The founder bringing the power of curiosity to new heights – with the help of some wine

Lucy Busk, founder of canned wine drinks brand, NICE, tells Jennifer Sieg what her secret is when it comes to maintaining her speed on the road to success.

Twelve years into her entrepreneurial career, Lucy Busk still believes the art of ‘learning as you go’ is the key to her growing success.

The now proud co-founder of wine-in-a-can drinks brand, NICE, tells me it wasn’t until she closed the final book to her Fine Arts degree in 2012 that she realised she would never move on to be someone else’s employee.

With little to no knowledge of where to start, Busk landed herself a front-row seat in one of the nation’s best “business schools” – building her first business with her best friend.

“I did not even know what a margin was, but we had an idea, and we were super naive,” Busk says.

“I think naivety is a brilliant thing sometimes.”

I think naivety is a brilliant thing sometimes. Lucy Busk

Was it luck?

Despite their lack of experience, the two friends went on to launch, build and sell a food brand – known at the time as Cuckoo – within the first four years out of university.

Busk laughs as she admits the journey of selling a business can easily sound “glamorous,” but it was far from a big money maker at the time – the two actually didn’t profit from the sale at all.

“I didn’t make any money from it, but I have no regrets from it,” Busk adds.

“I don’t see it as a failure, it was an amazing business school and learning for me.”

Packing in the lessons learned from the real-world lecture hall, Busk soon found her way to a new venture.

It started when she saw wine in the can for the first time.

The idea was a revelation. “I couldn’t sleep,” Busk says.

“That whole night I just stayed up on my laptop and looked into the American canned wine market and just saw how much it was exploding.”

To make wine “more easy, understandable and approachable” is exactly what the drinks market in the UK needed, she thought.

All she had to do was take what she learned, pivot, and learn again – leading her to launch NICE in 2019.

‘Get really curious’

You could say Busk had the skill of finding herself “in the right place at the right time,” but it was also her sense of pure curiosity that helped her spot a business opportunity’s full potential.

Busk recalls spending those early days of her first business roaming the aisles of Whole Foods – what better place to learn how to build a food brand than being surrounded by others?

“I looked at packaging and products that I liked and I saw that there was an email address on the back or a phone number and I emailed or rang those companies very politely asking for a little bit of help and advice.”

“It’s really amazing when you’re just quite polite and you ask someone for a bit of help, it’s really amazing how many people actually want to help you.”

Reflecting on each piece of advice she received, she attributes much of her growing success to the community that helped make it all possible.

Now, NICE is the largest (and fastest growing) wine-in-a-can brand in the UK – selling one every 10 seconds.