After recently becoming an MBE, Fraser Doherty (24) is taking a moment to reflect. “I’m not sure how great my first few jars of jam were but, thankfully, my Gran, parents and the neighbours who bought them didn’t discourage me.”
He’s gone from selling a few jars, door-to-door, out of a plastic bucket to supplying the biggest supermarket chains in the world.
“I can remember my parents waiting at the house anxiously while I took my first dozen jars around the neighbourhood – worried, no doubt, about how I’d react if nobody bought them from me!”
They did, however, and the then-14-year-old was soon making and selling his all-fruit jams round local farmers’ markets. Doherty and his products have since won numerous national awards and even recognition as an Iconic Scottish Brand by the National Museum of Scotland.
He’s the first, however, to point out the debt he owes to his family, not least his Gran, Mum and Dad. “My Grandmother grew up on a small farm in Donegal in Ireland, where they made all their own bread and jams,” he says. “She had been perfecting her recipes all throughout her life and, thankfully, was willing to share them with me! And then my parents are the kind who always told my brother and I that the most important thing in life was that we found something we loved. If we could get up every morning and look forward to the day ahead, then that was success.
“When I told them that I wanted to leave school at sixteen to make jam every day, they didn’t for a minute imagine that it would be a success but they thankfully didn’t try to stop me – they knew that it was what I loved,” he adds. “My poor Dad even got up every Saturday morning at 5.30am to drive me to Edinburgh fruit market to buy supplies for the coming week.”
Practical support also extended to the use of the family kitchen, but that naturally had its limits. “I never really imagined that the afternoon my Gran and I spent making jam would go on to change my life and become my career,” he says, “but once production in my parents’ kitchen reached 1,000 jars a week, I knew that I was onto something. At that point I also realised that I would have to move production into a factory and create a brand if I wanted to make a business out of my recipes.
“I’ve been amazed by the help and support that is available to young people wanting to start a business, especially in Scotland,” he adds. “I have also found that if you just ask for help, chances are that people will give it to you. In my case, I got advice from a successful entrepreneur called Kevin, who had started a business supplying supermarkets and he was just willing to share some of the lessons that he had learned with me.”
There are undoubtedly challenges for anyone trying to turn a hobby into a business. “I spent a year of convincing a factory to work with me and creating labels to go onto the jars,” he says. “We created the brand around a comic book theme, with me being ‘Jam Boy’, a superhero character. When I presented this idea, and my prices, to the supermarket buyer, they didn’t exactly see the funny side–they explained that packaging wasn’t supposed to make people laugh, it was supposed to get a message across. I had to throw it all into the bin and start all over again. That was a point where I seriously thought about giving up, but thankfully decided to give my idea another shot.”
Doherty accepts that his relative youth, while undoubtedly one of the unique selling points of ‘The Adventures of Jam Boy’, didn’t always help when it came to setting up an actual business. “I think that in some ways my youth was a problem,” he admits, “in the sense that it was impossible to borrow money from a bank and, of course, I didn’t know anything about how supermarkets or factories worked. However, I also found that people tend to be more willing to help when you’re young – they want to see you succeed.”
Succeed he has, and his SuperJam “brand” has since extended into several books and a growing national network of tea parties for older people who live alone or in care. “For me it’s important that business is about more than just making money,” Doherty insists. “I’m inspired by the idea that you can use your success to do something good in your community.
“Originally, when my Gran made jam, she would make jam and scones and visit all of the care homes in the East End of Glasgow, having afternoon tea with the elderly people. She’d drag my little brother and I around with her; he’d play his guitar and I would tell them stories. A couple years ago, I decided that it would be a nice idea to do something like that on a bigger scale – as a way of giving something back to my Gran’s generation. We have since run hundreds of free tea parties in care homes and hospitals in Scotland, the rest of the UK and also in places as far away as Australia.”
Doherty also spends a lot of his time supporting other young entrepreneurs, not least investing in start ups such as Beer52.com, an Edinburgh-based craft beer club which now sells more than 10,000 cases a month. “I’ve learned a huge amount from getting SuperJam off the ground and onto the shelves of thousands of supermarkets around the world,” he insists. “These are lessons that don’t just apply to selling jam – they apply to any startup business. By writing my book SuperBusiness (which has been translated into Korean and Japanese!) and by speaking at over 500 events around the world, I’ve shared these lessons with over a hundred thousand people.”
First published in The Scots Magazine, October 2014.
