James Lind Vitamintea 3A

No bank interest related revenues have been considered in the business plan. We only considered sales revenues in the financial exercise we present you, the statement being to present a carefull business plan.

Hello Jean-Marc,
At the moment our James Lind Vitamin Teas are sold in the region of Cologne only, in the REWE and EDEKA stores. If you absolutely want to taste it immediately, you would have to plan a city trip to this marvelous city (http://www.lejournaldelevasion.be/bons-plans-escapades/week-ends-en-ville/item/1461-citytrip-sympa-a-cologne).
More seriously, on one hand, we will bring some samples of each taste at the closure of the capital increase at the notary place, and on the other hand, the distribution in BeLux is planned to start in Spring 2019.
To celebrate this important milestone of the James Lind Adventure , we are planning to organise a small (but smart) event, inviting all our investors in the first store on the Day.
It will give us all the opportunity to meet and greet!
Cheers,

Hello Bastien,
Thank you for your message.
We indeed have an historical investors who is at the same time our Chairman.
He is by the way really involved in the adventure, participating himself to this round of investment for a total amount of 250 k€.
As Spreds knows him really well, they do not ask us any additional co-investor but we are of course always open to discussion with a relevant professional investor but in a reactive mood at the moment.
Have a good day,
Christophe

Dear Mr. Rubbens,
First of all we would like to thank you for your email.
Secondly we would like to come back to you regarding your questions and try to answer them all. If you would consider at the end of this email that this is not enough, we would like to propose you to meet and discuss face to face in detail the status on the James Lind adventure.
We would like to start by completely agreeing on the fact we did not communicate enough in the past years with our investors and are clearly willing to improve.
We are also sorry for not having developed the “setting the scene” while preparing this crowdfunding campaign but nor the product nor the positioning did change much in the last years and as we did not invest in a new presentation video of the project, we decided to reuse the same commercial video.
Valuation of the company in current state has been defined by the major investor, already committed to reinvest 150 k€ in this investment round. This valuation is based on a minimum risk for the investors, meaning a 3 years business plan worst case scenario with only 2 customers (1 in South West Germany and 1 in BeLux) delivering only their minimum commitment.
This valuation is definitely below the one considered in 2015 because of the problems encountered by James Lind in the past years on its commercial path to development. We indeed suffered a huge sales channel issue in 2016, having our strategic commercial partner victim of an accident. Consequence for James Lind has been that our sales network collapsed within the year. The entrepreneurs then reacted, trying to recreate a new network on their own, taking all their time, energy and cash with a limited success and only 340 k units sold in 2 years and a turnover objective of 2.5 mio€ certainly not achived.
Nevertheless, James Lind learned a lot from this experience understanding we had to stop trying to develop our own distribution, and to split the commercial risk and efforts between more channels.
-> We have now full variable commercial agreements with already 2 channels, without overlap and are currently discussing with 3 other prospects, always in different regions to avoid any cannibalization or incoherent sales strategies.
The 170k€ valuation is also, therefore, a major dilution/penalization of the entrepreneurs for the mistakes done in the last years.
Regarding the "complete review of costs in 2018 Q3", we must say it has been a global exercise, taking back from scratch all the value chain
- changing the raw material supplier, dividing these costs by 2
- changing the packaging from glass bottles to Tetra pack, eliminating all the recycling related costs which must be covered by the supplier, meaning us, in Germany
- changing the bottling supplier, reducing the related costs by 30%
- rebuilding a brand new distribution strategy with partners only paid on a variable basis (no sales -> no commission)
- moving to a virtual office to kill all office costs related
We fully agree this exercise is normal for every company, and certainly a loss-making start-up but we reviewed the complete costs structure to its maximum, killing all the unnecessary steps, renegotiating all the other ones… and yes we are proud to say this as an achievement.
The valuation proposed in this crowdfunding campaign may look as disappointing to you, and we fully understand, more specifically when we look back to the 2015 plan. Today, as explained, we have cleaned all the past, learned from it and rebuilt completely the strategy and value chain with stronger suppliers and more diversified sales channels.
The business case we propose is by the way in line with this philosophy, us expecting of course to do much better than presented but, this time we want to be sure we will overdeliver. We do not want our investors over expecting, with us underachieving.
Regarding your point about the gross monthly salary of € 4500 for the CEO of a loss-making start-up being far too high and totally inappropriate, we fully agree many entrepreneurs do not pay themselves a salary until the company is profitable, but we would like to bring you with some clarifications:
- The 4.500€/month for the CEO is a all costs included payment to the CEO, which means a gross salary of 2.812,5€/month and a net salary of maximum 1.800€ if he was an employee.
- The CEO is external to the project, having only joined the adventure beginning Q3 02018 but excited by the challenge and does not have any shares of the company at the moment, only a share plan diluting only the entrepreneurs for 10% of the total shares on the next 3 years.
- The CEO is not planned to be paid before Q2 2019.
Finally, we would like to excuse ourselves if you have considered this campaign as a lack of respect to you and we really hope our answers prove, as you said in your conclusion, you were wrong in your conclusions/disappointments and give you some good reasons to participate in this new capital increase.
In conclusion we also would like to remind you our proposal to meet and further discuss face to face the status on the project to, we hope, continue counting you in the James Lind adventure.
Best regards,
Christophe Honinckx