THE EARLY YEARS: 2007

After the travails of the first few years - during which I took over the running of the business and sourced another way to make kombucha to order via web site sales, all the while sleeping in warehouses on pallets of Kombucha and sofa-surfing at friends’ homes - business was slow but steady, until February 2007 when a huge boost came from an unlikely source…

“Wild child” Lindsay Lohan was adamant that kombucha was the cause of her alcohol bracelet alerting the local LAPD that she had breached the “no alcohol” terms of her release from prison; it’s minute trace of alcohol being enough to activate the device.

This was huge celebrity news at the time, and Lindsay was photographed holding a bottle of GT’s kombucha on the front pages of most of the women’s weekly magazines!

Overnight our orders quadrupled, but stuffed with debt how on earth could we scale up our production sufficiently without the funds to kit out our own, customised facility?

A quick Google search at the beginning of April 2007 led us to Carr Taylor Vineyard in East Sussex; there we would have the space needed to brew 6000-bottle runs while remaining true to our small batch process, and a bottling line to which to pipe each brew for bottling, packing, and loading onto lorries for distributing.

Confident that here, finally, lay the path to success, I took out £20,000 in credit card loans at 0% interest for 12-18 months to aid the transition and getting equipped for the larger brews, and giving the label a revamp of its own.

With the boathouse a long and distant memory, our kombucha was renamed ‘Gaia’s Organic Kombucha’, benefitting as it would now do from the vineyard’s natural on site spring water source (swipe above for label artwork and various concepts, and our new and present home deep in the Sussex countryside)…