Despite its premium-price, Mockingbird Raw Press became the UK’s fastest-growing smoothie brand, and the start-up doubled its team-size from four to eight staff in only three years.
Mockingbird’s design has been crucial to the smoothie brand’s success. It empowered the challenger’s strategy of reshaping the smoothie category into a good, better, best model and the small but mighty brand is now the premium go-to option. The success is a David versus two Goliaths story; since its launch in 2020, Mockingbird has disrupted the dominance of Innocent and Naked to become the number one contributor to overall category growth.
B&B studio created Mockingbird’s compelling brand world, from the name, messaging and tone of voice to the visual identity and packaging, drawing on craft category codes to celebrate the superior credentials of cold-pressed products and denote quality. By creating the first ‘craft smoothie’, the design encourages consumers to pay more for the brand while balancing with a welcoming personality. It has brought a whole new language to the category, enabling Mockingbird to secure a national listing with Waitrose in its first year and to extend into new SKUs, all manufactured at a B. Corp-certified factory.
Smashing its value sales target by 39.1% in its launch-year, in the following two years Mockingbird increased sales by 158% and then again by 136%, while competitors experienced value share decline. The brand’s volume sales also bucked the trend in a shrinking category, growing 116.9% in Mockingbird’s third year.
By October 2023, the start-up had 15,000 distribution points across major grocers to high-end independents and the brand’s ability to sit on the shelves of both Asda and Selfridges speaks volumes about the success of Mockingbird’s design and its ‘premium accessible’ positioning.