iRise founder explains how he built a functional smart drink from an idea

Living in Munich, Germany inspired Steve Devlin to create his own functional health drink brand called iRise. Inside FMCG talked to Devlin about why he decided to create a functional, plant-based drink in Australia, how he stays competitive and plans for future growth.Inside FMCG: Tell us how you built iRise from the ground up?Steve Devlin: In a nutshell, when living in Munich, my love of drinking German beer in the evening and running in the Alps the next morning inspired me to create a health drink that allowed others to ‘DoBoth’.The slightly longer version is that I recognised a need for functional, plant-based drinks to combat the increased demand on people’s work, social and home life. We are being asked for faster, more efficient work, all the while working longer hours, which transfers into less time for family and friends. Without a healthy balance of the three, we are destined to struggle.In iRise, we have created a plant-based functional drink that when drunk during a night out or before bed will reduce or altogether rid you of the hangover the next morning. Now this wasn’t intended as something to abuse, rather our focus and target market is ‘high achievers’.Those that entertain clients at night, which often spills over into drinks, yet need to crush that next morning meeting, spin or yoga class; or the parent with children that has a glass of wine or two at night to wind down, but needs their game face the next morning to take the kids to school, soccer practice or even to work when competing against younger motivated staff in the workplace… to the trades person who would often have several beers on a ‘school night’ yet need to be fit for site work the next morning.Steve Devlin created plant-based functional drink iRise.Without iRise as an option, these people are inclined to skip these social drinks, which then lead to stress, which then can transpire into family or work life.In creating iRise, I basically got up at 4am every day before my normal job and researched, read boring white papers and studies on the cause and effect of hangovers and, to a lesser degree, sports recovery, pulling together a range of plant ingredients to counteract these.I then hired a plant-molecular biologist from a University in Switzerland and a herbalist from the Sunshine Coast in Australia, and together created the iRise formula. iRise is drunk anytime between your first drink and going to bed.From there I asked myself where my skills and weaknesses lay, and being a carpenter, I felt I needed someone more ‘refined’ in business dealings, and was fortunate enough to meet my co-founder Steve Grigoriadis down in Melbourne who has a strong corporate sales background. Together we are steering iRise organically through the Australian market, gathering as much solid figures and traction before approaching investors. We felt getting real-time data as opposed to forecasting potential and ‘educated guess’ figures, far more diligent.Inside FMCG: How did Covid-19 affect the business?SD: Honestly, not much given we only launched through the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in January. As we are entirely self funded and have no debt or investors to speak of looking over our shoulders, it has allowed us to really lay a solid organic foundation, to interact directly with our customers and figure out who and why is buying iRise. I guess we will never know how much better iRise would have gone had Covid not hit around February-March, but I don’t concern myself with ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ type scenarios. We are hyper focused right now on building our brand in Australia before looking to other overseas markets.Inside FMCG: What’s the process of creating iRise?SD: Initially we were sourcing everything individually – packaging, ingredients, bottles, caps. But I was fortunate enough to find a great manufacturer that did everything pretty much turn-key for us, given it was more expensive. However I felt that my time was better spent elsewhere in the startup, rather than trawling Alibaba and such sites for the specific ingredients and bottles we needed.Steve Devlin sees a trend in ‘drinks with benefits’.Inside FMCG: Where do you source your ingredients?SD: Mostly from South Korea, however some are from China, Japan and Europe. Our manufacturer gets them a lot easier than we could, so we leave that to them. We do correspond with them when sourcing each ingredient to ensure it is of the highest quality.Inside FMCG: The packaging looks great, tell us the process in creating the bottles.SD: The design of the bottle I did myself fairly early on as I couldn’t afford a graphic designer, this along with the awesome functional box we have. This box and bottle have actually been entered in the Australian Packaging Awards this year, so fingers crossed. The logo represents the three places I have lived in most of my life: the mountains are the alps south of Munich where I spent a lot of my time running and competing. The sun represents Australia, and the name itself spells ‘Irish’ when you replace the ‘e’ on the end with a ‘h’: iRise the name is simply what it does for you when you drink the night before… iRise.Inside FMCG: How do you stay competitive with rivals?SD: I live the iRise lifestyle of enjoying an evening social life and rising early the next morning regardless of last night’s escapades crushing the day.. It comes natural to me to market and promote iRise. So where rivals don’t have this, they need to force [the] market, have a big marketing budget, and raise a lot of money which could be used more efficiently elsewhere. Aside from that, we have a very unique drink in iRise, none are like it, so it’s easy to stand out.Inside FMCG: What do you foresee happening in the beverage sector this year?SD: A push towards less sugary drinks and more towards – let’s call them – ‘drinks with benefits’. People want more than just a great-tasting drink now, they want it to have a function as well, and they are willing to pay for that convenience too. Our company CleverWatrs is setting itself up to take advantage of this shift.Inside FMCG: What’s next for iRise this year?SD: We have several other functional drinks in the pipeline to complement iRise, which will act as our flagship functional drink. We are very excited about these other drink solutions, however, this will require us to take a serious investor onboard.We see these four drinks sold around the world in several years, though before that we want to get iRise stocked across all the major cities in Australia, and have 1000 happy iRise drink subscribers. We will build the brand in Australia before exporting to Asia, the US and Europe, where we saw significant sales during our crowdfunding campaign. In fact, some of our best customers are based in the US, despite the Covid-19 restrictions.