From Naturz to Oddpods - The brand journey
A brand journey worth watching
by Jeremy Pang
Building a grocery brand is a tough ask, especially for small, challenger brands. We’ve been in the thick of it with our own brands, and worked with many brands just like Odd Pods, who have the patience of saints and the creative confidence to stop, rethink and rebrand quickly if or when they have to; the ability to switch and change tactics or even completely rebrand and change direction is the biggest weapon a challenger brand has over the mammoth brands who have the deep pockets we all wished we had, but often have at least 10 layers of bureaucracy to get through before they can make such crucial decisions.
Pavan Patel founded Odd Pods after having worked on a set of products that initially sat under its first name Naturz, which was nice, friendly, spoke out all-natural product, but perhaps didn’t quite stand out from the crowd as he initially wanted. Pav being Pav, and we know him well enough for him to trust us to produce his videos for him from an early stage, felt the brand needed a rebrand and a boost. In fact, we had produced the first ever brand video for Pav under the Naturz brand, that we were quite proud of, which in the end was never used but a great test run for us all.
I could attempt to write why I think the change happened so soon in the new brand journey, but I figure it would be better to ask the brand owner himself and here’s Pav’s answer: Pav, Odd Pods Founder “Naturz was a brand focused on the whole foods market. Competing against dried beans and lentils etc. We wanted something exciting to entice a younger audience to the brand. We wanted to be disruptive as well. So, the name Odd Pods just really worked and this went hand in hand with a new ready to eat product that we had been working on for a while”.
And of course, the everyday mass market consumer hadn’t had the full on Naturz or Odd Pods experience yet anyway, so, whatever they wanted to call it, was yet to stick. It’s always better to make the change whilst you still can, and so they did just that. After bumping into Pav at a food trade show, we had a chat, saw the new prototype packaging and decided we had better make some videos to show just how easy the new retail product is to use.
With Odd Pods now found in close to 300 stores in Sainsbury’s and counting, with a great distribution in Ocado, Booths (The Waitrose of the North) and plenty of independent grocery stores too, all I can say is Waitrose & Tesco buyers better be keeping their eyes wide open, else they’ll miss out on another brilliant disrupter brand and will feel like the only odd pods out there soon enough.
Here's a brand worth watching, having seen them grow from nothing to something in a very short space of time and with some clever tweaks and changes to their branding and messaging, I’m sure we’ll be producing a video or two just to tell new investors about their brand journey and commercial successes in no time.
