Today Reggae Reggae sauce enjoys national distribution and is advertised on television. None of this would have happened without one Levi Roots giving the pitch of a lifetime on Dragon’s Den.
Last week, on channel Dave, they showed some highlights of the original January 2007 show, together with a recent interview with Levi. As he says on his website, “the deal was to pitch, barter and sell your business to five multimillionaires……..if they choose to invest in your ting, you get the money”.
It was a superb pitch and scored brilliantly in three areas.
1. An unexpected opening. Levi understood that ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’ when he entered the Den playing his guitar and singing his sauce song. This included the verse “Hot Reggae Reggae sauce , it’s so nice I had to name it twice”. The Dragons were almost slain at the outset.
2. Audience participation. Instead of presenting at them, he engaged with them through a product tasting, apparently of the hottest version of his sauce by mistake, or not. By now Dragons, or some of them, succumbing.
3. The likeability factor. In any pitch people buy people and here the charm of the man was irresistible, such that he was forgiven for some dreadful content errors. For example, mistakenly claiming orders 1000 times the actual!
No wonder that he can claim “I slayed dem dragons”.