hadn’t had a solid enough proposition to turn his skills into serious bucks. Now, though, he did. “The iced coffee idea dragged me out of bed,” he says. “I was driven by that one thought of ‘you have to do this every single day until you can go and pick up one of your iced coffees wherever you go in the world’.” Soon enough, Cregan had secured a handy £100k from his parents and a contract was signed with a manufacturer. As for a name, that came easily enough. Cregan wanted to stand out from the crowd and how better to do that than to give the brand a personality, even if it was essentially his own? “In Australia, I was just called Jimmy the whole time so I just thought it was an ode to Australia to say ‘thank you very much for introducing me to iced coffee’,” he says. “Jimmy also has a nice ring to it, as opposed to Jim’s Iced Coffee or James’s Iced Coffee.” Needless to say, social media is the ideal sounding board for this personality. Anybody who happens to visit the Jimmy’s Iced Coffee Twitter page will have the pleasure of Cregan’s company as he responds to each and every tweet in his own unique way. So confident was Cregan in his iced coffee brand that he set his sights on upmarket department store Selfridges as a first port of call. “I was just so happy that we had
01/02/2014 13:27