About this deal
Finally on the 11 March 2020 I received the long awaited phone call from a BBC representative who later became my mentor. She asked me many questions about the business, why I had applied, what I was expecting out of the show, and told me what I should expect too.
I have always been business minded and constantly looked out for business opportunities throughout my childhood and early adulthood. This made Dragons' Den an amazing TV show for me, it gave me good insight into the minds of people who have been running successful businesses for many years, providing me with invaluable knowledge, whilst being extremely entertaining at the same time. What if I mess up, what if I make a mistake, what if they rip me apart, what if I don't get investment, so many questions that were whirling through my head. Since then we have created many other products to our lineup that fall into our ethos of removing sugar from your diet with no compromise to taste or health. In the body, erythritol is absorbed into the bloodstream in the small intestine, and then for the most part excreted unchanged in the urine. Because erythritol is normally absorbed before it enters the large intestine, it does not normally cause laxative effects as are often experienced after over-consumption of other sugar alcohols (such as xylitol and maltitol) and most people will consume erythritol with no side effects. This is a unique characteristic, as other sugar alcohols are not absorbed directly by the body in this manner, and consequently are more prone to causing gastric distress. (*SOURCE: Wikipedia)It was really nice to have a squabble in the Den which lasted longer than what you got to see. Also I went to the wall twice and I tried to negotiate the Dragons down in equity but these parts were all cut from the final episode.
I was asked by my mentor to come in for an audition at the BBC broadcast centre in White City, London, on the 17th March 2020. She asked me to bring along a selection of the products we sell and prepare a short speech about the benefit of the products and the amount of investment I was looking for. At this point I was really nervous because I was about to be filmed (I am camera shy) and I would have to recite my pitch off memory. The film was to be shown by my mentor to the producers at a later date to decide if they are willing to take me into the real Den.The reason why some of the bags are turned around or lying down was due to the producers saying that there are new rules that don't allow you to show more than one of each product, it's because they don't want companies abusing the advertisement space they have being on Dragons' Den, this rule was only mentioned when we were setting up the table at the studio, so we had to find innovative ways to dress the table without showing more than one of each product. At that point we did't have our Brown Shuga® or our Mayple® Syrup so that meant we only had 3 products on the table. This gave us very little to play with. This baffled me, because we were in a BBC building being filmed by BBC crew, but somehow he wasn't aware of their filming permit which apparently has to be issued for any filming that goes on in the building. My mentor said to him, 'What do you mean?, We are filming for Dragons' Den, we have a permit, if you want you can call my manager'. Tangle Teezer have now become a massive international brand, with their products being sold in over 90 countries worldwide, turning over more than 27million pounds a year! Over the years there have been times that I was screaming at the screen, either when an investment went through that I thought was a bad investment or when an investment didn't go through and I thought that the dragons should have invested. My mentor arranged for a bed to be put into my dressing room so that I could rest, but due to my nerves this was unfortunately not something that had much benefit.