Vodka Jelly Shots

Spotting the Opportunity

Unscathed from any previous failures, and full of energy and optimism about the ease of doing things, my best friend Log and I saw a load of people selling things at Gay Pride in Brighton and thought, we can do that.

Also, for anyone not from Brighton reading this, it is known by many as the gay capital of Europe, and everyone goes to Pride. Families, gay, straight, bi, green, blue, grey. It does not matter.

The Plan

So the following year we did a very basic bit of maths, bought a load of cheap vodka, plastic shot glasses and jelly, and filled Log’s freezer.

A few things to note here. Vodka has a very low freezing temperature, and lots of people pointed out to us that it would not set in jelly.

Well, they were wrong.

Then we sampled a few and realised that they tasted really very strong.

Moving the Operation

The next day, Log’s dad drove the supplies down and we moved them into my house, because I lived a five minute walk from the park where the main part of the Pride festival happens.

We shoved them back in the freezer and loaded up a portion in my cool bag that we used for camping, along with a load of ice packs.

I whipped out some strategic pink board shorts. Hot pink really is my second favourite colour.

And off we went. Blazing sun, no T-shirts, and £200 worth of vodka incarcerated inside a tiny colourful champagne of wobbly sugar.

Pound a Pop

“POUND A POP, POUND A POP, VODKA JELLIES, POUND A POP.”

Log and I bellowed this for about six hours and offloaded hundreds of jelly shots.

Some people tried to haggle, but we were like, no. It is pound a pop.

Our parents said we could charge 20p more. We said no. It is pound a pop.

And in our first year we sold the whole lot. Not one jelly left.

First Taste of Entrepreneurship

It was a very good first impression of opportunistically just going for an idea.

We were flattered across the board. The attendees of Pride liked our abs, ingenuity and gusto. Our parents got to see their children being entrepreneurial, free spirited and confident in a scenario that is fairly atypical.

It was a really good first run.

Year Two and the Rain

So we went back the next year.

And it rained.

In fairness, we went into the second year with even more enthusiasm than the first, because of how well things had gone. So we arrived earlier, had more belief, and actually sold slightly more.

However, we had also made more after thinking about what could have been, having run out the year before.

By the end of it we probably had about forty jellies left, which we gave out to our friends and scranned ourselves that evening.

The End of the Jelly Shot Era

And that was it.

The next year I went off to university, and Pride started locking off the park, gating it, adding security and charging for tickets.

But across those two years we pocketed a few hundred pounds each, which was not bad in 2007 for a few hours’ work.

And I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, learning more about myself, optimism, and how far abs and a catchy slogan can go when you are trying to sell something to people.