Back to the Heavenly future: 2003.

In celebration of their 20 years at Heavenly, founding members John Rhys and Marcus Barrett-Greene step aboard their DeLorean to revisit the early years.

It’s 2003…there’s a record heatwave across Europe, Myspace launches, Robosapiens is one of the most popular toys for children, Concorde makes its last commercial flight and Black Eyed Peas take the prize for the biggest hit of the year with ‘Where is the love?’.

Following that theme, where was the Heavenly love in 2003?!
(Marcus) Our first office was in Barnes, unsurprisingly 100 yards from Richard’s home…mine and John’s was 2 hours away! It was in an old fire station, overlooking the Thames and with a very popular restaurant on site called The Depot (now Rick Stein’s restaurant). For those old friends of Heavenly who paid us a visit then, there was of course The White Hart pub, just a short stroll away which hosted many a meeting and brainstorm!

Why did you call yourselves Heavenly?
(John) Aside from it sounded good…the idea was that we could apply the Heavenly prefix to all the products and services we were going to create and take the world by storm! A bit like Virgin…Atlantic…Wines…Weddings…Vodka and so on. If nothing else, we would have a great and memorable name. And it was fun on calls saying this was Heavenly John!

And how did that plan work out?
(Marcus) We did set up a company called Heavenly Wine in 2005. Yes, it’s true! An online commercial site that retailed over 1000 wines. The brand idea was turning wine into water, whereby 10% of all our profits was donated to WaterAid. The reverse miracle as you were. We of course had great fun in sampling all the wines, creating the brand and naming our mixed cases. Think: Great Heavenly Whites, The Holy Trinity, Devilishly Good Reds and so on. I particularly remember The Wine Society of Great Britain commenting on how refreshing our brand was in such a bland marketplace. Sadly it was not to be, as we couldn’t compete with the large supermarkets and the likes of Virgin Wines etc whose purchasing power was far superior. A good lesson learned though and our knowledge of wines was greatly enhanced via our taste testing!

Some memorable early clients?
(John) One of our most fun early clients was Pukka Pies, a family-owned business in Syston near Leicester. They were very much the people’s pie with a focus on distribution through fish & chip shops at the time. My highlight was getting to Syston at 5am for an induction day on one of their vans in Birmingham delivering pies to chippies – still the earliest start I can recall in my working life.

The amazingly trusting relationships Pukka had with their customers was exemplified by the size of the driver’s bunch of keys – one for every chippy in the area, so that deliveries could be made without supervision from 6am till 11am in the morning. The work wasn’t bad either, reflecting Pukka’s exemplary focus on quality at a price and the passion of their people. With a bit of alliteration thrown in, the positioning was summed up as ‘Pukka Pies – Don’t Compromise’, with the call to action – ‘Piefectionists wanted’. Pukka successfully established and extended their distribution in all the major supermarkets and are still doing brilliantly 20 years on.

(Marcus) The Beach at Carlyon Bay was one of our first clients at Heavenly. An extraordinary development, near St Austell, which had plans to create a vibrant new neighbourhood on a beach in Cornwall, providing over 500 homes, with a mix of leisure and entertainment facilities. Our weekly meetings with 20+ people at Savills in Mayfair were the highlight of the week – multi-client, multi-agency with people training and flying into Mayfair from out of town – including Cornwall – the sort of meeting that would have been a cast-iron, no argument Teams meeting 20 years’ later. One particular repetitive challenge was the weekly race to get from Mortlake to Hill Street in Mayfair in 20 mins in our colleague’s bright yellow 15-year-old Nissan – without the help of smartphones, Google Maps or Waze of course. We were particularly proud of our partnership with Selfridges which included building a sales centre in the lower ground floor and recruiting 60 models to sit in the corner window on Oxford Street and Orchard Street in a live beach scene on rotation to promote sales! Sadly it has not been built yet (planning complications), but our good friends at CEG are still fully committed. Happy to say that our love affair with Cornish resorts has grown since then, with resorts such as The Cornwall Hotel & Spa, Una St Ives and Hotel Meudon, near Falmouth, all being cherished clients over subsequent years.

And you moved into a church?
(John) Well, we shared a church building in Marylebone in 2005. Not the religious section. My abiding memory was our sign at the bottom of the stairs which said, ‘Stairway to Heavenly’! Which of course took you to our office. Many Heavenly ideas were generated here. Call it divine inspiration if you like!

20 years on. What’s changed?
(John) Probably too much to say, but Marcus is the only one that has actually grown his hair since then. The rest of us have to make do with what we have left!

(Marcus) We started life at Heavenly with the philosophy of ‘Down to earth thinking’ and like to think that we are still very grounded 20 years on.