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Sweet success

One day, 18 year-old Fraser Doherty bought some fruit and sugar and made a few jars of jam using his gran's secret recipe. He tells TheSite.org how he turned his idea into a thriving business.

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Fraser Doherty

Jamming it

It all started when I was about 14, when my gran taught me how to make jam using her secret recipe. I started making jam at home and selling it door-to-door, and later, at church fairs and farmers markets. It's quite an unusual thing for a grandson to want to learn how to make jam, but it has influenced my life in a big way.

Leaving school

When I left school at 16 I worked full time on the business and was making 1,000 jars a week in my parent's small kitchen. My family could barely find enough space to make their dinner so I had to come up with an imaginative idea to move production into a commercial setting. I did a lot of research and discovered that the sale of jam has been in decline for the last couple of decades. This is mostly because of the very unhealthy and old fashioned image that jam has; old women and afternoon tea! I decided I'd change all of that by coming up with a healthier and more modern brand. I experimented in the kitchen for a few months and came up with the solution of using grape juice as a sweetener rather than refined sugar or anything artificial. I called my product Super Jam.

Getting financial advice

In the early stages it was such a simple business that there wasn't any need to take any financial advice. As it grew I went to see the local tax office and they told me what I needed to do. While I was still at school I got advice from my teachers about how to keep accounts. I used the HMRC website and other internet sources to find out how much tax I needed to pay, whether I should register as a limited company, and if I needed to register for VAT.

"To me it's not really about making money. I really enjoy the creative process of coming up with an idea and then turning that into a real product."

The biggest challenge I've faced was convincing people to believe in the idea. When I started I was just a teenager with no money and no experience trying to convince designers and factories to work with me, and get people to lend me money. It was very difficult because at that point all I had was an idea. Eventually I managed to convince the right number of people to help me out and we got it off the ground.

Forms, forms, and more forms

I've set up the business as a limited company so I haven't had to fill out any self assessment forms like a self employed person would have to. The local tax office explained everything to me. You get forms sent to you regularly with questions such as: What is your annual turnover? What's the value of VAT items you have bought? I don't take a salary so I don't pay tax as an employed person; I just pay tax on the profits of the business. Jams are a zero-rated VAT product so every three months when I do a VAT return I end up claiming money back from the Government because there isn't VAT on the product I'm selling, but there is VAT on the products that I'm buying.

Future plans

I'm launching a few new flavours in the near future and hopefully Super Jam will be going into some of the other large supermarkets. I'm already talking to most of the big supermarkets in the UK and a lot of supermarkets from abroad have been in touch. At the moment I'm just taking it step by step. Other plans for the future include making little jars for hotels, cafés and airlines.

To me it's not really about making money. I really enjoy the creative process of coming up with an idea and then turning that into a real product. You should go into business with the attitude that you're looking for an adventure and want to have fun, but also accept that it may not succeed. When something fails at the first hurdle a lot of people give up. It takes a long time to get a business off the ground and you have to be realistic that it might not work at all. If it does fail you can always come up with something else and try again.


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