Jan Verlinden

The through-line

Everything Jan Verlinden says circles back to one decision and its consequences: leaving fifteen years of corporate marketing at PepsiCo and Lucky Strike at 47 to relaunch the lemonade brand his family had owned after the war and which had vanished by the late 1980s [16][19]. He frames that move as risk avoidance rather than risk taking. "Volgens mij was het het grootste risico om het niet te doen en ongelukkig te zijn, dan het risico te nemen om het wel te doen" [19], and the corporate golden cage is less safe than it looks, since there is a shelf life at big companies and you see very few people above 50 [19]. The test he applies is not ambition but appetite: "Ik wil op mijn 65e niet in de zetel zitten en zeggen van: had ik het maar gedaan" [19], because "Mensen hebben voornamelijk spijt van dingen die ze niet hebben gedaan, niet zozeer van wat ze wel hebben gedaan" [17].

The second half of the through-line is what he built once he jumped: a deliberately small, self-financed, one-man operation that spends its money on being seen rather than on being complicated [17][18][19]. He has no exit in mind and says so plainly: "Als vandaag iemand zou bellen, we willen Ritchie kopen, het antwoord is neen. Ik amuseer mij teveel. Wat moet ik dan gaan doen, thuis gaan zitten en mijn geld gaan tellen?" [17]. Nearly nine years in, the operating principles have not softened; they have hardened into a method [18].

On the golden cage and goesting

The word he uses for the deciding factor is untranslatable and he knows it: "Goesting is een schoon Vlaams woord. Als je goesting hebt, ja, dan moet je dat doen" [19]. He distinguishes it sharply from wanting something. Goesting is passion plus the willingness to keep going through setbacks, the difference between liking the idea of a marathon and training in the rain: "Ik heb zin om een marathon te lopen, maar ik heb geen goesting om een marathon te lopen, dus ik ga er nooit gaan lopen" [17]. He also warns against starting a company purely to cash out inside five years, since the odds of a successful exit are small and the goal itself is a recipe for unhappiness [17].

The jump was managed, not romantic. He gave himself a realistic horizon of five years and eliminated the biggest cost line, his own salary, which he set to zero, so the business could survive the ramp-up [19]. He also had an asset most first-time founders lack: a PepsiCo pedigree that gave him credibility with suppliers, which he calls the hardest part of starting, because almost nobody starts a lemonade company from scratch [19]. Part of what pushed him out was the ceiling on the work itself: Belgium is a small market for a multinational marketer, a country of ten million where you grab or lose a bit of share, while the real breakthroughs happen in Asia and other big markets [19].

On product before advertising

His most repeated correction to founders is about what marketing actually is. "Iedereen denkt dat marketing reclame is. Reclame is maar een stuk. De P van product van de marketingmix is stap nummer één" [17]. The product rule is short: "Lekkere limonade maak je met lekkere ingrediënten, punt" [17]. Packaging sits immediately behind it and is the piece startups most often underestimate, because it is a communication element rather than a container; in his phrasing, we eat and drink packaging [17]. He does the product development himself, along with logistics negotiation, accounting, campaigns and packaging, and delegates the work that does not energise him [18].

The bottle also produced the closest thing to a fatal moment. After two years of preparation his Chinese supplier admitted they could only guarantee one bar of pressure, which for a carbonated drink means bottles that can explode, and he nearly had to start over before switching to a Western supplier that required €50,000 in molds [19].

On cola without phosphoric acid

The clearest expression of product-first thinking is Ritchie cola, which he built around what it leaves out. Phosphoric acid is replaced with lemon juice and non-alcoholic fermented apple juice, and artificial caramel E150d with barley malt, which he says makes it the only cola kidney dialysis patients can drink [17]. He keeps returning to the health case with outside authority rather than his own claims: press coverage of the effect of phosphoric acid on the kidneys, osteoporosis expert Stefan Goemaere on its possible effect on bones [6], and nephrologist Elien Mahieu describing cola as "echt een fosforbom" with a pH of 2.5 to 3, so low you can descale a toilet or remove rust with it [13].

He turns that into a line he knows is provocative inside his own industry: Ritchie cola is "niet geschikt om een ketting te ontroesten, maar wél om zonder blikken of blozen van te genieten", an observation not everyone in the sector appreciates [6].

On reaching everyone

Media buyers always open with the same question, and he always gives the same answer. Asked who his target group is, he says "iedereen", and he defends it against the charge that it is unstrategic: everyone occasionally enjoys a good Belgian soft drink, and small brands grow above all by raising penetration, which means getting more people to buy the brand [14]. That is why the money goes into broad mass media, television, bus shelters, newspapers and radio [14], and why he deliberately avoids programmes and channels with limited reach, which deliver fewer people and usually at a higher cost per contact as well [14].

Radio is a live part of that mix, including a new variation of the Ritchie radio commercial produced through the VAR Puppy Prize, an initiative of VAR, YoungDogs Belgium and Creative Belgium in which young creatives compete to build a Ritchie radio campaign; the winning five-second spot "Rit-chhh-ie", built on the sound of a Ritchie bottle being opened, was selected from more than fifty entries and ran on Studio Brussel, Radio 2, Nostalgie and an online audio network package [10]. He also plays the frugality game visually, getting three posters for the price of one through a bit of mirroring, which he presents as media investment optimisation [5].

On squeezing the media budget

The budget is modest and he says so, which shapes every choice about how the money is split between production and reach [14]. Production is the enemy: an €80,000 twenty-second television spot drains money that could have bought audience, which is why product placement is more cost-efficient than a commercial and why he wants every euro to go to brand visibility [17]. The practical side of placement is unglamorous, down to managing television appearances so the drinks actually appear to be consumed during filming [16].

He is equally blunt about measurement. For a small brand, measuring brand attribution is not worth what it costs; the only thing that matters is that doing everything at once makes volumes go up [17]. The same logic runs through his partnerships, from the collaboration with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Belgium and TBWA\Belgium [7] to visiting the first beer wholesaler customer in the ID-Buzz [2], all of it visibility bought cheaply.

On horeca first, retail after

His channel doctrine is a sentence: "In horeca you try, in retail you buy" [19]. Premium horeca distribution generates awareness and trial, and retail captures the repeat purchase [19]. He is protective of that first channel beyond commercial self-interest, supporting the Kroegtijgers initiative for authentic cafés as meeting places, on the grounds that a village or a town without a café loses part of its soul, with a national café day on 12 September as its first big event, and noting that more and more horeca businesses are choosing the better Belgian soft drink [15].

The strategy nearly broke in March 2020. Horeca was both his trial engine and more than half his volume, and when lockdown closed it retail did not compensate [17][19]. He responded by accelerating the media and marketing investment far earlier than planned, still finished the year with 36% volume growth, and learned that the horeca and media strategies reinforce each other even at small scale [19].

Retail came with its own confrontation. Asked for the standard 1+1 promo as the price of being listed, he calculated that with margins under 50% it is loss-making, that once you start promotions you can never stop, and answered "En dan heb ik gezegd: dat is goed, dan kom ik er niet in" [19]. Years later Ritchie is in nearly all retailers, without promos [19].

On financing yourself

He has never taken external investors and gives three reasons: nobody would be able to say no to his contrarian moves, discussions with investors slow down bold decisions such as sponsoring The Masked Singer, and investors come in with the intention to exit, which conflicts with building a brand for the long term [19]. The alternative is simple arithmetic: "Uiteindelijk de beste manier om jezelf te financieren is winst te maken" [19]. He never signs a marketing cheque he cannot already pay, reinvests profit every year, and has stayed in the green since year one [19]. Behind all of it is the definition he treats as fundamental: "Dat is de enige manier dat er geld binnenkomt: is dat er iemand bereid is om voor uw product te betalen. Dat is de essentie van zaken doen" [19]. Against that stands his warning about business plans, "In Excel rijk worden is heel gemakkelijk" [17], and against the capex objection, the observation that in beverages you can start light by outsourcing production, which lowers risk and lets you scale from 100,000 bottles to millions as demand arrives [19]. He is under no illusion about the opponent: "Je vecht tegen de grootste merken ter wereld met de diepste pockets" [19].

On keeping the machine simple

Complexity is treated as a cost to be designed out. He only delivers full pallets and refuses small orders, precisely so the cost structure stays low and the maximum share of budget can go into marketing [17]. Nearly nine years in he runs the business with three independent representatives while outsourcing logistics, production and social media to partners [18]. The trade-off is explicit: the soft drink business needs high volume and heavy investment in brand awareness, and that investment eats most of his margin [18].

He is a hard critic of the opposite approach when he meets it as a customer. A request to raise his children's mobile limit at Telenet, where he had been a customer for almost twenty years, turned into what he calls a Kafkaesque administrative experience: an old subscription that had to be changed, a technician visit he had not expected, and an installation that was presented as free during the ordering process before turning out to cost €85, followed by an apology for the "niet eenduidige communicatie" [1].

On expectations, targets and the rollercoaster

He manages his own morale as deliberately as his cost base. "The secret of happiness is low expectations. Als je teveel verwacht ga je altijd teleurgesteld zijn" [17]. He applies this to budgeting: set targets below what you expect to achieve, because delivering 150 against a target of 100 creates motivation while missing 200 with the same 150 kills it, and the choice of target changes nothing about the work, only the psychology [17]. He does not pretend the ride is smooth: "De wins zijn heel leuk, de highs zijn high, maar de lows zijn heel low. Het is echt een rollercoaster in het begin" [17]. His standing instruction to himself is "Wat er ook van komt, zet: komt altijd goed. En als het nog niet goed is, dan zijn we nog niet klaar" [19].

Because of that volatility he is specific about who to keep close: fellow founders, for instance in an incubator, rather than family or ex-colleagues, because only peers going through the same rollercoaster understand what you are dealing with [19]. The same regard for people who show up runs through his tribute to Patrick De Greve, a fellow Vlerick student from the 1992 class who later became general director of the school and who gave the welcome speech at the launch event for his book in Vlerick's Brussels building, a speech he remembers as full of humour, warmth and style [4].

On the brand's company

Ritchie's presence is built partly through long associations rather than campaigns. It has been a proud partner of Retro Sur Mer for ten years, an event at the Rotonde in Wenduine that started as a cosy vintage gathering and grew into the largest retro and rockabilly festival in the Benelux, with its tenth-anniversary edition running from 7 to 9 August with a bigger programme and a bigger festival tent [8]. The café campaign works the same way, with a video for Kroegtijgers recorded with Ben Mouling [15]. It is of a piece with a brand whose own story begins with history, a family lemonade from the 1950s that disappeared and was relaunched in November 2016 [3][16][17].

Takeaways

• Treat staying put as the risky option: there is a shelf life at big companies and few people above 50, so "het grootste risico [was] om het niet te doen en ongelukkig te zijn" [19].
• Fix the product before the advertising: "Reclame is maar een stuk. De P van product van de marketingmix is stap nummer één", with packaging as a communication element rather than a container [17].
• For a small brand, "iedereen" is a legitimate target group, because small brands grow through penetration; buy broad mass media and skip low-reach channels that cost more per contact [14].
• Spend on reach, not on production: an €80,000 twenty-second spot is budget taken away from audience, which makes product placement the better buy [17].
• Refuse the 1+1 retail promo even at the price of not being listed; under 50% margin it loses money and once you start you can never stop [19].
• Finance growth from profit, never sign a marketing cheque you cannot already pay, and keep investors out because they enter intending to exit [19].
• Engineer out complexity, full pallets only and no small orders, so the cost structure leaves room for marketing [17].
• Set budgets below what you expect: 150 against a target of 100 motivates, 150 against 200 demoralises, and the target changes nothing about the work [17].