Kiwi Planting | Live Image from Field

Here you see some impressions directly from planting. The weather is good, the sun is shining, and we are managing to get many plants into the ground, about 600 per day. More images to follow.


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We Got Plants!!!

Yesterday we got 2 year old Hayward green kiwifruit plants and this morning we started to plant them. Below you see a picture of a well developed root system of kiwifruit plant.

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Website or Facebook? How to Connect to Consumers?

We started to think about it as soon as we started to think about sales. As Facebook users ourselves with our profiles we saw how many interesting pages there were representing different companies and products. We liked (not Facebook's like but just a like as a like) some of them and we did not like (again just a pre-Facebook like) some. We thought what would people think about our page and what and how should we communicate to be likable (now both, Facebook and a real like).

We even learned that there are many firms who offer and sell to companies their consultancies on how to become popular on Facebook and how to "even measure impact of Facebook activities on sales, brand image etc".

While not being big experts on this we realised one thing from the begining: Facebook was different from website in that here (on Facebook) we should be informal to people who liked us. Unlike websites, Facebook did not look like sphere of companies but rather a sphere of individuals, people, friends. People log to Facebook to have a very informal, private chat with their friends, share funny photos and statuses, post links to various music.

So, we decided to have a page and try to post an engagable content. We also try to not post anything without relevant photo or video because we observed visual impressions are important. As someone said once: "what I saw I remember, what I heard I forgot." We did not market this a lot yet, but already have people checking in with us.



Click here to see our facebook fan page.

So, what kind of posts do we post? Here are some of examples: with our first post we put a picture of our kiwifruit being presented at one of street fruit seller's tables, and we informed our fans when we started selling and where . Then we put 4 pictures representing person (Isabel Fraser) who brought wild kiwifruit seeds to New Zealand in 1904, also a map of China, which is the homeland of kiwifruit, the picture of man after whom the most popular kiwifruit variety is named, and all these pictures were accompanied with relevant text messages. On another occasion we again put pictures of the Georgian region Samegrelo which pioneered kiwifruit into Georgia and gave a short history of kiwifruit arrival to Georgia.


We also obtained permission from New Zealand dietary expert to put her kiwifruit recipes on our fan page, published the copy of laboratory test on our kiwifruit, posted pictures from our trip to New Zealand kiwifruit growers. It is not yet about scale for us, but about using various channels to communicate that we want our consumers to be happy, and that we care for quality first and foremost.

As for the website, we decided to build this soon, to communicate with our non-consumer audience mostly such as suppliers, retailers and wholesale buyers, and other potential business partners. Coming soon.

To contact the blogger, email:
Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge

Nergeta Logo is a Protected Trademark

We are pleased to hear from the Georgian Patent Office that our logo has now been copyrighted and protected by law as the Nergeta logo. We are very happy that our logo was made by ourselves and that we did not "delegate" it to some outside design company. We now believe that if you look at your product (literally) for many days, think about how you can express your product and its best features graphically, you will eventually arrive to your own design idea. Our own work was the result of focus on the product and search for most relevant geometrical shapes to transform our product vision into a logo.

As we were doing what we really loved to do, we wanted to have our own unique logo and stickers for two main reasons:
1. our work should bear "our" mark, distinctive, simple and beautiful.
2. consumer should like our logo and perceive it as a sign of quality, and memorise it as that.

We started with the traditional approach: visiting three famous advertising and branding agencies in Tbilisi. We got the impression that those 1 hour meetings just were not enough for them to undertand what we stood for, what we wanted to say with a logo and we decided to do homework and give it several weeks of thinking.

We were inspired by MC Saatchi's: "it is easier to complicate than to simplify" and "brutal simplicity of thought". After several weeks of homework we decided to link kiwifruit's visual features to different geometrical shapes and then gave our hand made sketches to friend, a designer by training, Mari Balavadze, to make those professional computer graphics and also add her own ideas. We did not get to our final version at the first attempt, actually we rejected several of our own works and together with Mari and other friends arrived to what is now our logo: 9 oval slices that together resemble the rising sun and we gave flesh green colour to oval slices and put black circles to establish the connection to our product: kiwifruit.

It was not an easy task and at one point we thought (really) that we just could not produce a logo which would look original and in the meantime be immediately associated with kiwifruit. However we made it and looking back, we can say that it is thanks to our own homework, many many hours of producing numerous options, then going through them critically, rejecting many of them and finally arriving to what we thought was a worthy one.

Contact me at:
Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge

Nergeta Press Appearance

We have not concentrated much on generating coverage in the press, since we primarily want to get the product right. However, we have been approached by some journalists, and here is one of the first problem articles written about this, by the November issue of Georgian Products (issued by the publishing house Navigator).



If you want the full PDF, let us know.

How Far Would We Go For Knowledge? As Far As New Zealand

While China is the origin of wild kiwifruit, New Zealand growers, nurserymen and scientists pushed it from obscurity into becoming one of the world's top fruits. It took a lot of work and trials and this is why New Zealand became most sophisticated and knowledgeable in kiwifruit propagation, cultivation and marketing.

As we wanted to learn from them we decided to visit New Zealand where we saw and heard many useful things for our own orchard development. As one of our new friends told us we have "no excuses now". It will take 3 to 4 years to see if we made a good use of their advice and here we just give you some of photos of this fascinating trip.

countdown to 18 hour avia-marathon in Dubai airport

New Zealand, a country of volcanic icelands



Pacific Ocean "nebulising" the forest

Auckland, not the capital of New Zealand

Eden Park, "All Blacks" play here

Kiwifruit -- the reason of our trip

Natural, Bio, Eco, Local or What?

Everyday in Georgia and elsewhere we see that many companies from consumer food industries emphasize two main points: that their products are 100% natural (bio, ecologically clean) and that they are local. In Georgia lots of consumers also think that "local" automatically means "healthy, natural" in the sense of what "organic" means for instance in Germany.

We think that as soon as there will be several Georgian producers of labeled fruit instead of one, companies will need to offer more than just emphasizing the "local origin of their product". For this reason we ignored the "local" argument from the start and focused on quality, the real quality. We also do not just play with words like "natural" and "bio" without a relevant test report to prove it.

As a sign of our approach, we took samples of our kiwifruit to an accredited lab, had a test done, and published it on our Facebook fan page as well as on Facebook pages of "Made in Georgia" and Georgian business news programme.

Here is the copy of test report which shows that value of nitrates in our kiwifruit is about 5 times less than allowed and pesticides are so low that they are practically undetectable. We will keep doing these tests continuously, and focus on quality so that customers know they can trust our product.