City smoothie lovers rejoice! Organic juice bar Crussh looks on the up.
The fruity drink chain, founded in 1998, seemed on an unstoppable rise. There were dozens of stores across London, many of them in the Square Mile – and the drinks were sold in hundreds more supermarkets. They even signed a deal to do smoothies for WeWork. “The real vision is to make Crussh a global business and I will do whatever it takes to do that,” Etonian founder James Learmond boasted to the Guardian.
Then it collapsed. Dreams were crushed. Staff were let go and stores were shut, along with the swanky Notting Hill HQ. But a year after being bought out of administration, new sites in Kensington and Fulham are opening, and more could be on the way.
Who’s behind it now? At the time, the trade press was happy to drink the PR Kool-Aid that “an unnamed investor” acquired the business “for an undisclosed sum.” So it was left to Spy to do the digging.
Turns out it was two people in Wimbledon, who got it for about £600k. One is ex-office printer salesman called James Collins, who is thought to have pocketed more than £100 million after successfully selling his business to HP in 2018. Since then he’s spent his time buying and selling million-pound houses in areas like Belgravia and Chelsea.
The other is a venture capitalists called Rohini Finch who made much of her fortune as an early investor in Darktrace. Billionaire Mike Lynch helped set the cybersecurity company up and financed its first two years of operations using the huge sums he made from having also sold a business to HP – with a bit less success.
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