Made behind
a blue door.
For a BLUE DOOR of our own.

Two girls
called Nela and Julia.

They are the reason this company exists. Start here.

March 2020. Lockdown. I was a single mother in a rented terrace on Riverview Dream, W4 — Chiswick riverside — with a beautiful blue front door that didn't belong to us. My two daughters were home from school. Nela was 12. Julia was 8. Nobody was going anywhere. So we bought a press.

It was never just me. Nela washed the bottles, peeled the ginger, and labelled every bottle by hand — her writing is on the original labels; I still have them. Julia, at eight, stood on a stool to help pour, and ran the till at Duke's Meadows farmers' market on Saturday mornings in a yellow apron she wore until it fell apart. She could tell a stranger the difference between turmeric and ginger before she could spell them.

The two of them are on every clip in the archive below. They pressed. They cleaned. They sold. They handed the bottles to customers at the door with a ceremony I will never forget. The Ginger Planet was theirs before it was anyone's.

A museum.
Hundreds of households.
Thousands of hands.

Within a year we were on the shelf at the Natural History Museum. Then, door by door, into kitchens across Turnham Green, Kew Bridge, Hammersmith Broadway, Brook Green. A hundred households said yes. Then two hundred. Then — across three years and every dawn run — thousands of West London houses, thousands of hands, thousands of throats. A very small kitchen with a very cheerful output.

Most weekends Nela and Julia came with me to Duke's Meadows market at 7 a.m. We sold out by 11. It was Julia who first said, out loud, the sentence that ended up on the bottle: "Mum, it has to be the same day." She was nine. She was right.

It was never the branding. Never the Instagram. It was the line — what landed on the counter at 9 a.m. was inside a lemon at 6:14. That's the whole product. It always has been.

For part of that stretch a friend's daughter from Poland, Amelia, stayed in our spare room — doing her A-levels by day, pressing beside me at night when the morning run had to be out by six. Some of what you drank in 2022, she bottled. She went on to graduate with distinction in Business. I owe her a great deal.

A baby
called Gloria.

She arrived in the spring. I had three daughters now, a tiny flat in Brentford, and a press that wouldn't fit through the door. We paused the brand. I stopped pressing. I fed Gloria.

Nela, 15. Julia, 11. Gloria, newborn. I spent the next three years teaching myself the thing I didn't know the first time — the unglamorous side: digital marketing, paid media, conversion, retention, the spreadsheet. The juice had been easy. The business I'd been doing with my eyes shut.

A reason to
come back.

Somewhere in the middle of those three years the health of someone I love changed. I won't write the specifics here — I will tell you in person if we meet. But it gave me, with a kind of violence I didn't expect, the answer to the only question I still had open: what is this for?

Nothing is more precious than health. And nothing is more honest than a vegetable, pressed at six in the morning, twenty minutes from your step, by the same three girls who started it.

A unit
in TW8.

In February I signed a lease on a small unit in Brentford, TW8 — a hundred metres from the Thames, a ten-minute cycle from the original kitchen. Same press. Same recipes. Nela, now 18, is back on the line after school. Julia, now 14, is designing the packaging you're holding.

The bottle you drink tomorrow was pressed at 06:14, one postcode from your front door. No pasteurisation. No 87,000-psi cold-pressure theatre. A seventy-two-hour window — best within forty-eight. On your step by ten. The fridge is the factory. The blue door is the plan.