I’m starting to think he isn’t looking for a sustainable business model, but rather an inflated price for the business. Now whether that’s for floating on the stock market or selling their stake I don’t know, but to me he seems to be running before he’s learned to walk, and either he’s so dim and short sighted he can’t see how leveraging such an expansion will leave a business in a precarious position (see Livia’s for an example or the many delis he opened in a short time and didn’t learn from) or he’s trying to inflate the price for the business as quickly as he can, will be interesting to watch how he gets her to agree to sell if that’s his plan!
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They will “compromise” with moving to the countryside…
What happened to Livia’s?
I feel like veganism was a massive fad tbh. And I’m not convinced that Ella has made great decisions. She’s said she’s turned down opportunities to do cooking shows, but that’s how people like Jamie Oliver and Mary Berry stay relevant.
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Because she can’t cook and she knows it.
and she did a couple. I honestly think that was the excuse she used because she did not get any requests actually.
I think the way she does vegan is a massive fad - always hopping on the latest trend, unsustainable because it's covered in plastic packaging, expensive. And I just don't think it works - like her style is sort of whole foods and vegan but she sells high fat, high calorie, complicated ingredient list convenience food. Her business is definitely part of the expensive vegan junk food and commodified 'wellness' bandwagon. Not necessarily her date balls or whatever but definitely a lot of the new stuff.
Obviously moving to lower meat and dairy etc I do think is here to stay but her style of food is very fad oriented. She's always jumping on the next trend in food but is never the first and never does it best.
Livia moved to a bigger office she’d rented and had a brand new kitchen installed there with high end appliances, marble worktops etc and had a dozen new hires in quick succession aiming for expansion….. right before a pandemic appeared. I don’t know how the kitchen was financed, but with the snowball that followed I suspect it wasn’t in cash. Her brand had multiple new products recently launched in quick succession and was mainly focused on commuter lunch sales at places like Boots, so when the pandemic hit and everyone became a remote worker, overnight sales plummeted. She survived thanks to her father lending money to the business (why her father and not a bank is an interesting question to ponder) Sales hadn’t recovered so she then sold shares in Livia’s via crowdfunding (again its curious she didn’t get a bank loan) this was under the guise of expanding the business, without ever letting on what kind of trouble they were in, and avoiding reporting any financials or business updates to shareholders for the entirety of her time on the crowdfund platform… within 12 months the company had become insolvent and the investments made by thousands of her devoted Instagram following were gone in an instant. Records showed that the company was heavily in debt, and that any proceeds from the sale would prioritise her father as beneficiary because of his previous loan. Shareholders have never received a single penny back. She hasn’t ever apologised for leading followers along and taking money under false pretences, her departure was very much a victim mentality, lots of sadness for herself and convenient amnesia for everyone else, she claims that she made no profit from the sale but the recently purchased multimillion pound home with a full back to brick renovation/extension and a garden in London was secure and safe throughout, and she’s spent the past year as a stay at home mum without an income so I wouldn’t say she was left destitute and struggling afterwards.
To watch the whole thing unfold was a fantastic lesson in how to balance growth with security, and to make sure you build on solid foundations. Over leveraging lead to a collapse, she risked it all on expansion being her saviour out of the mess and it failed.
Matthew closed down as much of DE as he could do to get a lower valuation to then purchase the remaining parts of the company from the bank in order to own it outright, now he’s expanding quickly to plump up the value and (I suspect) to either gain higher dividends for both of them to put towards a pile in the midlands or to float the company publicly (or both!). The trouble is an expansion this quick without a solid foundation is a veeeeeery risky gamble, yes they don’t have the loans that Livia did but they’re still leveraged with a high staff turnover, there will be hundreds of thousands of pounds outstanding, total apathy from the workforce in maintaining a balance and all it takes is one supplier or one retailer to fold and suddenly he’ll find himself forever chasing his tail to catch up.
Incredible intel. Genuine thank you for this overview!
Ella and CEO Matthew do have loans though… they used their house as collateral for it. And this is such a bad move. They basically tied their personal finances to their business. If DE goes down, their home goes with it.
Genuinely really interesting, thanks. I haven’t followed her for years, I stopped in 2019 along with Ella as I found the whole “I am super skinny yet eat tonnes of nuts every single day” disingenuous. In the same way I don’t believe Ella eats much of what she claims to.
It must be so hard for her to have built the brand and poured her heart and soul into it, to have lost it all and still see it on shelves in shops.
Also an interesting contrast to DE. I looked at the company accounts for Livia’s and there is an administrator report. Her Dad loaned the company £150k to try and keep it afloat, DE has been loaned more than that in the past by her mother, who is often also a shareholder of the companies as a result.
But no, Ella has never had any help and has done it all on her own hasn’t she… she’s never benefited at all from being born into one of the wealthiest families in the country, and all of us could have started a food brand and launched in supermarkets up and down the country if we’d wanted to.
I do think that they are treading into risky territory with this Waitrose thing. No other retailers will want to work collaboratively to grow the DE brand when they see the amount of money and resources that are going into the Plants at Waitrose brand. With 40 products going in not all of them are going to work, and the buyer could just turn around and delist with little notice.
It does feel like they’re putting too many eggs into the gilded basket, being sponsored by the most expensive supermarket during a cost of living crisis and recession seems counterintuitive…..
No risk to her though is it, they can easily be bailed out by her family.
I feel like we are mixing net worth with liquid cash sitting in the bank. Also her family’s assets have been split when her parents divorced and I’m fairly sure Ella got her trustfund and the bulk of her inheritance already.
Not to say she can’t lean on family but I’m not convinced they would pour millions into her business. Instead they would move to one of the family’s properties after they sink their own place…
Tieing your personal finances to your business is stupid and banking on your family bailing you out is never a good idea.
Trump and others got away with it because they did it before spcial media was a thing. Now you can’t live things down. Everything is online. If their business goes down, CEO Matthew will not get anywhere near any leading roles anywhere and Ella’s reputation as a food blogger or anything will be toast. So it would sting either way.
Agree with everything you say. I just meant in my comment, no risk compared to the average person who would never be able to put their house on the line as they have done, especially if they have two young kids. It really is a different world for her. Not to mention all the poorly thought out decisions they seem to make along the way, it seems like financial risk doesn’t come into the equation with them.
I’m pretty sure her mum is a minority shareholder of the top company. They’ve got the Sainsburies dynasty as security to bail them out of trouble.
Not to defend her on what her security net really is but her mom or even her grandparents do not own Sainsbury’s and the family is pretty big so the “sainsbury’s fortune” has been split between multiple people. The family altogether holds a tiny tiny share in the company. Yes they have money and cash and assets but net worth =/ liquid cash. And net worth can not be turned into the same amount of liquid cash fast.
Let’s say my net worth is $20 million. That means I might have about $2 million in cash, the rest is tied up in a stock portfolio, in real estates, pensions and various other investments. You can’t turn these into cash fast or at least not all of them and not without losing significant chunks on your assets.
This is why it is absolutely not a given her family or his for that matter would just toss millions or hundreds of thousands at them to bail them out and this is probably why it was a better option for them to take a loan from a bank rather than take money from family.
it also reflects better that a business managed to get first investors and then the business owners could personally guarantee such a huge loan.
She’s so full of tit, again not acknowledging her privilege nor the affects the pandemic had on people’s lives! As long as she still has her sugary snacks… and pretty sure she was at the phase of saying everything was HEAVEN
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How tone deaf can she be?! Covid isn’t even over for good and there are other new problems people have to deal with… but yay Ella is in love with her job again. Meanwhile some people can mot get a job or despite working their ass off can’t make ends meet.
Ahhhh...poor Ella. Evil COVID taking away her stockists. Christ, I work with secondary school children who can barely read or on camhs waiting lists so long they'll never get help. But at least they didn't have to experience the pain of losing stockists for their soups.
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