VitHit looks to the big time with €50 million turnover target after a decade of toil
The Dublin based drinks company has been brought ‘back from the brink’ and its founder feels its time has finally arrived
VitHit, a Dublin-based drinks business, aims to double its annual turnover to €50 million over the next three years.
The company’s goal is to provide a healthier, less sugary alternative to other products on the market. Founded by Gary Lavin in 2008, the Dublin-based business has 27 staff and had revenues of €25 million last year.
“I was a professional rugby player over in the UK and I saw everybody drinking Lucozade Sport, which had a lot of sugar in it. I said to myself that there had to be another option so I started looking at ways to make a drink with less sugar that tasted great,” Lavin told the Business Post.
“For the first ten years, I was losing money. The product was too early for the market. I was funding it myself by buying and selling apartments. Eventually, that ran out so I had to knuckle down and drive around the country selling it.”
Lavin’s mileage paid off, getting the product into stores across Ireland. He described the move as bringing the company “back from the brink”. The growth has been steady since then, around 25 per cent year on year for the last decade.
“The real growth came from when we moved to a large distributor. The product was performing well but we couldn’t get it in enough stores. We started working with Richmond Marketing and that enabled us to jump from 3,000 cases to 30,000 cases a month in 2010,” he said.
“That revenue gave us the funding to launch overseas. In 2011, we launched in the UK. That’s where most of our massive growth is coming from today.”
A day to remember
This year, the company had a single day where it sold more bottles of its products than in the whole of 2007. The business has expanded into many other markets including Norway, Australia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
“We’re still 100 per cent privately owned. Our growth has to be sustainable. We have to be profitable to survive. When you become a player in the UK, selling in Tesco and Sainsbury’s, you can go to other markets and show what you are doing,” he said.
“Even today, with our success, we’re still knocking on doors in certain countries and not getting answers from some people. It’s a big scene out there.”
It’s that focus on continually reaching out to new markets in a measured way that has Lavin confident of hitting the €50 million annual turnover target over the next three years.
“We’re going to start planning on how we hit turnover of €100 million. That plan will start to come into place in 18 month’s time. We’re focused on hitting our goals that we have in front of us now before reaching too far ahead,” Lavin said.
