# How Ed met Jamie Laing and started the business

- **Episode:** [125](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/125.md) (2024-09-05)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** founders, jamie-laing, business-partnership, startup
- **Time:** 4:07–6:53 (start 247s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/125?t=247](https://truthliesandwork.com/125?t=247)

---

[4:07] Leanne Elliott: How did you meet, Jamie? How did this business partnership start?
[4:10] Ed Williams: It was through mutual friends after university. So I was in I was interested in design and marketing. I studied industrial design at university, which was 100% the wrong course for me, but always much more interested in the brand and logo that you put on a product than the nuts and bolts of it. And Jamie and I met through mutual friends. He had this sort of crazy idea in his head to start something called Candy Kittens, and he didn't quite know what that was. And when we met, it was just sort of a little bit like a light bulb turning on. We both came together And before I knew it, it's, you know, rolling and we were off to the races and things were happening. It's been lots of ups and downs. I suppose the cliché that everyone talks about, this kind of roller coaster, I'm not sure if it has been like that. It's sort of been a little bit like a plane on the runway sort of trying to take off and constantly running out of runway. We were a sweets company without sweets for the first 2, 2 and a half years. We had a name and an idea in our minds, But we didn't quite get the product where we wanted it to be. So we— because Jamie was on a TV show, the name got out there and we sort of had awareness of what we were doing before we had anything to show anyone, which was quite interesting and made for some sort of challenging times. Right now, if you fast forward to today, we're in every major supermarket in the UK. We have presence across Europe and North America. But UK grocery, the supermarkets, is really our kind of heartland, if you like. And our brand awareness has also grown to a reasonable level that we're quite proud of. Lots of people in the UK, if you're interested in sweets and you buy sweets regularly, you will have hopefully heard of us. But it hasn't always been that. So we were that sweets company without sweets. Then we got the product and it took us a while to sort of figure out what was right and wrong about that. There were— turns out there were quite a lot of things that were wrong with it and we hadn't of cracked it first time around. And then we, uh, had to convince people that 2 young guys with no former experience in food and drink, um, no sort of professional skills or experience really up until that point, were able to justify space on supermarket shelves and deal with these big businesses and compete against multinational kind of corporations. Um, so there's been lots of different challenges along the way, and I think we've We've got to a point now where we've proven all of those doubters and haters wrong. We've shown that there is a concept here that has legs and demand, and now it's about how far can we really take that. So we no longer worry about sort of paying the bills and whether or not we will or won't make it, which we did for a very long time. And now it's more, okay, we've got something, how far can we take it?