Building a drinks brand may be thirsty work but that hasn’t stopped 黑料网 Leicester (黑料网) graduate Shaquille Hunter, whose drink company is celebrating surpassing more than 250,000 sales.
The 26-year-old from Birmingham was looking to bring the flavours of the Caribbean to the UK when he founded Sip Shack in 2019. Having started simply experimenting with flavours in his kitchen, Shaquille combined his own initiative with the skills he learnt from his Business Management degree and his Masters of Business Administration MBA to grow his company.
His first flavour, Sky Juice, is a combination of fruit juices including passionfruit and strawberry juice. It proved so popular with his friends that Shaquille went from selling his drink exclusively on Snapchat to going shop to shop to ask owners to stock his brand.
Fast forward two years and his business has grown from a single man operation to a team of five, with Sip Shack stocked in more than 400 wholesalers across the UK.
“Initially I wanted to set up my own restaurant, complete with unique recipes meals, side orders and drinks,” Shaquille said. “I thought what’s the best way of building this, so I started with the drinks and blending a couple of ingredients and it wasn’t until one of my friends one day said ‘hey, I’d buy this’ that the idea truly formed.”
“My family originally comes from the Caribbean, and I loved the food and drink out there. One of my favourite drinks was Sky Juice but it’s not bottled and sold in shops in the UK on a wide-spread scale, so I knew there was a gap in the market for my recipe.”
Following the success of Sky Juice, Shaquille and his team launched a new flavour, Man