If only I wanted to own a Juice shop, I would have started a Movement

Posted on 30th Nov 2011 by Heather LeFevre in Blog

I discovered juicing this year when Diego Zambrano decided to go on a 60 day juice fast and mark his progress on this blog. Now, I only know Diego through twitter, but I would say about half of his tweets are about bacon and other pork recipes he enjoys. So I was intrigued to find out what instigated such a project.

It turns out, a man died of a heart attack on his long-haul flight and a friend of his nearly died the same day of heart complications. Then he watched a couple of documentaries and decided to try the juice fast. If you wanted to understand his reasoning, he explained, you had to watch Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.

Curious, I watched the film. And though I didn’t decide to fast, I too started drinking fresh vegetable juices and urging my friends to watch the film and have juice with me. I started a mini-movement in our office. Suddenly everyone was popping into the local juice shops during lunch.

One of the options near my office is a fresh juice shop in Amsterdam called Frood. They have a second location near my house so I became a frequent customer. Sadly, they have just gone out of business last week. They had posted a sign that they were looking to sell the business, and for a moment I thought about it.

Why? Because I am truly passionate about juicing. I believe in it. I believe that you can get far more vitamins into your body from juice than you could ever eat on your plate. That the nutrients I get has changed the way I feel and I can see it in my skin when I drink it consistently. I imagined myself replacing the disinterested girls behind the counter and making every customer a fan of juicing, spreading the good word around town.

I thought about how I would market the shop. In addition to all the social presence they lack, I envisioned putting 50 or 100 copies of the documentary in mailboxes in the neighborhood. Return the DVD to the shop for a free juice. Then repeat. I’m convinced I would have saved that business. If only I wanted to own a juice shop.

But that is what starts a movement. True, authentic, passionate belief that others can buy. Because as we’ve learned from Simon Sinek, people don’t buy WHAT we do, they buy WHY we do it. It’s not about what or even how you do something differently. It’s about dedicating your brand to a purpose and never deviating from it.