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Ed Armitage
CEO at Freja
Ed Armitage is the co-founder and CEO of Freja, a company he established after more than 15 years of experience in building digital capabilities for private equity.1 Freja appears to be a brand that was launched in the summer of 2023, following a rebranding process that began in early 2022.25
Career and Company
Armitage's journey with Freja began when the company was previously known as Take Stock. In May 2023, he announced that Take Stock was rebranding.3 The official launch of the Freja brand took place on May 19, 2023.5
Background
Prior to founding Freja, Armitage had extensive experience in the digital realm, particularly in relation to private equity. He received his education from ESADE Business School.1
Recent Activities
As CEO, Armitage has been actively involved in various aspects of the company's growth:
- Fundraising: In September 2022, he mentioned that the company had been raising investment over the summer.2
- Brand Development: Armitage has been overseeing the company's rebranding and launch efforts.35
- Team Building: In July 2024, he posted about an opportunity for a Brand Manager to join the Freja team.6
- Industry Engagement: Armitage participated in his first podcast in January 2023, discussing the bone broth category.4
It's worth noting that the name Freja holds personal significance for Armitage, as it's also the name of his cat.3
Highlights
Freja turns… 🎂 1 🎈 … hold on ... whaaat?... it's only been ONE year since I wrote this post?
When you are inside a startup or scaleup, every week feels like a month and every month feels like a year, just because of the sheer volume and variety of work.
But still, it’s just mind-blowing to me that it’s only been 12 months since we re-launched our business under the Freja brand.
It feels like 5 years (maybe I’ve just aged 5 years in the process 🙃 )
What’s in a name?
Regular bone broth drinkers and Linkedin lurkers will have noticed that we recently changed our brand name from Take Stock to Freja.
As an ecommerce geek who accidentally became a CEO, I’ve always found “brand” something of a mystery.
So trying to quantify something as intangible as a new brand name has been very uncomfortable for me - I have no framework through which to approach it.
In a startup/scaleup (without VC money) there are very limited funds to spend on a rebranding process, and zero wiggle room in the cashflow for a poor outcome. Get it wrong and it’s game over.
To make it extra hard, we had to make the decision to rebrand when we were at a £1m run rate, knowing that the process wouldn’t be complete until we were at a £3m-£5m run rate (we kicked off the process in early 2022 and launched the Freja brand summer 2023).
It’s been a truly nerve-wracking summer as every single touch point in our business has had some unforeseen reaction to the switchover, like a nightmarish quantum physics experiment - nothing we could predict, nothing we could measure, just having to trust that our gut instinct decision 18 months ago would still be correct today.
Thankfully the outcome has been more positive than we could have imagined, and the impact has been immediate - sales are up in every channel (+60% to budget last month), increased engagement from consumers and retailers, soft metrics on social media are through the roof - all of this in August, the worst month for selling bone broth.
If we’re right, the Freja brand will add millions in enterprise value over the coming years, but we’ll never really be able to measure it.
My biggest takeaway from all of this?
Get your brand name right in the first place 🤦🏻♂️
#brandstrategy #rebranding #cpgbrands
Lots of open positions at Freja right now!
Come and join our hybrid team in the Cotswolds (remote-first, 6 days per month in the office). Flexible working, share options and lots of bone broth!
Head of Brand - make bone broth big, make Freja famous
Head of Finance - keep us growing >100% every year
Ecom Manager - run a 7-fig Shopify site end-to-end
Amazon Exec - optimise and grow a 7-fig Seller account
We're a high-trust, high-output team, trying things out and learning as we go 🚀
Warm intros most welcome, no such thing as a 'perfect CV' so give it a shot, no recruiters please.
Below is about half the team in the office, happy days!
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